Please sir, may we have another

A nice little garland of stories on the Denver Post's front page right now.

Two University Hospital clinics balk at government insurance;

Colo. tells Cotter Corp. to redouble mine cleaning effort;

Xcel socks Denver with nation's second-highest electric rate increase;

Economic growth slows to 1.6 percent in the spring; and (just so it's not all doom and gloom)

Stubborn side has helped Sotomayer prevail.

Odd hunger extinguished

For a couple of weeks the d-blog has been craving bologna. On dark rye. With yellow mustard. The d-blog hasn't eaten bologna for a decade at least, but yesterday bought a package and some cheapo mustard (already had the dark rye) and made himself a sammich.

It was gross. Bologna is inherently slimy. Billy Bob got the last couple of bites.

One other craving recently is for Taco Bell's Taco Supreme (with extra hopefully-not-salmonella-infused tomatoes).

The d-blog is not, as far as he knows, pregnant.

Why couldn't it have been a clown car?

The Post:

Numerous injuries after Tiny Town train derailment

The Tiny Town train derailed this morning, causing five passenger cars to tip over.

Capt. Daniel Hatlestad, spokesman for Inter-Canyon Fire Rescue, said 30 people were on the train, 20 were evaluated and 15 taken by ambulance to area hospitals.

Hatlestad said although most injuries were bumps, bruises and scrapes, some people may also have broken bones. "There were many children involved. The patients range from small children to grandparents," he said.

Tiny Town, for those not Coloradoewok, is an allegedly one-sixth-size town that's been a tourist attraction since about 1920. The train itself is a steam engine that chugs along at about ten miles an hour. Bonk. It was probably terrorism. Here are a couple of pics of the tragedy.

Update: One imagines it went down something . . . like . . . this.

Update II: Must have been a Toyota train:

The train at Tiny Town that derailed on Wednesday did so because of operator error, initial findings of the Colorado Department of Labor & Employment have concluded.

In interviews with investigators, "the engineer of the train admitted he accelerated the train - the locomotive - versus braking when he was entering a turn," said Cher Haavind, spokeswoman for the state agency. "He should have been going three miles per hour, and he admitted he was going at a much higher speed."

Eight miles an hour would more than double it.

As he entered the turn, said Haavind, the train operator realized he was going too fast for the turn, "panicked" and reached for the wrong lever in the locomotive.

Instead of grabbing the brake lever, he pulled the lever that actually accelerated the train, said the spokeswoman.