It was a busy weekend. We did the grocery shopping ordeal. Yesterday we had to get new tires for my wife’s car. I also did some yard work. I set-up a photo run-by but I never got the pictures taken. Somehow I ran out of time. I still did not get to the LHS so my stock car kit assembly is still on hold.
I am leaving for my yearly vacation today, but on the weekend, I did my first complete teardown of my AZL SD70. I took out one set of bearings, and it runs much better now.
Well, we are organizing stuff for our trip to the UK...we leave next Saturday. I have slowly been working rolling stock off the layout and into storage for the time we are gone. This is done by switching operations to the yard then removal...quite fun! I also solved the problem of my 4-4-0 derailing by reconfiguring the track on our "temporary" layout...
I actually built something this week. I replaced a bunch of large flange wheelsets with small flange wheelsets to use the cars on my home layout, then assembled a series of coil steel cars. I also installed a couple DCC decoders, including in my RSC-2, another model that I finally assembled this weekend.
I built about a half dozen 2 bay, 50 ton hoppers (Bowser kits), Painted and assembled a Proto-1000 RS-2 undecorated with installed Soundtraxx decoder (I'll decal and weather it over the coming long weekend), and ran trains!
Tried out my "$40 spin caster." The first few shots were incomplete. This shot, I injected the resin into the mold and then spun it for a few minutes. The mold is old and a little loose.
Picked up an Ho Walthers Amtrak sleeper, roads, and a pack of tall grass at the Strasburg Train shop located next to the Choo Choo Barn. Spent some time at the Museum and what not. I gotta put the roads in place this week and run some trains!
Track Realignment After derailments of autoracks on a descending grade, the one in a upper back corner, I knew Friday night it was time to fix the problem. What had to happen was a major realignment to eliminate an S-curve. Not a fun project, but necessary if I was going to operate downgrade pulling autoracks and stacks. After looking at the problem and visualizing the new route, Sunday I pulled up the offending trackage, and began the task. I first stripped everything, cut away some cliff face, planed down a couple of humps on the raodbed, test fit the proposed realignment and then replaced the roadbed, laid the new track, spiked it down and after everything was dry and set, ran trains over the new track under slow orders. Beautiful. Lots of work and stretching and bending but mission accomplished. Next all the removed lower scenery was replaced, telephone poles and trees replanted, vacuumed again and ready for the removal of slow orders. Everything worked great, like it should have on the first install. Worth the backache.
Went to an Ntrak show with my club. My first one as a member. I sorta learned the control panel for the yard. I got to run a throttle for a few hours. I got to run all my trains. One is a Metrolink, which really excited the kids, because that may be the only train they see on a regular basis in real life. One was a DMU from England, a short two-car set that is slightly off-scale. It smoothed out a lot after all the running. The third was a Virgin Voyager, also bought in England. The other club members showed me how to adjust the couplers on the Metrolink so I wouldn't pick points. The Voyager had a sticking axle, which one guy figured out when it kept derailing in the same spot. It was also determined that I need to add some weight to the Voyager end cars, it doesn't like running backwards very well. I'll probably weight the cars on the Metrolink too, since they run as pushers half the time in real life. And I also got to see what's involved in teardown and how things get shoehorned back into the club trailer.
I know it's not Monday but here goes anyway. Here's something I picked up in Alexandria today. An Athearn KCS covered hopper in the Southern Belle scheme. It has shelf couplers as per the prototype.
