Mark Derrick’s Home Page (Updated on Nov 17, 2007)

I work for the Tennessee Department of Transportation as a Civil Engineer and graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1982. I am a licensed professional engineer in the State of Tennessee. I’ve been married to my wife Maria since 1979. She works for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. We live in a quiet neighborhood and don’t have any kids. That’s how we can afford to travel as much as we do.

This picture was taken on our most recent trip to Europe in April 2004. This year is our 25^th anniversary link to wedding picture here and we decided to blow all our accumulated points and take a very special trip to celebrate our anniversary year. Every hotel we stayed at during this trip was absolutely free from using points. See below for details. We visited France, Italy and England where we saw two shows and I even got to play some 18xx games one day. We were gone fifteen wonderful days and I can’t wait to go back. No wonder I never have any vacation time!

Interests

So far 2004 has been a great year for me. Two of my very favorite shows I loved when I was a kid came out on DVD. I now finally have Lost in Space and Jonny Quest season one. A few episodes of each have appeared on VHS tape but never all of them. Between these and Babylon 5, we’ll be backed up with our watching.

We bought and sold comics for many years, and had great fun meeting other collectors at conventions. My comics are almost all gone now but I still love my old comics, particularly the old Adventure Comics from the sixties featuring the Legion of Superheroes. One year I held a convention in Knoxville and hosted a Star trek guest. It was Mark Lenard who played Spock’s father in the series and in several of the movies.

For about the last ten years now, I have been captivated by a series of railroad based boardgames known as the 18xx series. My first game played in the series was 1830 published by the now defunct Avalon Hill Game Company. Since then, I have played various games in the series and even designed several games. One design, 1851, was published in England and I self published 18GA and 18AL. For more details see the 18xx link below.

I have had a high definition television for about three years now and I am still impressed by some of the video I see in high definition. Chattanooga now has several stations that broadcast in high definition and satellite providers like DirecTV offer about a half dozen channels in HD. This will surely increase over time. These are indeed interesting times.

Links

Here are the links to the other parts of the page:

For information on my annual railroad gaming convention in Chattanooga, click here

For information on my 18xx games, click here

For information on my passion for traveling, click here

For some pictures from the ‘ole family album, click here

CONTACT

Contact me via email at:

derrick at chattanooga dot net

This is listed the way you have to type it in and it is listed like this to thwart email harvester programs. I should have done this years ago. I have had this email address since late 1994 and I currently receive about 250 emails a day, nearly all spam (sigh). I have to resort to extensive filtering but for now, I’m too stubborn to give in and change my email address.