Daniel E. Markle's Blog

Happy Halloween!

I don't normally purchase holiday cars, but Doris at The Station talked me into this one. She said to think of her as the witch on the left side of the car, so I suppose Dick would be the vampire on the right.

This one is made by MTH.

Saw this O gauge model of a Jet Snow Blower in the Lionel catalog and found one in stock at The Station.



Interesting that it has to move to ramp up. In actual use these aren't used to clear long lengths of track, but to clear switches, which is impossible to simulate with the action of this model. A Legacy command control model with remote control of the smoke, noise, and nozzle would be ideal.

After finding a 2009 Bloomsburg Fair Car and searching the internet to see what else was in the series, I found this one on eBay. It is an O gauge milk tanker car. This one was made for the fair by Weaver Models and is very nicely detailed.

When using the FCKeditor plugin for Grails, if the data is loaded into the view this way:

<fckeditor:editor name="detail">
  ${fieldValue(bean:itemInstance,field:'detail')}
</fckeditor:editor>

The raw html being retrieved from the data source will not be parsed as expected. This will display as html source in the editor, and if saved will result in the html tags being placed into the data source as escaped text. For correct handling, add .decodeHTML() to the JSTL retrieval:

<fckeditor:editor name="detail">
  ${fieldValue(bean:itemInstance,field:'detail').decodeHTML()}
</fckeditor:editor>


Wandering around the Bloomsburg Fair this year, I was (mostly) jokingly looking for model train cars. A vendor under the grandstand was selling these collectible HO gauge train cars. This is one of 200 that were made, and number 10 in the series according to a certificate provided with the car.