The best gift I received was the pleasure of sharing four wonderful days with the WHOLE family, both daughters and their families and grandkids, in Kingman, AZ. We had so much fun I didn't even get into Kingman Canyon for a little railfanning. Santa also brought me two new New York Central history books. :tb-biggrin: We are still on the road and won't be home till Saturday if the weather holds up.
One of the gifts I got was a detailset featuring mailboxes, phone booths, and fore hydrants. Unfortunately, they're in O, and I'm building an N layout. Oh well, 'tis the thought that counts.........anybody want some O scale phone booths? :tb-wink:
A lump of coal and a miniature firemens shovel (looks like a stick to me). Hey, now I can run my N scale live steamers. Ahh...if I had one. Would you putt TT's on a live steamer? Not a good year for my railroad. We shall see what happens next year. I spent most of the day with a good friend and his family. The Christmas Turkey and all the trimmings was the best.
Since I have been off work 10 months now, money has been tight, so no new trains for Christmas. The best gift however, like Fitz, was spending time with the family. All the girls were here, I talked to my son in Ohio, and thanks to a donation from the church we had a nice Ham.
I had a hand lettered sign that I put at the end of our driveway whenever I had a layout open house, whenever I hosted one of 3 MRR groups I belong to, or when I expected new members at an operating session. The sign was ugly and deteriorating from the weather, so my daughter had a beautiful sign done at Kinkos that has the P&PU logo, "Trains Here Today", and is waterproof. She's also offered to help me set up a layout website...but we haven't done much on it, yet. Didn't get much in the way of train stuff for Christmas, but have had a couple days to spend working on stuff I've had unopened on my workbench: 1. Got some stationary decoders to control turnouts in September and finally had a chance to start installing them. 2. Made significant headway on reconfiguring some of my tracks leading to staging so I can use cascading turnouts to set up most of a run by keying in one or two switch numbers to correctly align all the turnouts along the way. This will make dispatching WAY easier... 3. Put together a cheapee signal bridge, bashed it to install operating lamps, wired it to a tortoise controlled by one of the newly installed stationary decoders, and tossed some trees and ballast around it, and took some (terrible) pics...Then fried the lamps when I hooked into the permanent signal lamps power source but didn't rewire the resistor into the permanent circuit. Arrrghh! Here's one of the pics from before zapping the lamps...I tried adding photo lighting but still got flash glare, shadows, focus issues, and always washed out the green lamp. I'm saving for a camera that will let me manually adjust for lighting and focus when I want to. 4. Opened 1 of 10 spans, but didn't do much more than look at the parts of a Rix highway overpass that will cross over the main P&PU yard.
I got a new airbrush and compresser. I also recieved some plaster. Train show coming up on the 19th so im gonna traet myself to some nice things there:tb-biggrin:
I got a new airbrush and compresser. I also recieved some plaster. Train show coming up on the 19th so im gonna traet myself to some nice things there:tb-biggrin:
I got a new airbrush and compresser. I also recieved some plaster. Train show coming up on the 19th so im gonna traet myself to some nice things there:tb-biggrin:
I got a new airbrush and compresser. I also recieved some plaster. Train show coming up on the 19th so im gonna traet myself to some nice things there:tb-biggrin:
Santa left me a Walthers Bus Terminal, an IHC Loews Movie Theatre, and a Digitrax PR-2. Woo hoo, time to start adding custom sounds to my locos!
Ditto that....Waiting on Kato Klause....or the Grinch that stole my Kato SP Daylight set...You'll shoot your eye out kid, er uh, run over your toe with that train boy!
