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My Wright City adventure

Dave Farquhar Personal January 21, 2013Big Boy, Kansas City

My wife and I trekked out to Wright City this weekend for a surprise anniversary party for one of her uncles. It was in a park in Wright City. Wright City is a small town roughly an hour west of St. Louis on I-70. It’s most famous for Big Boy’s, a roadside hole-in-the-wall restaurant that predated the national chain by a couple of decades, and for the defunct Elvis Is Alive Museum, an old laundromat that a Baptist preacher converted into a tribute to the other Elvis (Presley, not Costello), where he spun theories about what Elvis did after faking his death.

I’ve driven through Wright City more times than I can count, since it’s along I-70 in between St. Louis and Kansas City, but up until this weekend, I’ve never stopped there, even for gas.

An excellent story about collectors of old signs

Dave Farquhar St. Louis January 15, 2012April 18, 20171990s, Big Boy, CVS, train layout

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch profiled three local sign collectors this weekend. Bill Christman, Greg Rhomberg, and Jim May go around buying old storefront signage, particularly enamel-painted metal signs with neon lights.

“Most businesses are branded franchises, so you see the same signs over and over, repeating every few miles,” said Tod Swormstedt, who operates a sign museum in Cincinnati. “But the old signs — the hand-carved shoe or the gold-leaf lettering on a window — were iconic and what made each neighborhood unique. People miss that.”

So I guess I’m not the only one who misses that, but it sure seems like we’re a minority.

Gatermann captured me demonstrating how to run a steam locomotive

Dave Farquhar Personal January 4, 2005April 17, 20171950s, Big Boy

Tom Gatermann caught me hard at work this past weekend at the National Museum of Transport in St. Louis, inside the cab of a UP Big Boy.

I know the real reason why railroads made the transition to diesel locomotives in the 1950s and scrapped those huge, magnificent-looking steamers. The chairs in the diesel locomotives are much, much more comfortable.