MODELING It's Monday, September 25th, 2023: Weekend Modeling Accomplishments

Good morning all! This weekend wound up spending a lot of time in the workshop as opposed to the layout. The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that good stuff. In any event, I did get some things done that I had been putting off:

• Spent a lot of time working on putting together the BTS cabin kit that I parts-painted last weekend. Got the walls and windows in as well as trim. Got the trim weathered. It is about 70% done. Still need to put shingles, gutter, and trim on the roof, get all the corbels installed. Put on the doors and build the walkway.
• Got out several kits I am going to combine for the LCL building and started laying parts out to figure out how the "Kitbash" will go together. That is going to be a big project.
• Cleaned out the big cabinet underneath my spray booth. It was a rats nest mess. Cleaned out old boxes and parts. Got rid of about 1/3 of of the old stuff that was under there and now it is useable again.

Everyone have a great week!

 

Good morning from partly cloudy and mild Northeast Ohio!

Managed to paint another G39 Ore Jennie and get it mostly decaled over the weekend, also finished painting parts of the ART Reefer and it is completely decaled. Got all the parts of the substation attached to its base and I hope to get the stone spread around and glued in place to complete the structure for the club layout.

Speaking of the club layout, we had our normal meeting and followed that with an op session, used my new Rapido RS-11's for the switching job I had and they worked perfectly.

I also started on building another Moloco kit, a GATC RBL that will be modified to closely resemble the cars the DT&I had.

Rick Jesionowski

 

Opened my carton of Woodland Scenics "Mold-A-Scene" Plaster bought months ago at my LHS. I had some buyer's remorse afterward, thinking that I should have instead bought patching plaster at Home Depot for less money.

Instead, I found that the Woodland Scenics product is excellent. It dries a light tan color, is textured, is easy to work, forms nicely and is lightweight. I was rather nervous untertaking this step (I'm not skilled with scenery), but am really pleased with the result so far.

 

Good morning all,

Weekend went about as planned. Much of Saturday was spent on some winter prep projects. Cleaning the furnace and ducts, and changing the filters in the furnace and then the batteries in the smoke detectors. When I did get out to the train room I attempted to work with the Digitrax Duplex receiver but got rather frustrated with it. Thought I had it working but then realized that some of the Duplex throttles have the IR and that was what was working. Reading up on the subject found out that the receiver may need a software update to work with some of the older Duplex throttles.

Put all that aside and worked on the Ntrak club staging yard and that went much better. At one end secured some loose track that had been broken from the ties and replaced one turnout. Still lots of work to do on this staging yard but this is a good start.




On Sunday the visit with our nephew, his son, and my wife's dad went very well. Wife and I are off to get our annual flu shots this morning.

 

Chinese! I love Chinese! That is one crisp cabin. ART reefer coming out! I love it when a product is excellent. I hate it when it needs an update. I was outdoors a good bit Saturday and Sunday which interfered with me "doing stuff". Also, extra chores reared their ugly heads. However, I think I can begin cutting car sides later today. I hope all "has" a great week.

 

Things definitely did not go as planned over the weekend. I did get to spend a couple of hours in the train room. Set a pair of trains loose on the layout and spent the majority of the time drinking coffee, sorting papers, and going through magazines to see what to keep and what not to. Going to be a long next few days here.

Hope you all have a great week!

 

With my wife sick I didn’t get much time off-ended up doing all the errands and chores we typically split between us. With TS Ophelia, we didn’t have any sports or outdoor activities so at least I didn’t have to try and do all that too. After all that and hanging new blinds in living room I did a little bit of train stuff. I sold some excess stuff on that auction site and posted some more. I bought some plastic cement and some acrylic paint. And I played with my track plan a bit trying to incorporate different things. So not as restful as I’d hoped but better than a day at work!


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Still 100+ here in South Texas, so spent some time inside...lots of painting trucks and wheelsets, and other small projects. I did manage some progress on this Pullman Standard 2893 covered hopper for the W&NW. With my office put back together after three weeks of new floors, new paint and other trim and electrical works, I printed a fresh set of decals, along with some black patch-outs for other projects. These cars started as CNW cars, but easy to remove the herald and original numbers from Athearn cars like this one in the Genesis line.



I hope you all had a good one!

-Bob T.

 

I spent a good part of the week working security at the Put-In-Bay Road Race Reunion, classic car races held annually on the airport runway and taxiways of Put-in-Bay on South Bass Island on Lake Erie. Once home, I had to catch up on chores as well as do my regular homework reading. So, Friday and most of Saturday were dedicated to homework, laundry, etc.

I had hoped to finish my homework early on Saturday and do some other things, possibly even model railroad things, but something else happened instead. I finished my homework around 3:00 (instead of after dinner, as normal) but while I was doing laundry, my wife asked me to "dump her laundry basket in the machine" and wash her one load. I asked if anything needed to be separated and she repeated that I could just dump everything in.

So, I did.

Not quite an hour later, I discovered that this was a *very* bad thing. When I next opened the washing machine it was FULL of shredded paper and, upon closer examination, a book cover or two, and a couple spiral wires from spiral bindings. Paper go all over the floor when I transferred the wash to the dryer and I picked out all the big chunks, the remains of the covers, and the bindings, and showed them to my wife. Luckily, she wasn't mad because she admitted that I had only done what she had asked.

BUT...

I spent the next TWO HOURS opening the dryer door every 5-10 minutes, emptying the lint trap, wiping the wet paper bits off the door, and vacuuming the lint trap, the floor, and any other loose paper fluff that presented itself. There was a LOT of paper fluff. I nearly filled a trash can with it. And, even after that, some of the clothes in that load still had so much paper in them that I ran them on another fluff cycle in the dryer and STILL had to run them through the next load of clothes in the washing machine. It was a mess but I got through it.

Unfortunately, that ate all of the time I had hoped to use to do other things.

Sunday was, of course, church, then off to train club after a short break to calm down the headache that had been growing all morning. At the club, two of us continued to lay track on the new port facility. My mission was to bridge the new track connection to the existing 50 year old, hand-laid, track section at the power plant. I got the new flex track cut to length easily enough, but the switch at the entrance of the power plant has been abused long enough that it's no longer spiked down. So, I trimmed back the sub-roadbed so that the rail heights matched, shaved down a new wooden tie to match the rail height of hand-laid switch, and attempted to teach myself how to spike down hand laid track. It's not done, but I got far enough along that I have hope of eventual success.