Rainier Great Western Const Update

Trains were cool, merchandise tent, which is 110 yards long shook with every passing freight

 

First post in new platform, congrats Trainboard on successfully migrating to this new platform. I'm sure it'll have been worth the wait!

 

It's seems like an minor eternity since we last updated the RGW progress, so I'll get what I can in.

Since our last update, we made great progress on the lumber mill, worked the US Open, took a wonderful tour of the Tesoro Anacortes CROF, made great strides on the wigwam burner, watched my kid win best junior and two first places at local ipms show, attended my brother-in-law's change of command at JBLM and held a scenery clinic using the RGW as the canvas. Other than that, not much happening.

Touching on all of these items could take several posts, but over the next couple of days, I'll get in what I can.

Our man Bob has been working on the ingress/egress of our truck access. The cork serves to raise the roadbed to better accommodate the bridges that span the mainline at each end.



Once we anchor the road, we intend to add a rail tie support wall behind the road.



Meanwhile, Ed has been running the lower level LED light strings and got the 2nd transformer in place.



That's it for this post, much more to follow. M

 

LED wholesalers had them on sale at $20 each last time I purchased them.

 

Here is where we are on the wigwam burner.

We gave it a coat of primer:



Then took it to the paint booth:



Mike built the mound that will be it's home:



Here it is in it's home, still needs a ton of weathering and rust spots, but you get the idea. The scene will have heavy overgrowth, tall grasses and weeds.



I intend to add a blower and a rusted pipe to the outside of the burner as well. Kind of like this:



Here is the view from the back of the mill:



More later. M

 

Thanks Ken, we googled a bunch of burner pics, they almost all had same characteristic; heavy rust coloration to about 3/4 up the burner, where it turned black. So that's the look we chose.

 

This website has some cool shots, my compliments to the gentleman who put this together.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewe...01,3.515625&z=8&mid=zuuIe7bG0AsM.k4GAQEKUvQGg

 

Wanted to put in a quick "brag". My son won best junior, best armored and best airplane at local ipms show this past weekend. Dad is proud.







Best part was seeing him be invited to play Tactica II by three pretty serious players, only to see him be consulted for advice by his teammates after he made some very shrewd moves. He'd never played the game before that day.



The kid has no limits.

 

I hope so, he and I and grandpa were up to midnight last night running the RGW.

 

This past Wednesday I hosted a scenery clinic at the RGW. We hosted 14 good friends and fellow modelers and our clinician was Mike O'Brien from XTrains. I met Mike at the Monroe, WA swap meet earlier this year and fell in love with his Moose Creek tree line. He is the lead modeler for the Moose Creek Logging modular, a 4x72' beauty of a layout.

I ended up purchasing over 200 of his trees and asked him to do us the great favor of doing a scenery clinic at the RGW. He agreed and the event was fantastic. Here is Mike and yours truly just prior to getting things going.



Here is Mike explaining his use of natural materials, like ground up maple leaves, real dirt, twigs and such to create realism. His canvas is right behind him:





Here Mike is showing the guys his trees up close:



His work is spectacular, this was about 35 minutes of work:



I highly recommend you consider his products:





After we concluded the clinic we headed to the back porch where a burger bbq awaited. A fun time for all, for sure.

Thanks, M

 

Here is a quick snipit of our July 1 scenery clinic. More to follow down the road. M

 

A night of discussion and revision last night at the RGW. After operating the last few nights, it became clear we had put some scenery too close to the rail. Locos and rolling stock were catching in a few spots. So most of the night we began scaling back encroaching scenery.

We also determined one of our passing sidings included too tight a curve, so we mapped out next week's plan to ease the curve.

Rey spent most of his night tweaking some existing cars that seemed to have reliability issues. We determined a couple had trucks that were not square, and in combo with the wheelsets forced the car to derail.

Bob was able to get the lumber mill road glued in place using liquid nails. He used extended length wood shims between the two cork layers at the west end to give the road the proper slope. You can see the shim under the spackle tub on the right side of this shot.



Not much visible progress, but a plan to attack the deficiencies is in place that will get us back up and running next week.