Carl Blare

Being on a boat sounds like a wonderful place to run a radio station. I once considered the idea of buying a railroad passenger car for a studio.

Being on a boat sounds like a wonderful place to run a radio station. I once considered the idea of buying a railroad passenger car for a studio.

In early 80s I became somehow aware of a magazine called Private Varnish, about people in this country who have refurbished old railroad cars for use as a home or office. The cars can be parked on sidings near downtown areas or anywhere there are sidings, and if kept up to standard, can be hitched to trains and taken wherever.

At that time Amtrak was mentioned in the paper as having a string of passenger cars for sale in a railroad yard so we went through them, they were asking $3k per car. Trouble is outfitting them to railroad standard would have required more like $250k, but before abandoning the idea we made one more stop, to a very fancy office in a train car parked downtown with a business that professionally restores train cars.

Also at that time I read in a trade journal that a radio station on a moving train was operating somewhere in Switzerland, so the idea was alive.