Well we made it through another weekend and the last weekend of March. How did you fare? I had a great weekend just running trains with my club. I started off early Saturday morning, loading up the T-Trak modules, train boxes and tool box into Jess the Railfan Jeep and set off for Normal Illinois around 6:15 a.m. After a stop for tea and and a bagel, I reached Heartland Community College and met up with the rest of the club and got busy adding my four modules to the set up. To date, this was our biggest T-Trak set up made completely of club member modules. Many new modules had been added this year along with my new double bridge module. We also had our Ntrak modules in a room across the way and guests brought G, O and HO layouts and displays. The other treat was the public talks and slide shows presented by local rail historians and museums. All in all a great relaxing weekend. Now back to the schedule. So how about you? What did you accomplish this past weekend? Let us know! We'll assemble again on Friday, April 3rd and start the modeling process all over again. Until then, have a great week, stay safe and... High Greens!
I got the full mechanical linkage set up for the crossing gates. The Tortoise drives both gates, and I got the range-of-motion set up for them, too, so the gates end up horizontal when down and just short of vertical when raised. I've still got to work on the phototransistor placement, along with the IR LEDs across the tracks. I did a bit of coupler maintenance on a passenger coach, and, since it was actually sunny and close to 40 degrees out, I pulled the trucks off that pickle car, painted and weathered the truck frames and replaced the plastic wheels with metal. My Oxford Diecast vehicles arrived at my LHS, so I picked them up. These are nice metal models. I got a '56 T-Bird and a '58 Edsel.
I got the handrails off this little Dockside and finished applying the paint, still have to get the lettering on then will put it on the layout, plan to use it by the log loading area to move flats around, since my Jammer is set up more or less permanently at the end of the tracks, I am going to have one engineer in the cab, also have to put knuckle couplers on to make it complete
Went out of town for a wedding, didn't get much done. I installed some Sergent couplers on around 20 cars, I had assembled the Sergents earlier last week in my hotel room at work.
This sounds pretty awesome, MisterBeasley! Would be cool to see a video of it in action. As for me, I got a few things done that I'm happy about. To start, I got a few Caboose Hobbies switch stands installed. I have a few more ready to go (styrene glued to the bottom and cork on the table all glued and dried). I'll install those sometime this week. I also fixed a few buildings that were bugging me. One of them was my car shop, which I didn't put together quite right apparently, so the roof wouldn't sit nicely. I was able to remove some parts that I don't think are necessarily "important" to get the roof to sit properly. Now the question is, do I want to glue the roof on or not? Part of me says yes, but part of me also says no, in case I decide to detail the interior. Lastly, I had a slight mishap when I was soldering rail feeders. I got too close to an insulated rail joiner (for a reverse loop) for too long and melted the darn thing. Unfortunately, it was a tricky piece of track to lay, that I wasn't 100% thrilled with to start. So yesterday I decided to tear up that section (about 12") including the roadbed and re-lay it. I glued the new roadbed down yesterday and it's dry now, so will probably attempt to install the new track this evening. Hopefully it goes better this time, and I can get the feeders soldered without incident.
