Daniel E. Markle's Blog

This DT&I (Detroit Toledo and Ironton) work crane and boom car set by K-Line caught my eye, it's the first set of this type I've acquired in O gauge.

These road name labeled versions are an interesting staple of model railroading that were rare in real life. Actual railroad lines didn't want work cars cleaning up derailments, etc. to have their names on the side (they didn't want to be associated with train disasters) so these actually came in either plain colors or if marked were marked with the manufacturer's name. The 'work caboose' was also rare, these were usually just plain flat cars.

With the Super Bowl approaching and the impending commercials associated with it, I've just seen a commercial setting the standard by which their strength will be compared.



With the weakness most of these commercials have had over the past few years, this is going to be one tough little guy to defeat.

While working on permanent layouts for trains, we couldn't resist setting up a couple in the living room to run in the meantime.



These O gauge trains include the Lionel Polar Express, which Joyce purchased before Christmas and the extra cars to which she received as Christmas gifts. Also running in this video on the second loop is an MTH AEM-7 pulling the Amfleet passenger cars from the Lionel HHP-8 set; this consist matches the Keystone service trains which run from Harrisburg through Philadelphia to New York.

Last week I took some photographs of the Mifflin County Model Railroad Club's layout as of Christmas 2009.

I picked up this K-Line Pennsylvania Railroad MP 15 Diesel Switcher at Ed's Train Repair and Sales. He often has an interesting selection of used trains, and this one caught my eye for the price.

I've always liked the look of trains with weathering and although this one is clearly unintentionally weathered (i.e. rust, dents, and such), with a little bit of strategic spraying it will do its job in an old turnout somewhere on the line; pushing cars out to the mainline for pickup occasionally, most of the time collecting rust while fancy new engines like the one in the background zip by on the mainline.

When working with automatic id's in Grails, sequence generation uses a less than useful default sequence name of hibernate_sequence. Use the following syntax as part of the GORM mapping to set the sequence name to something sane:

static mapping = {
    id generator:sequence,params:[name:'mytable_id_seq']
}

Working on a Spring application using Hibernate recently I encountered the dreaded org.hibernate.HibernateException: Illegal attempt to associate a collection with two open sessions error. Fixes for this vary widely; it can be caused by problems ranging from bad session handling in your framework configuration, bad cascade settings, incorrect persistence settings, to forgetting initialization of an array stored in a @ManyToOne database relation.

Make sure to check thoroughly for the latter before wasting hours changing the transaction handling, trying various cascade settings, or mucking with persistence annotations.

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.

Quotes like "if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" are well known from Carl Sagan, but delivered like this take on a different beat.



A hilarious yet thought provoking mix, with lots of 1980's retro style.

I have an extensive media library in iTunes, and am very picky about everything having album art. Having family that plays in the Greenwood Community Band, and liking classical/band music, I have quite a few albums from them. Being a small band, the album artwork tends to be extremely basic, which drives me crazy since I listen to these frequently. Fortunately I have photography of the band at various venues and had some free time today to make some artwork for them.

Apple lingered about 6 hours today before posting its special event online, and now their servers are so saturated downloads are proceeding at under 10KB/s. It took what may be the foremost media technology company in the world 6 hours to post an event, a company that produces software designed to allow extremely fast editing and production of video.

Even with all the technology available to them their servers cannot handle the demand to get the event to my Apple TV in a timely manner. This is the clearest obstacle to the Apple TV replacing other media, the network it connects to simply isn't ready yet.