Santa likes to rock it, likes to go real fast

My brother invited me to his place for a Saturday afternoon with his wife and my elder niece, with the goal of getting to a Santa Train Ride at the Whippany Train Museum. I was certainly up for that, since I don't see them enough, plus, hey, train museum. Actually, I didn't know there was a train museum in Whippany, but then, it's hard believing in the existence of a place called ``Whippany'' too. Such things happen in the Garden State.

The museum's a smaller building than I figured on; it's not quite a converted trailer, but it's about that size. There's a good-sized model train layout in the center, with what looks like a rough mockup of that part of the state, although decorated with the same Generically Circa 1950 model train village that all model train layouts default to. Or almost, anyway: it turns out there's HO scale replicas of A Christmas Story scenes, so at least for this time of year the train runs around Ralphie in his bunny costume and Dad showing off his Fragile lamp and the kid having his tongue stuck to the flagpole.

The museum's got a nice collection of the ephemera of trains, mostly the Pennsylvania Rail Road --- I pointed out to my niece that ``they're responsible for building Penn Station, but you shouldn't hold that against them'' --- and the New Jersey Central. It's stuff from oil lamps to day passes to ``Quiet, Please'' signs to milk bottles to dining car silverware (made of real actual metal) to ... all right, I have no idea why a taxidermied raccoon was there, but as it was tucked on top of a case with no explanatory label maybe they didn't know either and they just had it. I presume there were probably raccoons near the railroad at some point in its operations. Also there were miscellaneous signs, pointing out distances to Jersey City or Philadelphia or where the boundary of Essex County was. Actually, two signs were placed so as to imply that Essex County spans the entire earth apart from this forty-foot stretch; I'd have put the signs in the other order and suggested a tiny wedge of Essex. But it wasn't my museum.

Trivia: The Pennsylvania Rail Road's plans to top the (original) Penn Station with an eighteen-story hotel and office building were cancelled when analysis showed the support pillars for one would cut out two or more train tracks --- around a tenth of the terminal's capacity --- from the station. Source: Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station And Its Tunnels, Jill Jonnes.

Currently Reading: The Shock Of The Old: Technology And Global History Since 1900, David Edgerton.