Tiny train toils in tabletop

I saw a coffeetable containing a train for sale in a magazine ad, and decided to do my own.
The table is oak and the train is an n-guage Atlas 2-6-0 Mogul pulling four cars. There are also buildings, people, and cows.


Another recent activity: Memphis Mensa is running a bad fiction contest, in the tradition of the Bulwer-Lytton contest at San Jose State. This is a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. Edward Bulwer-Lytton famously wrote the sentence beginning, "It was a dark and stormy night..." which has become his legacy. The Mensa contest asks for something along the same line, but with Memphis references. Here is my entry, or at least my first one:

It is January 8, just another bleak winter's day for most people, but for me the day that carries the heavy double shoulder-burden of Elvis' birth in 1935 and Dave Thomas' death sixty-seven years later; my battered Buick station wagon roars through the morning mist out of Bear Bryant's childhood homeland, crossing the black father-of-waters into the looming triangular grip of a strange Egyptian icon crawling up into the gray Tennesse sky like the dark fist in the opening scene of some grotesque Nazi propaganda movie.