Hall of Fame

I just returned from the Amory Railroad Festival in Amory, Mississippi. It was held April 6,7,8 and 9, 2017. I'm rubber tramping these days--I've got a van built out with a bed made of 2x4's, a foam mattress and and a folding card table. What a drive! 1,025 miles each way. Seems like a long drive just to camp out in the parking lot of a police station, ha ha. Home town boy Trent Harmon, who won the American Idol competition last year, was the headliner on Friday night, and the Lone Star Band played country on Saturday night, There were some other groups as well, of course, and two stages in different areas of "downtown" Amory. The weather was surprisingly mild, almost chilly Tues, Weds and Thurs. Friday it started getting warm during the day and Sat and Sun were cloudless and blistering hot with almost no humidity in the day, and chilly at night. Amory had about twenty different churches cooking barbecue, burgers, hot dogs, catfish, ribs, etc., and of course, the famous Amory apple fritters. One lady told us she drove 60 miles just to buy some apple fritters. It's a huge event for that part of Mississippi, and four or five times as large as the National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa. Friday night after the "food court" area closed down for the night, a couple of guys from churches brought us a bag of apple fritters, some boiled potatoes and some ears of corn-on-the-cob, but no barbecue ribs or chicken, like in years past. Saturday night I guess they forgot all about us, but one church cut their prices to $2 for any sandwich and we tanked up on burgers, hot dogs and chicken sandwiches. I didn't go down to the amusement park rides area, but there was a large carnival in town, with all the usual stuff like a Ferris wheel, Tilt-A-Whirl, a "vomit comet" and so on. There were quite a few rides designed for smaller children. It was all lit up as carnivals usually are, with a zillion colored lights and the usual canned music. I don't think they had a midway, at least I didn't see one. In times past we've had as many as 60 tramps in Amory for the RR festival, but this year there were only ten--National Hobo King Ricardo, Virginia Slim and Cathy, Hobo SLC, Medicine Man and Daisy Sue, me, Fredy the German, another guy I didn't know and of course, Hobo Queen Miss Charlotte, who lives in Amory. Charlotte very graciously put up those who did not bring a vehicle in which they could sleep in her and the late Loco Larry's "hobo hotel" sheds. King Ricardo, Hobo SLC and I were vandwelling and got festival passes from the city so we could camp in a parking lot near the steam locomotive. Unfortunately our parking spots were right next to a police & sheriff disaster response trailer--good in a way, because we could tap into their shore power electric, but the radio chatter was kind of annoying late at night. The cops were very nice, though. Nobody was able to ride a train in, and nobody even pitched a tent or rolled out in the "jungle" next to the locomotive. BNSF had brought in several bulls and we had Amory city cops, Monroe County sheriff's deputies and BNSF railroad bulls all over the Amory yards. I don't think even that legendary rail ghost, Stretch Wilson, could have ridden a train in. There were plenty of gendarmes, although I saw no arrests, despite the size of the crowd--at least 10,000, I'd guess. The park was packed. SLC showed King Ricardo and me where the Amory City Water Department is, and Friday we hiked down to take a shower. They told us they told us they weren't allowing hobos to shower there any more, but when I asked them if they could spare a clean 5-gallon bucket for us to bathe in, and since we had already walked all the way down there, they let us shower anyway. SLC and Ricardo scrubbed up, but I passed, having already washed up in the brand-spankin' new city park bathrooms next to the Amory fire station. It was good to see everybody again, I hadn't seen anyone since last August at Britt. It was especially good to see Fredy the German, who flew into Miami from Germany and rented a car to get to Amory. (Now that's what I call a dedicated tramp.)

Guilty.. Only sometimes though...

Surprised no one simply answered "Me."

1 of 1 in existance

Letters. If they don't have good letter structure I won't care how rad the color scheme, layout, characters, or other add ons are. This goes for all of graffiti, not just trains. Like OMB, not hating characters, just not what I care about.

Looks interesting enough to me, in principle st least Also, my lower intestine could have confirmed for them the presence of lactose in skim milk, as could anyone in my immediate vicinity a couple of hours after I've drunk it!