NOBODY WANTED THIS.

According to Reason's Jason Russell, the collegiate sports cartel made an unpopular decision at the wrong time.

March Madness is growing from 68 teams to 76 teams for both men and women, even though no one asked for this—not fans, anyway. The vast majority of public sentiment has been against expansion, while conference leaders and coaches have pushed for expansion (it's a lot harder to get fired if your mediocre team somehow slides into the tournament).

It's not as if the cartel managers are doing everything they can to keep the four or five power conferences from bolting, which comes as no surprise.  "How long have I been carrying on about College Sports, Inc. realigning until there are four major conferences of sixteen teams each and the National Collegiate Athletic Association becomes irrelevant?"

ANTIPODEAN HUSKIE HEROICS.

In Australia, the women's professional basketball season is during their summer, with their professional league championship being awarded at the end of February.  "Courtney Woods has spearheaded the Townsville Fire to the WNBL championship, defeating the Perth Lynx 108-105 after overtime to confirm redemption for last year's heartbreaking grand final loss."  That's a familiar name.  Courtney Woods was recruited to Northern Illinois for one coach's system and made quite a splash in another's.

Sarah Reed photograph for Getty Images retrieved from ESPN.

It's a rough game, whether in the Mid-American or Down Under.

Townsville weathered the storm with captain Woods dazzling, despite having to undergo glue surgery during the third period after copping a Han Xu elbow to the head.

Her career-high 28 points, along with eight rebounds and seven assists, steered them to their second championship in four years and a fifth all-time for Queensland's sole club.

41 lead changes occurred, but when the Fire were down by three in the final quarter, sharp shooter Miela Sowah (18 points) scored an emphatic triple to tie the scores with 3.7 seconds left.

With a plethora of stars off the court after getting into foul trouble, it was Sowah who rose to the occasion again, sinking a crucial basket with 7.4 seconds remaining in overtime to secure the win.

"Glue surgery" is an improvisation military field medics came up with, using superglues to close up cuts.  No two minutes for elbowing in basketball.

I stumbled across Townsville on Chicago's Marquee sports channel a couple of Christmas Eves ago, simply channel surfing to find either a movie or a concert and what to my wondering eyes did appear.  Good on ya.

I DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING.

A few weeks ago, Wisconsin's women's hockey team secured yet another national championship.

The men's postseason aspirations were on life support.  The way things like strength of schedule and quality wins work, though, they were an at-large participant in the national tournament as an at-large team.  They rallied to oust Michigan State in overtime to reach the Frozen Four, and then played North Dakota Fighting Hawks.  There were fans in the stands rocking their Fighting Sioux gear: imagine Chicago Black Hawks sweaters, only in green.

Wisconsin had never defeated North Dakota in the national tournament.  Last Thursday, though, they did.

Twenty years ago, the women won a national championship and a few weeks later (I am not a fan of these long pauses in the hockey tournament while the basketball tournaments go on) the men also did.

The men's championship game featured Wisconsin playing Denver.  Denver had never defeated Wisconsin in the national tournament.  Last Saturday, though, they did.  Denver have eleven national titles, including three in the past five years.  Wisconsin men have six, the most recent being the 2006 win.

Wisconsin's sports information people looked on the bright side.  "The young team proved they’ll be a force to reckon with for years to come."  That might be, although they might want to study the advice Wisconsin's 2006 coach, Mike Eaves, offered.  "In a close game where you don't get rewarded with goals you have to be patiently persistent."  That was Denver, they didn't get many shots, but they didn't let Wisconsin's aggressive forechecking demoralize them either.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

A partially completed model railroad still offers plenty of play value if the right bits of trackwork are in place and functional.  I can while away close to an hour simply exchanging hot metal cars at the steel works, and running a passenger train around the milk train likewise keeps the operators busy.

That's a highlight reel of what was running during the recently-concluded March Meet.  I tend to have a short train running continuously on the powered display track up high.  The drive units on the rebuilt old-style Atlas F units require more tweaking.

The continued early spring weather suggest more opportunities to carry on with heavy construction and sessions at my workbench.

WINDING DOWN THE SWAP MEET SEASON.

The Chicago area March Meet is likely now the largest O Scale show in the United States, and surely the largest of the winter swap meet season.  The Gloucester Branch was available for layout tours again, and here's a look at a few of the trains that were running.

A longer video with more of the locomotives equipped with onboard power is in preparation.

IT'S A GREAT DAY FOR HOCKEY.

Current and past players for Wisconsin and Ohio State competed on Team Canada and Team U.S.A. for a gold medal in women's hockey.  Team U.S.A. secured that gold.  Then the current players returned to college, where Wisconsin secured the regular-season championship in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association (the conference alignments in Olympic, or "non-revenue," if you will, sports are bizarre) after which Ohio State won the conference tournament.  Thus when the national championship bids were issued, Ohio State were the top seed and Wisconsin the second seed.  They met again for the national championship.

University of Wisconsin official photograph retrieved from WTMJ.

Wisconsin's women won their ninth national championship, and if you thought Connecticut versus Tennessee was too frequent a final in women's basketball, it has been either Ohio State or Wisconsin skating with that trophy you can't drink from each of the last four years.

And those sports pundits who had reservations about Kirsten Simms being on Team U.S.A?  All she did this tournament is get Wisconsin back to the finals with an overtime goal against a scrappy Penn State team.  And 1980 Team U.S.A. most valuable player and current Wisconsin coach Mark Johnson is conference coach of the year.

Well done, kids.

GREYLOCK NEXT TO TUMBLE.

As I wrap up the week's posting, ESPN note that of the over twenty-six million men's tournament brackets submitted in their challenge, some 3,714 entries are still in contention.  In Thursday's games, a lot of chalk had to be erased with six lower seeds winning, and the "upsets" continue today.

That title?  In the depths of the Depression, the Boston and Maine Railroad offered a contest in which lineside school children could name locomotives, including the 3700 series of medium-heavy Pacifics, and the judges selected Greylock for 3714.  One of those steamers is still in preservation, fittingly 3713, named Constitution.  Whether she will ever steam again remains to be seen.

So what's the over-under on all the brackets broken by the end of today's games?  Note: less-than-perfect brackets are still in contention for identifying the eventual champion.

LET'S PUT A PIN IN THIS, TOO.

It has been our practice, the last few years, to note the hurricane projections at the beginning of summer for later evaluation at the beginning of Advent.  Perhaps it's time to highlight the doom-saying of doomsday environmentalists.  Take Bill McKibben.  Please?  "It’s About to Get Even Hotter—Can We Learn From It?"  He has to introduce his doomsaying with a lot of contextualizing.

It’s already hot, all over the world and here in the United States. That’s been a little hidden these past months, because the country’s population and power center—the northeast corridor from Boston to DC—has had a cold winter; until the last few days of rapid-onset mud season it’s felt like an old-school winter in New England (with sublime skiing, which has kept me sane). And Minnesota, the source of much of the year’s news so far, was cold too, at least in bursts. But we’ve been the exception: in fact, it was the second-warmest winter on record in the continental US, and that’s because the West broke every possible record.

That air masses might not be respecters of calendars or political boundaries might be of secondary importance, and we'll see how this latest dose of polar vortex to the northeast and heat dome to the southwest (I apologize for using the doomsday environmentalists' new euphemisms for what I've always understood as "cold snap" and "heat wave") plays out and let's get to the projection I want to pin down.

All this is happening during a La Niña “cool phase” of the Pacific, something that will soon change. I alerted you exactly a month ago to the likelihood we were going to see an El Niño kick off sometime this summer; in the last few weeks the chances of that have grown stronger, and more to the point it looks like it could be an exceptionally strong “super” version of the warming current. The normally cautious-almost-to-a-fault climate scientist Zeke Hausfather came out with his new forecast Thursday afternoon.

Because extrapolation models are so good at extrapolating.  Let's take stock around Oktoberfest.

1.  We’re going to see temperatures unlike any that humans have seen before, which means we’re going to see chaotic weather unlike humans have seen before.
2.  I do not think it’s fear-mongering to warn that fire may be a serious danger this season in the West.
3.  All I’m saying is, the next six months could be the ultimate in teachable moments, with rapidly rising prices for oil, and rapidly rising temperatures.

The good Lord willin', the crick don't rise, and the mullahs don't nuke, we'll see more frustration for Bill McKibben, heir to Paul Ehrlich in the "good doomsday copy that's wrong" class of celebrity experts.

CLIMATE CHAOS IN THE STATE LINE.

If you don't like the weather, go to the next county.  The Sunday morning map of watches and warnings had the springlike stuff to our southeast and fulfillment of the groundhog's fears to the northwest.

By evening, the groundhog's forecast was verifying here, although one might be forgiven for thinking "early spring" south toward Bloomington and Springfield, with another day of tornadoes.

This morning, DeKalb was in the "blizzard warning" area, not for any new snow, but for the prospect of high winds and light powder being blown around.  Local authorities were recommending against travel.  The sun is high enough and strong enough now that getting concrete surfaces mostly clear suffices to keep the blowing and drifting stuff under control.

Snow cover through most of Advent, cold with little snow cover through January and into February, now the sort of snow with almost enough moisture to congeal in the snow-thrower, and if it's a little deeper, can bring on cardiac events.

To the north, Wisconsin got it, with Weather Channel storm-reporters braving the blizzard conditions in downtown Green Bay.  Amtrak's trains between Chicago and Milwaukee were running.  I'm not sure about the trains toward the Cities and the Dakotas.

That's Amtrak 334, close to time, and lost in the snow cloud is an older B32-8 pushing.  I was hearing radio chatter about one of the trains' newer Charger diesels, like the one leading, having troubles.

We are now on Daylight Saving Time, which will bring us the weird phenomenon of sunset around 7 pm and heavy snow on the ground.

MARCH IS FOR MODEL RAILROAD SHOWS.

The Karlson Brothers Circus regularly show at Delavan's Train Show.  "The train show and swap meet season tends to run from November into March.  The Karlson Brothers Circus showed at last weekend's Delavan (one of two Wisconsin towns claiming to be midwestern home of the itinerant circus) for the first time in five years.  That ballyhooed March 2020 show never happened, because the politicians panicked."

The past two or three years the show has participated with several other State Line O Scale modellers and at the request of the Mayor, our display is in City Council chambers.

As is our practice, it's up to children of all ages to notice some of the sight gags.

In the past two or three years, the collection of college mascots in the menagerie has expanded.

The Circus World Museum in Baraboo has a short orange wagon with monkey bars in the ceiling, and if you look closely, there is a monkey hanging from the monkey bars.  Yes, some people did contort themselves to get a closer look into the wagon and see that yes, indeed, there's a set of monkey bars up there.

The circus train continues to draw interest from model railroaders.  The locomotive is a Saginaw bronze casting from before the War, fitted with brass wheels and a modern transmission, and the onboard power and sound are now working.

Next up, the big Chicago area O Scale show in another week.

WOE CANADA.

What are the identifying features of a proper social democracy?  Long vacations?  Generous public assistance?  Mandatory parental leave from work? Health care as a "right?"  High speed intercity trains?

Oops.  "VIA equipment shortage leads to cancellations, sellouts."  That refers to troubles offering services to the Maritime Provinces and other hinterland areas, where the carrier makes do with legacy rolling stock such as Budd Rail Diesel Cars and long distance cars initially built for Channel Tunnel services.  None of that comes up to the standard of European regional rail, and most European passengers use services other than the bullet trains the casual transportation advocates carry on about.

Read on, though, and note the troubles along that thickly settled stretch of Canada along the two eastern Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River.

The Ocean and RDC issues follow numerous VIA cancellations in the Quebec City-Windsor, Ont., corridor, attributed primarily to failures of newly acquired Siemens trainsets [see “Weather issues with Siemens equipment …,” Feb. 8, 2026]. Neither VIA nor Siemens have responded to Trains inquiries seeking details on the issues, attributed to “harsh weather conditions.” The current problems mean VIA finds itself unable to meet its commitments on all three of its forms of service: long-distance, corridor, and remote.

At the same time, Alto, the high-speed rail project, continues to conduct an elaborate, publicly funded initiative. Its proposed, largely rural right-of-way would serve corridor population centers where current service is deteriorating. Alto’s website features videos of fast trains and an “online consultation platform” to garner feedback for a route where land acquisition is not likely to begin until years of expensive consultant studies are completed.

In These United States, there is a simulacrum of a bullet train linking Boston with Washington, weather permitting, and it has to hurt when a Trains reader compares VIA Rail unfavorably with the New Haven.  "Growing up and later traveling to college, I traveled the bankrupt, decrepit, failing New Haven Railroad. There was always enough rolling stock to cover the schedules, even if the windows were broken and the upholstery worn. Sometimes there were standees in the aisles, but the trains did run."

The closest thing to a standard North American passenger train consist these days is a Siemens Charger diesel and a rake of Siemens coaches.  The Siemens stock might not be built for extreme cold.  That's probably not the best state of affairs for trains serving Canada.

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE.

Who really wins the Olympics?  "The convention is to count medals won by sports, meaning one figure skater counts the same as twenty hockey players in the gold medal count."  People with more time to work the problem, or perhaps paid to work the problem, such as Reason's Jason Russell, take on the convention.  He asked his wise and worldly readers (thanks, Matt!) for advice and they delivered.

Another popular idea that several of you suggested was splitting up the subjective sports into a new category, including sports where judges are the primary determinants of the winner, such as gymnastics and figure skating. One of you even suggested giving those sports their own separate Olympics.

Hell^YES!

GETTING THROUGH.

Cold Spring Shops got a heavy dose of snow at the beginning of Advent, which melted by Christmas, and there wasn't much snow during the late January cold snap.  It's different on the coasts.  Passenger Rail advocates have been making much about "I-80 closes, but California Zephyr gets through Sierras."  True though that is, it isn't impressing many people.

The eastbound California Zephyr arrived in Truckee today (Feb. 20) just after 1 a.m. Pacific Time, 11 hours late. But it won the battle against massive snowdrifts that had shut down parallel Interstate 80 through the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Televised news reports like this one described multiple I-80 closures throughout a week that saw trapped cross-country skiers lose their lives in an avalanche. But they almost never mentioned that Union Pacific track crews kept the route open for its freight trains and the Zephyr despite the conditions.

Thursday afternoon’s train no. 6 had departed Colfax, Calif., two hours late. Westbound counterpart no. 5 had been running an hour behind schedule leaving Truckee and lost two hours heading though the increasingly heavy snow as I-80 was being closed to all traffic. Status reports from Amtrak and other sources indicate that the eastbound’s lead locomotive stalled out on the climb between Colfax and Truckee. A relief engine was called and the Zephyr was finally able to proceed. As of Friday afternoon, it remained more than 11 hours late approaching Salt Lake City.

The avalanche that closed highways and prompted travel restrictions beginning Tuesday, Feb. 17, had resulted in delays to eastbound Zephyrs no more than one hour and 45 minutes until the rescue of no. 6 Thursday evening. The longest westbound delay occurred Wednesday when the CZ arrived almost seven hours late into Colfax.

More than 90 inches of snow has fallen in the Sierra Nevada since midweek; another storm is predicted this weekend. Zephyr coach seats were sold out in both directions between Sacramento and Reno on Friday and Sunday.

The off-peak Zephyr consist is two Superliner coaches and two or three sleepers.  There might not be many seats available, depending on who is booking coach seats for longer trips.  Donner Summit no longer has the snow sheds that once protected trains.   On the other hand, three score and fourteen years ago a westbound City of San Francisco was stuck in the snow up there for several days.

Elsewhere in mountain railroading, a Swiss passenger train had a close encounter with a snow slide.

Avalanches from heavy snowfall in the European Alps claimed more lives over the weekend, as a train was derailed by a snow slide in Switzerland on Monday and roads and villages around Mont Blanc were closed or placed under evacuation orders.

As large areas of the western Alps remained under a high risk of avalanche – following a week in which alerts reached category 5, the highest level – Swiss police said a train derailment caused by an avalanche injured five people near the town of Goppenstein.

The incident in Switzerland followed a series of deadly avalanches in the Alps in recent days involving skiers.

On Friday, two Britons were among three skiers killed in an avalanche while being accompanied by an instructor in Val d’Isère, in south-east France.

A French national, who was skiing alone, was also killed. The Albertville prosecutor, Benoît Bachelet, said the ski instructor, who avoided injury, tested negative after taking blood and drug tests. He added that another Briton had sustained minor injuries.

In another incident on Sunday, an avalanche claimed the lives of two skiers on the Italian side of Mont Blanc.

The incident occurred at about 11am in the Couloir Vesses, a popular off-piste route in Courmayeur, located in the upper Val Veny, near the border with France and Switzerland.

The Goppenstein snow slide took passengers by surprise.  There was one passenger recorded as referring to it as "normal" (given the way the railway is laid out, perhaps) until it proved to be a little stronger than normal.  But Switzerland was spared a replay of the Wellington disaster on the old Great Northern crossing of Stevens Pass.

Back country skiing can be dangerous on any mountain.  Condolences to the families of the skiers lost.

DISPATCHES FROM THE NEW COLD WAR.

The Games of the XXV Winter Olympics, to use the full and pretentious title (cue the bugles) wrapped up over the weekend.  Both men's and women's hockey tournaments concluded with Team Canada playing Team U.S.A.  For the first time in any Olympiad, Team U.S.A. won both games, which has not been the case for either squad of late.

Photo by Elsa for Getty Images retrieved from Washington Free Beacon.

Both games ended 2-1 in overtime.  The women played on Thursday.  During pool play, they beat Canada 5-0 (which was a common margin of victory all the way to the gold medal game).  Years ago, Wisconsin's men's team won the Western Collegiate Hockey Association tournament final, putting up ten on North Dakota.  Sure enough, North Dakota got another shot at Wisconsin for the national title, and won that game.

The men played on Sunday.  Both teams arrived at the gold medal game undefeated.  On paper, Team Canada looked like the better squad, and during much of the game all the play was in the United States' zone.  But after Canada got the equalizer in the second period, no team scored in regulation, that despite Team U.S.A. having a four minute power play after Jack Hughes, pictured above, had a close encounter with a high stick.  During that power play, a United States player committed a penalty, and Canada, rather than go on the attack with five skaters and an empty net, went with five skaters, one of whom did his best Bobby Orr impression skating circles in his own zone to facilitate a longer power play for their side.  Nobody scored.  Nor did Canada score on a subsequent five-on-three power play.  Thus it went to overtime, and on occasion the team that looks to be exerting the most pressure comes up short in overtime.  Ask the Minnesota men how their title games against Harvard, Union, and Quinnipiac turned out.  Jack Hughes got the winning goal, hustling into position to convert a two-on-one goal rush into a three-on-one.

MAGNIFYING SMALL DIFFERENCES.

Olympic skier Mikaela Shiffrin secured a gold medal in the slalom, which we distinguish from the "giant slalom" by the tightness of the space between the gates.

Shiffrin skied impeccably in both runs to win by 1.50 seconds over Camille Rast of Switzerland, the third-largest margin of victory in a women's Olympic slalom. Anna Swenn-Larsson of Sweden took bronze.

Shiffrin is now one of just a handful of Alpine skiers to win three career Olympic gold medals and the only American ever to do so.

By skiing standards, that margin of victory is a horizon job.

THIS MIKAELA SHIFFRIN STAT IS BONKERS. 🤯 #WinterOlympics pic.twitter.com/nLxCb8wasG

— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) February 19, 2026

What that image fails to tell you is how thin those margins are, and how little margin for error that is on the run.

Four hours later, Shiffrin stood at the starting gate for her second and final run, knowing she was less than 51 seconds away from her first medal since 2018.

It was by no means guaranteed. The second-to-last rider before Shiffrin broke a pole halfway down the course. And the skier immediately preceding her, Germany’s Lena Duerr, who was in second place after her first run, hooked the first gate and immediately stopped her run within seconds.

Shiffrin’s final run, in contrast, was a surgical performance that left her pumping her fist over her head at the finish line.

Starting in perfect rhythm, Shiffrin had a one-second lead over Camille Rast of Switzerland, the reigning world champion, one minute into her run. Entering the flat portion of the course, that lead had grown to 1.5 seconds.

In the first race, the skiers are seeded in a form similar to the pairing of chess tournaments, with the higher-rated skiers getting preference for an early start, the better to make a run on snow that has not been carved up by everyone else.  The thirty fastest times qualify for the second race, which goes off in reverse order.  Thus, the person fastest down the mountain in race one, which was Ms Shiffrin, is the final starter in the second race, and she knows how fast a run she has to make to secure the gold.  Note from that article there were at least two racers who had made a faster first run than Ms Rast, and Saint Stochastica intervened on their second runs.  Otherwise that margin would not been as large.  That we reckon ski races in fractions of a second illustrates how small, though, the difference is between international star and also-skied.

In Sochi in 2014, Shiffrin became the youngest Olympic slalom champion at 18. Now 30, she is one of the oldest.

Of her record 108 World Cup wins, 71 have come in slalom, more than any skier in any discipline. She has won seven of eight World Cup races this season and already clinched a ninth slalom Crystal Globe.

So it is with power rules.

We may be observing the phenomenon John S. McGee studied at length in In Defense of Industrial Concentration: a few economists do most of the publishing, a few actors get most of the leading roles. I'm sure there are plenty of culture-studies Ph.D.s who could do Katha Pollitt's column as well as she could, yet, there she is, month in, month out. For that matter, there are plenty of universities other than the Ivies from which The Nation could recruit interns.

A fraction of a second better, consistently: endorsement opportunities, red-carpet passes for Hollywood events, and in sport at least, little whingeing about inequities.  Don't shave that second off?  "Almost as good as Mikaela Shiffrin?  Do you have a college coaching or ski-instructor at a major resort gig lined up?"

AM ASCHERMITTWOCH IST ALLES VORBEI.

Enjoy an animated explainer of the Nubbel taking away all the sins the revelers committed during Karneval.

(At least I hope they are all sins of commission.)

The participants playing the role of clergymen might require a scrubbing of their permanent records.

PĄCZKI DAY, FASCHING DIENSTAG, MARDI GRAS.

You don't have to wait until today to enjoy a pączek or two.

Maybe there will be a few on hand for the next day or so as well.  Waste not, want not.

A QUARTER CENTURY OF PATHETIC PRESIDENTS.

Nothing more clearly illustrates our political class attempting to conceal that reality than the faux holiday called Presidents Day, which we observe today with furniture sales and no mail delivery.  February used to be for Lincoln's Birthday on the 12th and Washington's Birthday on the 22nd, and you'd mix in St. Valentine for the triumph of hope over experience on the 14th and because of the workings of the paschal full moon you could count on Pączki Day and the closing events of Karneval or Fasching or Mardi Gras sometime during the month, and then the faithful get their foreheads marked on Ash Wednesday.

I forgot the history.  Officially, today is Washington's Birthday for scheduling of government holidays.  Country Living's Jill Gleeson has the full story of how the day came to be known as Presidents Day.  Omit the apostrophe.  There was bipartisan agreement on the principle that another three-day weekend made more sense than two holidays tied to the calendar, and wasn't George Washington born before the British Crown switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar making his birth day and year ambiguous?  If you do family history back to the seventeenth and early eighteenth century you know of what I describe.

It has been my position, more or less, that the last serious president was George H. W. Bush, naval aviator, and somehow the Republic has made do since the end of the Cold War with a saxophone-playing philanderer, a legacy, a token who really didn't like his constituents very much, and his sock puppet; and a reality show host bracketing the sock puppet.

ROSENMONTAG.

As we've noted previously, "Why should Mobile or New Orleans or Rio monopolize the street parades? There's usually a fun one in Köln."  Or several.  One paid tribute to the horsecar!

Photo by Stephan Anemüller © KVB/ retrieved from Stadt Köln

Yes, as Karneval winds down, some of the parade floats tend to the raunchy, and those can surely be seen again this year.  We'll keep it fun this year.

Kölner Rosenmontagszug 2026
Unattributed photograph retrieved from Festkommitee Kölner Karneval.

And yes, there are pączki in the larder. "If you don't eat at least one pączek, you will be unlucky all year long." I'm taking no chances.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Two months ago, the benchwork for the staging peninsula circling the workbench was in place.

Here come the tracks.

First, ensure that the tracks line up without any annoying kinks or seriously tight curves.  Trust me, I've learned about that second challenge the hard way, more than once!

Here, a few sections of tie strip cannibalized from older Atlas flex track will serve as anchors for the handlaid turnouts to be built.  A curved 83" with a 63" diverging route and two conventional N^o. 10 will bring the four staging tracks into one to cross the liftout section.

Here we are two weeks later, with the points and throw bars installed and most of the spiking done.  Note that I use two strips of circuit board, one for the throw bar and another to hold the alignment.  There is more fettling to do yet.  I have hand-powered some cars through the special work, sometimes without incident.  Good cars will run on questionable track, and questionable cars will run on good track.  I'd rather get the track good as it's installed, and deal with the questionable cars from swap meets, of which there are many, later.

The connecting curve and lift-out section in place.  There will be additional terrain to the right of that curve, to keep anything from going on the floor should the worst happen.  There's another month of working time in advance of the Lombard O Scale show.