Y3K Day

Everybody hurry Blue light special on isle ten.








Hey what's this?

We were back at the model railroad club of toronto for Kieran's Y3K-day.




This time since it was not so crowded. I was able to go in behind the scenes and check out how everything works. It's amazing.




It's set up like a real live railway system with a dispatcher control room.
Here's the Trainmaster. I think the members take their turns being the trainmaster. They explained to me how everything works. The logic behind the switches. That even if you flip the wrong switch, the logic protects the trains from collision, due to an incorrect signal.


This of course doesn't stop train drivers from drinking rum and coke and ignoring signals and running red ones. Same as in real life. Only 1-200th the size.

What's even more amazing is what the brain was controlling the whole system.

That's a 2nd generation commodore 64. And that big box on the right is 360K floppy disk drive. Wow. Can't even fit a digital photo on that thing. I haven't seen one of these high powered systems since 1999, when I sold mine and bought a 386 machine.

And the guy who originally wrote it, wanted to make it faster so he rewrote in assembler and burned it on to an EPROM that's connected to the back of the C64.

Apparently that guy who wrote is no longer at the club, so there's a project to upgrade the system to x86. Might want to really think about what OS they want to use. I don't know when this C64 was last rebooted. Not sure if I would recommend Windoze.

Kieran was even allowed to drive his own train and they gave him his own conductors hat, cuz it's a birthday thing.

All this running around, driving trains made everyone hungry for cake and pizza, chocolate covered marshmallows, juice, chips and more sugary stuff. All part of the 4 food groups to make growing kids deaf and hyper active. The veggies and dip weren't touched.


Gotta work on that cardio. That flame is still going.


More photos of trains, kids, some adults and more trains.



Thanks to mamma for putting it all together. She did an amazing thing.
Got the party stuff together, food on the table, balloons in the air, and she still did her Workout Bootcamp this morning. Like the Energizer Bunny.