There is a cool chill in the air, a box car door slams shut breaking the silence of the night, a growl and whine can be heard, something is stirring in the inky shadows. What could it be? A Werewolf? A ghost? A politician!? Oh, sorry, it's just my new sound equipped BNSF ES44AC. Welcome back to that gateway to the weekend. Do you have a lot on your list? Let's get started. Saturday: Not sure how much modeling I will get done as it is Halloween and we are preparing to break up the COVID monotony with a small get together with friends, BBQ and pass out candy to our neighborhood kids, complete in costume. Ang and I are dressing up in Star Trek fleet uniforms, the OG ones. You know me, I'm stuck in the 1960's. It should be a good day, warm and sunny and I hope we get a lot of Trick or Treaters or else I'm going to get really FAT. Sunday: Not sure what is going on, the cold will be back so any progress will take place in my train/office room. I would like to get the new HO switching layouts fascia installed and ready for track as well as paint the skyboard on the N scale shadowbox. So how about you? What do you have planned? Let us know. We'll assemble again on Monday, November 2nd to see how we all did. Also, don't forget to set your clocks back 1 hour on Saturday night so your trains are on schedule. Until then, have a Spooktacular weekend, watch for the Great Pumpkin and be healthy and safe. Oh yeah and... HAPPY HALOWEEN! & High Greens!
Plans are as follows- work on the modules after I get home from work Sunday morning. I took my two days off this week (wed and Thursday) and got the fascia installed on all the modules. Now it’s track time. I need to hit the LHS for more track on Monday. Until then woohoo! I also started planning the scenery. I’m going with an agricultural industry. Entering the loop will be a rather large ADM grain elevator. I have 27” to fill. Take the right hand curved and follow it around and next we will see an ethanol plant with a spur. Four grain silos then the main plant followed by three tanks in a tank farm. That’s the second 27” to fill. Next we come to another grain elevator facility. This time they are corrugated steel. Two silos followed by a warehouse then four silos and second warehouse. That is the third 27”. Next where two modules comes together is a small town. This will be a road crossing and a business on each corner. A feed mill, farm supply, a gas dealer, and a DQ. This will fill another 27” space. Follow the loop and we come to a farmers coop grain elevator (fourth 27” area) then a small dairy farm finished it all up before we exit the loop back down the row of modules. The loop will have three tracks and two spurs in it. A main, siding, and staging industry access. Until I can hit the LHS I will tweak some of the rolling stock. Some need new wheels. I will have the full week off so I plan on having the track laid by Friday next week. My wife wants her family room back so I am time crunched.
Happy weekend all. More building work on the H W Meyers diorama Advance the Atlas Middlesex kitbash project, now named "Highland Paint & Seal" Clean up the train room some. If I don't keep up w/ it, the clutter takes on a life of its own.
Last weekend was a bust as far as getting anything done but it was some much needed rest. Hope to get back on track with some scenery work this weekend. Also have to get out and repair a couple bird houses and feeders that didn't fair so well during the remnants of Hurricane Zeta.
Cynthia and I are going to make our final move Saturday afternoon. Sunday I'm going to work on the steel trestle and post more International Space Station photos. Joe
I hope to have a better weekend than last weekend. Halloween will interrupt plans for a time. We have some last-minute decorations to put out. We will be giving out candy. We are going to bag the candy and then place it on a table at the sidewalk or hang them from bushes in the front yard to maintain social distance. I have more boxcars to weather. I have 14 to do to finish off all the RTR ones in the Wall of Trains. There are still many Accurail and Athearn kits to do later. I am concentrating on getting the RTR cars done. After the RTR boxcars are done RTR open hoppers are next.
With the lower staging yard rebuild finished I have been fine tuning the sequencer system. It's now working as designed and in the process I have found a few locomotives and cars that need some attention. So this weekend I plan to go through those that have been set aside in the bad order box and see how many I can return to operating status. I'll report back on Monday with the results. Everyone be careful and safe and have a great weekend whatever you are doing.
Happy Halloween all! Good progress all around. As for me, tonight is Wildcats football with grandson taking the "Senior Walk". His last year for HS football. Time has flown. This week has prep for the annual Smoky City Rails Train Show in Helena, AL. I was honored to be invited to display my Murphysboro Omega Scale Railway module. The show is Fri. afternoon and Sat. 9:00am to 3:00pm. I will be there Sat. My efforts this past week consisted of making some small signs and fabricating a transport box for the show. Come out if you can! All be well.
Settled into cooler days and notably shorter daylight hours. Should help with spending more time modeling. After being away for a couple weeks this should be the first of three weekends in a row at home. Here are the big objectives: Download a different version of CorelDRAW Draw some disc/Boxpok type overlays for N scale drivers with the software Retrieve my drill press and lathe from the depths of a storage unit Find a place to put them and do whatever is necessary to get them working after years of idleness Need to get some groceries, probably a trip to the hardware store and there is a soccer match to watch on Saturday. Otherwise, not much to keep me from the train-related fun. Stay safe.
I got my Woodland Scenics Static King in the mail earlier this week and today I stopped by the LHS and picked up a few packages of Static Grass. Time to put it to work on some of the bare areas of the layout. I hope it works better than that "hobby/war games" static applicator I bought on eBay last year. I never could get the dang thing to work. I took it apart and tested every circuit on the board, it never generated any voltage output. I waited too long and the seller wouldn't take it back. But it was a lot cheaper than the Static King, so I have much higher expectations. I'll try to post some pictures on Monday.
Paint the plastered risers. Got the PR4, program the engines with their road numbers. Must learn Decoder Pro while I'm at it. Visit LHS. Spend money. If I'm not fried and the paint dries, then lay the track on the risers. Watch NFC Least football Sunday night. Sent from my SM-T837A using Tapatalk
Finish review of the following two PCBs so they can be ordered next week in what I'm hoping will be the final pre-production run! ESP32 CS v1.4 PCB. A number of minor adjustments since the last PCB and possibly a few more to do before the next PCB run. Most of the adjustments have been in the RailCom detectors and a couple additional LEDs as diagnostic outputs. ESP32-S2 IO, provides 32 configurable IO pins (input with debounce, pulsed outputs, paired outputs, active high or active low). I'm looking at a couple variants on this design for addressable LEDs (WS2812 and similar) to use for signaling and another for control of servos.
