Weather 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows

Okay, reduced to weather chat today.

Here it is, 8:30 in the A.M. and it is 54 degrees out there. We are planning to go to Madison to bum around a bit, and I guess the good news is that it is supposed to be sunny most of the day.

Tomorrow, on the other hand, we have a pretty good chance of thunderstorms throughout the day. This matters to the railway in particular, because we run through a beautiful but heavily wooded stretch of scenery. We can run in the rain -- in fact, we often do better on cool, slightly rainy days because people don't go to waterparks and are looking for something else to do. But we cannot take a train out in thunder and lightning. Back in June, the major storm that destroyed Lake Delton knocked 34 large trees down across our track. That did not real damage to the tracks, but you can't run a train over fallen trees, and you don't want a tree toppling onto a wooden car filled with little kids.

The thing is, the conductor and engineer will decide when it is safe to take the train out, and that means they will keep calling us on the radio as departure time approaches to ask what the weather radar shows on our computers in the shop. So we will spend much of the day looking at green, orange and red spots on the screen and trying to give them enough information to hazard a guess about the odds of a hazard.

We have done this quite a bit this summer, and part of the challenge is the landscape around here. The combination of the hills of the Baraboo Ridge and the Wisconsin River and the Dells makes it very common for a storm to head right for us and then split and go around on both sides, striking neighbors just a few miles away but leaving the railroad unscathed. We tend to err on the side of caution -- there is no way to just turn around and come back if a sudden storm comes up, so they have to just back the train all the way back into Hyde Park Station. But about 90% of the time lately, the radar looks threatening, we can hear distant thunder, but nothing gets to us. But it keeps us in suspense about whether to even sell tickets while we wait to see what happens.

It should be a fun day.

This is the last full week of the season, too, since schools are back in session in many surrounding states and will be open everywhere after Labor Day. So we would like to have a good last week before we shift down to the fall schedule. Incidentally, we are actually running ahead of last year's business right now, which makes us (relatively speaking) one of the most successful venues in the Dells area this year. The Mid-Continent Railroad Museum over in North Freedom, a full-size train museum and ride, was badly affected by the June floods, and they have been closed for most of the season. Three weeks ago they finally got an engine working and ran a reduced schedule for a couple of weekends, but then the engine broke down on them again and they are closed until further notice. Mid-Continent is another volunteer-run organization, and you can imagine how hard it is to keep a full-sized train going with volunteers who have limited time to devote to it.