We are in full swing of the Holiday season so I wonder how many of us will get to work on our hobby. Y'all might surprise me! I wish I could find my cord for my camera, I'm breaking my own rule or suggestion of adding photos. Well I finished a structure last night for a project, hopefully some of you will see soon. I also finished my friends CB&Q locomotive, flat cars with I beam and caboose just in time for his show next weekend. So now the only thing left to do is to finish up the Christmas stuff. The new 2011 Christmas car came in last weekend and hopefully the new MTH Railking SW9 switcher to pull the train will be here today. What road you ask? Well B&M of coarse! I've wanted this switcher since last year and finally had the money so an early Christmas present to myself. Don't tell Angela! With Christmas stuff done I really, really hope I can work on the layout and post progress pics. I'm afraid y'all are thinking it's an imaginary layout. So how about you? Any shows this weekend? Still no excuse to not go railfaning. Layout work, stuctures, locomotives? What do you hope to get done this weekend? Leave your responses below, hopefully with pictures (unlike your author) and we'll get together Monday the 12th to see what we all did.
My club is going to set up and run a couple of layouts at a Nursing home / Assisted living complex in Goshen NY on Sunday, so tomorrow i will be checking my equipments couplers and wheelsets and packing my modules in my truck.
Winter still hasn't arrived in New England, so the skiing isn't worth the long trip up. So, we'll stay home and probably do some Christmas decorating. Hopefully, I'll get some time to work on the Mooseport buildings. I've got almost all the DPM sections trimmed and glued together into walls. The next step is painting and mortaring before putting in the windows and gluing the structures together. I bought myself an early present, too. I've got a big open area that I still hadn't decided what to do with. At the suggestion of one of the guys on another forum, I went with the Walthers "Empire Leather Tanning Company" set, a group of brick buildings that will fit in perfectly. They're sold out at Walthers, but I found one at Trainworld for a much better price. The wonders of the way UPS routes packages got it delivered in 1 day for the basic "lowest cost" shipping rate.
It's COLD outside. But not so cold that I'm going to miss the train show in town this weekend. So if you're in the DC metro area, come on out and check out some HO and N-scale modular railroads. FREE admission. Otherwise, I've started working on another photo diorama as part of a challenge on another board. Basically, the challenge is to build a diorama in any scale in 1 square foot (144 square inches), and it must include track. Doesn't have to be square, or even rectangular, as long as it's not bigger than 144 square inches. Mine is 24" x 6" and will feature a single track main with a parallel siding in front of a station. I'm including a road crossing and will be building it in such a way to connect to a tripod for outside photography. Anyway, hope you have a good train-related weekend!
More work on the pedestrian walkway on my auto bridges. Ops session at the club. Pesky Christmas parties are starting to get in the way!
The Great Midwest Train Show @ Wheaton, IL via the Du Page County Fairgrounds on Sunday. Wether or not I attend involves an ebay auction. I'm looking at an irish inspired boxcar patched for BN and that car will eat my train show budget. So we'll see as the auction is set to expire today in 7 hours. On the other side of things, a new project will start as soon as the mail truck shows up. I looked at so many prototypes of Chessie GP40s, looking for the one to use my standard snowplow on. I found a B&O unit that had it. But in the end I ended up buying the classic Chessie System Rock Plow. Going to mount it and paint it on my Athearn Blue Box Chessie GP40 dummy. Eventually the goal will be to power, dcc and sound install it. Going to use it as Pool Power for my BN Units. This is also going to be a great starting point to practice with MU and air hoses as I won't have to fish them through a normal snowplow.
Rough / test install of most of track plan and proof on concept yard for the Office Layout was completed and operational (finally ran some of my collection). This weekend I plan to tackle installing yard backrop supports, rough re-install foam base and if all goes well, glue in foam base. After that, rough install entire track plan. My fall semester ended Wednesday so I can now get some work done on the layout.
Slight change in plans. Murphy bid on my boxcar with 40 seconds left. I was....occupied....at that time. Looks like I'll be out at the Great Midwestern Train Show this sunday after all.
