Truth be told, sectional track is the main reason I stayed awake in high-school math class. Once I realized that mathematics could answer important questions like “how close to the edge of the plywood will this loop be?” and “how long do I need to cut that fitter section?” it became much more relevant to me. To this day, I carry a calculator with trigonometry functions everywhere I go, just in case a track-planning emergency crops up. Thanks to my enhanced geometry skills, my first book—about track planning, naturally—was well along by graduation time. (I self-published it a year later.) When the time came over the winter of ’21-22 to design a replacement for the Covid-19 Emergency Railroad, I was rarin’ to go.

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