This weekend was pretty nice with temperatures in the sixties and low seventies. I wish we could have spent more time outside but we had to run around with grocery shopping and birthday and Easter shopping. My daughter had her last basketball game which her team lost but they finished the season 7-2 so it was a good year. I finished adding trees and foliage to Drexel Ridge. I also continued adding people to the Cement Distributor scene. I painted a few more detail parts for the scene.
It got quite warm in the Jefferson High School gym, the site of the Rockford train show. Opening the doors helped as we got some nice warm breezes through the building, but everyone was a little ripe by the end of the show each day. I picked up five new (to me) locomotives, a set of nine undec ConCor Superliners where the previous owner had sanded down the mold line and injection gates on the roofs of half of them, about 15 other freight cars, and the 4-car set of UP smooth side passenger cars from Kato. After buying all that on Saturday, I spent Sunday just running trains at the layout; if I don't go wandering around the show, I'm not as tempted to buy more. With only three groups of train-bearing modelers at the layout on Sunday, we each had a mainline and four yard tracks to ourselves. I took some photos, but the lights in that facility are pure c**p for photos, casting a deep orange tint over everything no matter what white balance setting I chose. We'll see what the black and white film looks like in a few weeks after I finish the roll.
I continued to work on the addition to the JJJ&E and I installed decoders in two steam loco's. Stay cool and run steam.........
A great weekend in Stockholm running H0 modules. A few minor problems with mines of cource. But the H0e part worked as a charm after installed a Lenz Mini Gold decoder in the loco. My gallery
I finally got around to rebuilding my benchwork, so now I'm back to where I was before deciding to "renovate". I originally had built a frame out of 1x2's not really intending on doing cookie cutter benchwork with it. Then the wheels started churning and before I knew I had this elaborate cookie cutter plan done...but the 1x2's weren't strong enough to keep everything "in-line". SO, I went back and replaced the major pieces of the frame with 1x4's...a somewhat duanting task given the risers and subroadbed were already in place. But I took my time and finally got everything swapped out and it is now sufficiently strong to handle transporting the layout (without jacking up the trackwork) if needed. I laid out some Unitrack to test the general flow of the grades but I didn't have some key pieces I needed to do any actual run tests. I still have some more risers to place and I need to attach subroadbed to a few existing risers. I did determine that my plan to use Unitrack for staging isn't going to be optimal due to the turnout geometry so I am considering a slight change of plans there. Maybe Atlas C80 or Peco 55.
