I hope you all had an enjoyable Holiday time with family. I got back from Illinois Wednesday morning around 3:00AM. No modeling, just family stuff. Now we are in the midst of the last modeling weekend of 2011. For me, I plan to spend Christmas Part II with family in New Hampshire, however, railroading will take a large portion of time. Between snow flakes, I plan to get measurements I need for the north end of town. I have Cilleyville road down on my layout, now I need measurements for the station and everything north of this road. I also have a number for the person who runs the town historical society in the depot. I hope to get in touch with them and learn more about the town. Pan Am has painted another "tribute or heritage unit" this time a Springfield Terminal Geep 9 in all Pine Green with the single Harvest Gold stripe. An unusual choice since I only remember seeing this scheme on switchers, but worth the hunt non the less. So how about you? What are your plans for the last modeling weekend of the year? Let us know what part of the layout your working on, locomotives your painting or what railfan adventure awaits you. This time, we'll all return on Tuesday, January 3rd to see what we achieved. ​High Greens!
Need to work some more on the Tunnel 25/26 area, getting rock coloring finished. After that is done, it'll be time to let it snow!
Not much modeling this weekend, unless the wife lets me get a couple of hours today or tomorrow in between chores. Modutrak is having it's annual winter/holiday round up this Sunday, so there will be lots of train running/eating/drinking/deep discussions. And perhaps a video and some photos taken.
My plan for the weekend is to get the lighting for my Gulf station operational, then clean everything up, especially the rails where I have been ballasting and doing scenery work, and then run some trains. Get those new SP F3s speed matched and consisted, maybe even create a video to highlight all the progress made in 2011.
I finished laying the crossover from the main to the run-around track in the yard. I have a 6" stock of rail that needs to go in. Still need to install switch points in three switches. I have a three day weekend, so I would like to glue down the foam board on the end section and lay out the curve. This curve will be tricky because I need to make a 180 degree curve and bring three tracks into one. I figure the main track radius should be about 23 degrees, runaround track about 21-1/2 and the yard lead about 19 degrees. Very do able curve, it will just be tricky bringing the three curves back to one point where the elevator will connect. Speaking of the elevator, I also need to visit the local hardware stores and check out their line of drawer tracks and other sliding surface tracks that will stay together if mounted against a wall vertically and snug locking systems.
Plywood boards on my floor in the basement. Going to do final trackplan check before grabbing some flex track and shaping my custom radius. That and haul the baby name book out to please my g/f's parents (We already had names picked out a long time ago) Kiara and Toby, if you wanted to know.
I finally started "digging" the old mill canal through Mooseport. Originally, the plan was to use cardstock mockups to position the buildings, but we had an unexpected spell of relatively warm, dry weather, and I used that to do the spray painting on the old mill building itself. So, I fell behind on the canal, but the structure is close to finished. Next, I've got to make a number of Hydrocal stone wall castings for the sides of the canal. It curves through town, so I'll need to form the castings as well to get them to follow the canal walls. This is the mill building as it now stands, with the canal marked in black Sharpie just before I started digging it out:
Oh! Thanks for reminding me JD, I need to order and install my last set of bulk figures in my GN Observation car too.
Getting ready to start a Canadian Pacific "Mother & Daughter" Road set. GP38-2 and GP35 Cab Control unit.
I plan to put up a display case for some of my N scale cars and then, maybe start the planning for modifying an HO Medusa Cement Plant into an Ash Grove cement complex in N scale that will provide cars for all the little N scale Medusa Cement structures that I have around the layout.
Continue track work on the home office layout. As of right now, almost all the track has been rough installed. I had a pesky problem of a track joint on a cruve peaking /\ instead of a nice flat joint -- Well I fixed that problem and proceed with the remainder of the layout. When moving a loco to test another section of track....much to my horror the paralell track now has a peaking joint problem in about the same area. So I will focusing on track work to rid the line of slow orders and resume the few sections not yet installed. Next step will be to start placing the building foundations into the perspective spots to assure everything fits and make adjustments if and where needed.
With the Anaheim GTE show next weekend I hope to rebuild a bridge on a module to represent more accurately what is there. I hope to also add the pavement and structure base for a couple areas too, fire station, chemical storage, pallet producer. If you look closely you can see that I used the correct supports, but was pressed for time (got lazy!) and used the BLMA bridge kit to finish off the roadbed and railings. In the end both sides will look similar to the last one. Then it will all get a bit of weathering to better reflect its age and use.
