Welcome back everyone from cold and cloudy Chicago in O’Hare airport. I hope you all had a great weekend and got a lot done. Since I’m writing this from a phone let’s get to it as my accomplishments were just at the weekends train show. We’ll meet back on Friday, February 3rd to start it all over again. Until then have great week, stay safe and as always… High Greens!
Good mornin to Y'all, I had a very good weekend. The Ops session was a blast!! And - I am making good progress on my FA/FB project. Next: some lite weathering. Thanks, and - Y'all have an awesome week, Wolf
Good Morning all! Safe travels Jim. Hope the show was great! This weekend got mostly done what I wanted. NC Staten Mens' and Women won both of their basketball games. Women knocked off #7 Notre Dame and that is strong on their resume for the NCAA tourney in March. Got the extension built from the main layout to the new North Monterey area. Got it nice and level w/ the original layout which will help w/ the elevated trackway extension. Still much work to do here. This used to be an alcove where I staged the heavy construction of the main layout. The painted walls have been dinged/scarred here and there. So that will need some touching up. Have a great week all and stay warm. Going to be cold here in NC later this week.
This weekend we worked on getting the Christmas tree down. This year has been a very slow process, much slower than normal for us. We ran some errands on Saturday and spent Sunday around the house. I did not watch any of the championship games. It is not that I am not interested I just don’t watch much sports. I did check in every so often. I guess there will be a lot of green flu today. I continued organizing, checking, and tuning up boxcars. I finished the 36-foot wood boxcars and got them in a bin. I am working on my new acquisitions and getting them inventoried, organized, checked and tuned up if necessary.
Had a great weekend here. After getting my quota of yard work done, I did accomplish what I had wanted on the layout. Worked on some fences around the future scrap yard and scenery around the river west of Carlin. Throughout the weekend was making virtual visits to the Amherst Train show on YouTube with the virtual railcams and videos people posted. Amazing show, we have nothing like that in the west that I know of. Was looking for Jim but did not see the Athearn booth in any of the views I saw. View of the scrap yard, now I need to work on some scrap.
Moose so-called accomplishments... Friday: Went to Tacoma Home and Garden Show and were promptly attacked by sales-humans -- "No, da Mooses don't need a new roof to replace the one year old roof." "No, da Mooses don't need a new paint job to cover up the one year old paint job." "No, da Mooses don't want to buy "vintage" clothes to replace the "vintage" clothes da Mooses already have." Why are someone else's old clothes being sold at a home and garden show? And why are they "worth" more than new clothes from a clothing store? Continued designing & redesigning tender shells for a number of projects. Saturday: Went to flooring store to pick-up vinyl. Had to order it all special like, rather than off-the-rack. Delaying installation by more than a week. Mrs Moose not happy... Hid in train room whilst Mrs Moose painted the laundry room. Continued designing & redesigning tender shells for a number of projects, as well as developing different draw-bar designs to connect tenders to locomotives from different manufacturers. It's all really going to be a test of Moose's ability to cut & glue wee bits of styrene... Sunday: Continued design projects. Lots of work, for very small projects. Once again, gave up on an NP tender - the Life-Like tender will just have to be "close enough." Moose keeps tell moose-self that; perhaps this time it will stick. Watched San Francisco implode. So much for the NFC West stand-ins for the Seahawks... Watched Kansas City do their thing - barely. Two weeks to get healthy... Hope everyone has a great week!
Friday was all bowling, had the refresher on how to tape the lanes and deciding on stipends for those working on the State Tournament and bowling went well that night with a new ball and I was over average and the team won all 7 points. Saturday went to the club and ran my abbreviated PRR General as I have only received 8 of the 13 cars so far. Also looked at my Rapido PA-1 and we will attempt to replace the warped front truck next week. Did some decalling later in the evening. Sunday spent some time decalling but did not get anything finished will be working on it this week. Rick Jesionowski
Brrr...Chicago! A blast op session. It doesn't get any better. FA/B's look sharp. Construction Zone! Can't have too many boxcars. Front yard, scrap yard, freight yard. It just goes on and on. @Moose2013, I have complete "comfidence" in your ability. A warped front truck. Wow! The last thing I did Friday was make a full-size module footprint from old newspaper. I plan to make track and building footprints from graph paper. The module is one by three feet. Saturday was interesting. I attended a rabbit show in Dalton, GA (U.S.). After that I went by the Dalton Freight Depot. A young man was there with his mom. They said they saw twenty-six locomotives. After I went to the rest room, I saw the end of a hopper train. And then nothing. And then I went home. Have a great week.
We spent a LOT of time at karate testing Saturday, but the older two kids ranked up to Green Belt. Then it was out to an early dinner to celebrate, and then much of the family collapsing in a virtual heap of exhaustion. Sunday saw off and on rain, but we managed to squeeze some yard work in between the storms. Someday I'll get back to regular order MRR work . . . . .
Made progress without getting where I was hoping to go. I modified the table on the laser to get it closer to the moving parts. Adjusted the mounting of the laser module to bring everything closer to the carriage that moves the whole thing. Analogous to bringing everything closer to the center of gravity. Only had time to make some test runs without getting to the more demanding projects. Groundhog Day gifts for my mother-in-law! Now I can claim I worked all weekend on her presents. Stay safe,
Happy Monday! Well, Saturday went as planned. Outing with my son and did make it to the not so LHS and scored an October 1976 ORER. Was happy about that. Sunday stared out okay but wasn't feeling so great. Stayed in and napped a lot while accomplishing next to nothing. Not feeling much better today but have made it through the work day and now it's time to go play in the traffic. Hope you all have a great week.
My weekend work Track wiring for staging yard is complete. Wiring for the reverse loop module is also ready. The first two power distributors for the main power line are in progress.
As expected, I did nothing train related other than driving (and flying) over some tracks. Friday, we flew to Texas (Cleveland to Baltimore to Austin). Saturday, we had a small (but nice) backyard wedding and welcomed a new daughter to our family. Sunday, we got visitors' passes to Fort Hood, drove on base to our son's battalion, and got to ride several miles in an Abrams tank. I stood in the loader's hatch on the way out, switched with my wife, and sat in the gunner's seat on the way back. Monday, before breakfast, Southwest texted to let us know that they'd canceled our flight home because of the ice storm that was sweeping across Texas. In order to catch our alternate flight, we had to leave immediately after breakfast rather than after lunch, and our trip home took far longer than we'd hoped. Coming home, we flew from Austin to Minneapolis to Baltimore to Cleveland and arrived too late for a shuttle, or a taxi, back to the hotel where we had parked the car. None of us cared for the option of taking rapid transit (although that *would* have included a train in the weekend's activities) and walking in Cleveland at one o'clock in the morning, so we called an Uber minivan which may have got us to the hotel faster than their shuttle. We dropped our kids off at their car in Canton and finally arrived home around 2:00 am. to find the driveway blocked by my truck with a dead battery. Although the trip home was less than stellar, we got home, our kiddo got married, and we (mostly) had a good time. This morning, I retrieved our dogs from the kennel and went back to work. Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk
I'd say that's an awesome weekend right there!! Except for the logistics portion. Congrats on the new family member!
I made a bit more progress on my N scale helix. Ran out of track quicker than I thought I would have, but more is on the way. Two more levels to go.
I'm a bit late getting to this thread, but I flew from SFO to BDL on Wed / Thurs (Jan 25 / 26) to be out in Springfield MA for the Amherst show. I spent Friday setting up a booth and both Saturday and Sunday working in the booth talking with customers and learning what works / doesn't work with the current line of products. I can't share too many details on which booth I was in or details on the products that are in the works other than the new products should be announced and be available in the coming months. One thing I can share about the show is that there were nearly 22k attendees at the show, many of which were paid attendees (children and a few others were free entry). It was by far the largest show I've ever attended and it was at least 2x-3x larger than any show I've attended here in Calif.
