There's a lot to talk about these days.

As many of you already know, Traci Dunham ~labrat-78 passed the final home signal to the railyard in the sky on October 29th, after succumbing to laryngeal cancer. She was 46. Many features and tributes have been given, and suffice it to say, mine is not nearly early enough. Godspeed Traci, highball, and we miss you.

In other news, the #daRailyard chatroom has been relatively booming with new activity over the last couple of weeks. Great to see a new batch of faces coming in, and for those of you regulars who haven't been in, well, where are ya? Keep on coming around. The Yard can never be too busy.

Next up, I was very glad to see the great community response to the Railroad & Train Features for October 2009 article that I presented. I decided to resurrect an old tradition started by Robert =hunter1828 in an attempt to generate some interest in the community, and it seems to have gotten something going. So it'll be happening again for the month of November fairly soon after Thanksgiving .

But that brings me to my next item on the list:

~The-Railfan-Nation may soon be taking over the operations for the monthly features, as being an admin for the group, and not really having done much for it, I feel it's time to raise my contributions. In fact, over the next month or two, I intend to push for a lot of activities within the railroad community as a part or sponsored by ~The-Railfan-Nation, and in conjunction with #daRailyard to help bring even more awareness around. We've got some great artists around here, and it's time we showed them off to everyone else in an attempt to show how artistic railroading can be.

Of course, this all means that I won't be submitting as much material as I have been lately, but let's be realistic, it's been pretty spotty (and I think I'm starting to suck anyway ). But I'm guessing once I get the ball rolling on some of this, it'll be easy to keep up (I hope).

So stay tuned folks. It's gonna get interesting around here.