Another weekend and month has come to an end. How productive was your weekend? I had an enjoyable weekend watching English Football (Soccer) as Jared's team did really well this past weekend. The weather was also very English with colder dark skies and a light mist of rain through out the weekend, despite the weather forecast predicting sunny skies on Sunday. Guess it is time to convert Jess my Jeep to a year round hard top! One of two Kato SD70 ACe locomotives is ready for paint. Even with 91% alcohol, the BNSF colors are very stubborn. Shell number one cleaned up nicely and locomotive number two was carefully disassembled and had it's shell placed in the alcohol container. Not sure what decals are used on these but the BNSF swoosh is literally the last thing to come off. My goal is to have both shells in the paint booth tomorrow night. That was pretty much my weekend, busy with sports but work progressed on the SD70 ACe project. How about you? What did you accomplish this weekend? I see on Friday we had some good posts, so how many structures went up? How many dabbled in electronics and DCC? Whatever your modeling task was this weekend, let us know, with pictures if you have them. We'll all meet back here on Friday the 7th and do it all over again. Until then, have a great week and.... ​High Greens!
We've had 4 very hot days in New England. Saturday morning I got up early and went for a bicycle ride. It felt good, but by the end of the ride the comfort level between shade and sun was noticeable. I stayed inside the rest of the weekend, other than grilling some burgers Saturday evening. The carfloat project is almost complete, with just a few details to go, along with a bit of wiring for structures, the floodlight tower and the headhouse. I had some frustrating derailments down in Mooseport last night, and I think I've got to be fussy about which cars get to run down by the docks. Those old plastic-wheel models will have to stay off until I get around to re-wheeling them. I built carstock mockups for all the structures in the Empire Leather Tanning Company kit set. It's 4 buildings plus a water tower. Since the parts are modular, I'll be figuring out placement of loading dock doors on the walls, so it will take a while before I even start gluing and painting. Once and for all, though, I've got to fix a bit of questionable trackwork back in the corner where that complex will be before I put any more scenery in the way. And then, there's "mission creep," that inexorable growth in the scope of any project. I've got to do at least some interior detailing of these buildings, right? And, Walthers kindly provided some background on the process of leather tanning, including the bit of historical detail that raw hides were shipped from the slaughterhouse to the tannery in old last-job-before-the-scrapyard boxcars marked "Hide Loading Only," thanks to permanent odor that would remain in the car. Last week I saw some undecorated Tichy boxcar kits at my LHS, and I think they'll be perfect for the job. That will provide some good "crosstown traffic" from the slaughterhouse on the other end of my layout, the venerable Suydam building with "Swift" on the side, and another destination for cars coming off the carfloat. June is upon us. I've flipped another page on the model train calendar in my office. Now I've got a great shot of a passenger train in O-scale, crossing a nicely done bridge.
I don't know if it's a "modeling" accomplishment, but since it was going to be 97 here, I went down to Chuck's shop and picked up the new Wheels Of Time PC&F box cars that I ordered. I got a couple of WP and one SP and found a WP Centerbeam and an ATSF Super Shock Control flat. Then spent a couple of hours shooting the breeze with Chuck. It's a lot cooler where he is down in Marin! Did a couple of errands and then spent the rest of the weekend free time researching the SP GP9 that I just got. All in all, a nice weekend!
Finally got some time to work on a project for the first time in 3 weeks. Installed a few decoders and painted my Clark 66 gas station.
