This weekend saw my son’s football team the Drexel Hill Raiders Pee Wee Varsity lock-up a home playoff game with a 27-0 win over the Folcroft Falcons. I spent a great deal of the weekend doing a bunch of honey-dos and cleaning around the house. No modeling got done as a result of all the odds and ends we did this weekend.
No modeling done per say, spent Saturday afternoon with TB member THarms and caught a brand new Ferromex ES44, pics in International Forum. Sunday was the Bloomington IL train show, it was JTW's first show since Galesburg in June. Show attendance was slow unfortunately due to a local newspaper snafu. We sold some shirts and enough to make the trip worthwhile, even won a free steak dinner! Time to get my T-Trak modules ready for Trainfest now. A good weekend.
I finished up a project I have been working on for the Rosenberg Railroad Museum. It is a traveling display in a box for use in libraries and schools. I built a simple but rugged diorama to go in the box depicting a hobo jungle. The lid is the backdrop, the tray that holds the diorama flips over so the scene can be set at the same level as the top of the box. The box also contains litterature, photos and some "artifacts" that the museum director found poking around at an old hobo camp from the depression era.
Prepared a web page for my Special Run Cars http://www.windingstream.com/special_runs/src.htm With 14 pre-orders things are looking good. Started to redo the design in Microsoft PhotoDraw to improve the qualty of the decals.
Well i wasnt expecting my dad to have the money to go buy a few peices of track but he did we extended the yard tracks on my HO set thats about it
I removed the hill of Stonefield, because I needed the track inside the hill as a true runaround track. Thanks to my son Tim (7), who showed me this weekend that the track arrangement at Stonefield was no good for switching. Before: After: Well, OK, I lost some nice scenery, but got new opportunities for expanding the city area and building a freight house.
Nothing. I just wasn't in the mood. I had a writing assignment due today, and spent a lot of the weekend refining it. It was a really fun assignment from someone new, so I'm hoping to land more.
I did some serious cleaning and I unpacked a bunch of stuff my dad shipped out. The number of missing couplers and minor damage on things wrapped in acres of bubble wrap was a bit disappointing. I also settled in on the foundation of a trackplan.
I was in Rochester NY since last Thursday, so no modeling was done on the JJJ&E. I did see two of my grand daughters Julie and Emily, the first "J" and "E" in the JJJ&E. That was priceless. Stay cool and run steam....
I spent most of the weekend working some serious overtime but got paid for it. That's a plus. I'll think about what to spend it all on later. I did some reading in John Armstrong's Track Planning for Realistic Operation and I worked on my track plan in TurboCAD. I decided to give that a try since I had used it previously many years ago. I'm not sure if I want to spend the time relearning it though. Some things are pretty easy to reproduce and others just aren't. RTS gave me a pretty good basic result but won't do everything I want it to do. I haven't tried XtrkCAD yet. I also purchased 2 books on the FEC from Amazon & oh yeah, I did it all while watching football!
In-laws and outlaws visited for the weekend...ran some trains for the preschoolers and grade schoolers for about an hour on Saturday, had a big bonfire and made Smores Saturday evening. Sunday, after everyone left, I made some more fascia board cards specifying traffic at various industries as part of my new "paper-lite" car forwarding system (which will be taking its first test run at my monthly operating session this coming Friday).
I got the backdrop painted on saturday Checkout the pix http://www.trainboard.com/railimages/showgallery.php/cat/500/ppuser/5506 Also I'm keeping a running progress report on another site. I'm keeping it on the one site because there's only so much time in the day. http://www.modelrailroadforums.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4961 I'll keep this one up to date as much as possible. next step valance lighting, then the bench work begins. Ron
Fiddling around with my switches. Ran a couple trains. Low grade model railroading, but progress continues.
Completed a grain terminal so I could see how it would exactly fit so I can run spurs to that site on the N granger layout I'm building. Next up: soldering track and wiring (I know little but expect to learn soon).