Well did you survive the Thanksgiving Holiday? The Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce? Did you survive the Black Friday Curse? Unfortunately, my plans did not come to pass regarding Potter Place NH, I was helping my brother and father replace a hot water heater. I did get to spend a lot of time with family and so a nice relaxing time was had. I avoided the "Black Friday Fun" like the Black plague. How about you? I hope you had a great Thanksgiving and maybe had some fun with trains. As always, pictures are not required but certainly are acceptable.
I haven't photographed them yet, but I spent some "quality time" catching up on some custom decals on covered hoppers and a special boxcar I'm doing for my son (it's a GameStop video game billboard theme). The boxcar is a bit of a disaster, with the inkjet-printed decals not wanting to cooperate, but I'm hoping to rescue it with some strategic weathering. The boy's been a good sport about it, and I think he'll like it if I get the weathering done well. Otherwise, I'm going to strip it to the bone and start over, perhaps with some professionally made decals. This is one of those projects that has been on the shelf for months due to my frustration with the inkjet-decals, but it packed up and traveled with me easily for our holiday visits.
I came out wounded, but I'll pull through. Meanwhile, I didn't get to do much on my existing trains, but thanks to a visit from my son's grandma and aunt, he's now set up with an oval of track, a switch, some track for a siding, and the icing on the cake... an N-scale Bachmann Spectrum 2-8-0 (got it for a song at a great LHS from their quite-decent selection of used/consignment trains). So, for the first time, we actually ran trains together (before we'd set up some lengths of track and used a battery, but this is the real deal)! My old Bachmann power pack (original from my Metroliner set) still works great, so he's set up with that for the time being. I also have a filtered DC power pack that I built 20 years ago that works fantastic, and I have a Model Power throttle with a bad rheostat that's going to be converted into a nice pulse throttle for about 5 bucks in parts. All of this and we finally got down to the town depot/museum when it was open, and found out there's a model train show coming up in two weeks, right in town! So, not exactly what I'd expected, but a great weekend for trains!
Other than food, the only things I bought this weekend were long-shank Kadee couplers and a structure kit. So, surviving the Curse of the Black Friday was pretty easy. I got to visit 3 layouts on the Tour de Chooch. They were spread out geographically, so that's about what I planned to accomplish. One N-scale, one On3, and one HO. The N and HO layouts were both operations-oriented. The group running the HO scale layout had a lot of wireless throttles, and they were letting the younger visitors run the trains with adult supervision. You would have thought these kids were veterans. Electronic controls seem instinctive to them now. I started planning Mooseport, getting down to where individual buildings would go. I made some cardstock mockups of what will mostly be DPM modular structures. I'm trying to get an old mill town feel. The blue-bordered line will be a small canal, as many of the old mills started out water-powered. The track to the right will be the lead for the carfloat, which will be against the wall on the right, extending straight out. I ordered some girder rail and cobblestone streets from Proto87, so that curved section will be replaced by street-running track. As the weekend wore down, I replaced all the couplers on my Rivarossi passenger cars (3 coaches, one baggage car) with those long-shank Kadees. As I ran them around to test them, I finally got fed up enough with one spot where I've had a lot of uncoupling issues. The track is fine, but the layout base there is a thin sheet of masonite that forms the roof of the South Ferry subway station. It was fine when I put it in, but now it's started to sag, so I climbed down below and decided how to re-inforce it without blocking access to the subway tracks below. It's not a big job, but it was late and it will be put off until another day.
Thanksgiving dinner was good. We even went to the movies and saw the Muppet Movie. The movie was selected by my teenage kids over some other ones. They wanted to see a nice enjoyable family movie. My wife and I for the first time in a decade succumbed to Black Friday and went shopping late on Thursday night. For the first time we were actually successful and got what we went for. It was something my son wanted and needs and we could not pass up the price. The rest of the weekend was spent doing things around the house. We raked the leaves and cleaned out the gutters. We got the outside Christmas decorations up. It was the first time in years I didn’t freeze my fingers off doing it. We also did the bi-weekly grocery shopping. Now for the big news. I got the workbench cleared off. I even found the last projects I was working on. I have four Accurail wood box cars to weather and a repair to an Atheran U33C locomotive. I have to glue the bell back on. I even got a few things off the layout. One of the areas I cleared was the Water Tower diorama. I even found the backdrops I use for photos. Looks like I am one step closer.
I've been posting regular updates all weekend in my "Landscaping & Scenery" thread. I'm not going to duplicate those posts here, I'll just link to the thread... http://www.trainboard.com/grapevine...b-Landscaping-amp-scenery&p=825378#post825378
I didn't get anything done that is train related. But since my weekends stretch out for seven days I still have lots of time.
Survived Dinner and Thursday night at Walmart, got my Xbox and didn't get pepper sprayed. I got my GP60 decoderized, handrails painted and details applied. Unfortunately, the lights aren't working and the decoder doesn't quite fit in the space under the Dynamic brake blister, so I'm going to have to do some more work there.
I finished the last two switches in the yard, by soldering feeders to the points and then installing the switch points. I also laid Code 83 on the main and run around tracks, about 12 feet of rail including soldering all of the feeders. I would have gotten more done last night but I cut the end of my left thumb with a utility knife while carving out a scenery base for the last two switch stands. Hoping to have the Main and runaround tracks and the cross-over complete by the next of next weekend so I can start planning an elevator system for trains to go from level to level.
Over the weekend I managed to paint a 40' and 50' Boxcar in Reading Green and a 50' RBL in Big Sky Blue for the Erie Lackawanna. I also installed the glass in a Brass I-12 B&O Caboose and put it back together. Built a Quickie MDC kit in order to paint and decal for a B&M 50' FMC Boxcar. Continued with building a 50' Double Door Boxcar to be painted for the PC along with a completed X74 Boxcar. Finished adding roofwalk grabs, cut levers and brakewheels to two ExactRail PS4427 kits and will make the roadname placards for the cars prior to painting this week. And finally started removing the unwanted cast on detail to an Atlas C425 to be built as a New Haven Unit. Rick J
