Welcome back to the gateway to the weekend everyone. Looks like the theme this past weekend was accomplishments. Track planning that looks outstanding, a tobacco barn that looks real, sound installs that sound perfect and other projects heading to completion. Thank you for the well wishes, it turns out that I did not get food poisoning. My poor wife who took care of me suddenly came down with the same exact thing on Wednesday, so we picked up a major stomach virus somewhere. I'm about 90% now but still don't have an appetite and she is recovering nicely. Now onto our weekend plans. Saturday: Winter has hardly loosened its grip on east central Illinois. I'm afraid the Mustang and motorcycle will be in hibernation until May now. While not really winter, I don't like a high of 53 with northwest winds all weekend in my springtime rotation. That said, with everything that has been going on the past two weeks, the wife and I have agreed to take it easy and stay home and not eat out. Yard work will be the main goal of the day. In the evening, I plan to get the NTrak module out and start working on that in anticipation for Galesburg RR Days. Sunday: If we are lucky, we'll have a high of 57 degrees and sun. More yard work will continue, including cleaning out and rebuilding our back yard fire pit. Any off time will be spent working on the NTrak module which includes building the main industry and some houses that will line the street. So how about you? What do you have planned for this weekend? Let us know. We'll assemble again on Monday, the 22nd to see how we all did. Until then, have a great weekend, stay healthy, be safe and as always... High Greens!
Greetings from a cloudy Northern Virginia. If all goes well Priority: 'The Great Divide' mountain Friday: Cut pieces to "finish" 'The Great Divide'. Saturday: Assemble and Paint primer on TGD' Sunday: Get a 'color' coat on TGD
I am attending a train show in New Braunfels, Texas this weekend. I have my "Stafford, Texas" NTRAK module to set up with the AustNTRAK group.
Happy Friday to Y'all Not sure how much MRRing I will get to this "weekend" - Today: Get new tires on my truck - then possibly get it aligned (The tire store doesn't do alignments - go figure) Then - continue getting ready for tomorrow Saturday: Gonna be playing cowboy. Yep, we are dressing up as cowboys and hanging out in Santa Clarita Sunday: Recuperating from Saturday Y'all have a great weekend, Wolf
@Jim Wiggin - Hope you and your wife continue to recover. Not much modeling action planned for me this weekend. If I have some free time while the wife is grading papers I may hop into Rail Modeler Pro and play around with the track plan some more, but aside from that I'll be largely focusing on yard work and maybe some home improvement projects this weekend. Hope y'all have a great one.
Good morning everyone, @r-i-straw - I listen to an on line radio station from New Braunfels and they have been advertising that train show. Have a great time. Yesterday I finished the base coat on another Design Preservation Building which will be the hotel that will hide the speaker for the Carlin yard switcher's sound. So I'll be working on hand painting the details on the building. It's been windy here in the afternoon and all kinds of pollens blowing around will mostly keep me indoors but in the mornings I may get out and do some more yard work. Everyone have a great weekend whatever you are doing.
Good morning from cloudy, cool and rainy Northeast Ohio! Just got home from taking my wife to Physical Therapy for her knee and a followup appointment with the doctor. Today I need to get stuff ready for the club meeting tomorrow. Then work on some models including construction and masking on three cars I recently painted where I need to paint a second color. Saturday, will be the monthly club meeting and I hope to run my GP35 which was derailing last week as the track has been replaced and relaid. After I get home I will continue work on the masking, painting and construction. Sunday, don't know how much I will get done as I have a youth bowling tournament to administer for the association, then when I get home need to do the laundry and other housekeeping. When Hubert Mask died I was unable to get one of his Southern Brick car kits, but luckily a fellow MFCL group member offered a couple for sale, so I picked one up. Here are the kit contents, I have so far cleaned up the side castings and drilled out the holes for applying the grabs and ladders. Rick Jesionowski
Happy Friday all. This weekend I have several side things to take care of. We're going to a formal wedding in June so I tried my tux pants on and they are.... well, "too tight". Need to take them to a tailor. Those guys can take weeks in the spring so that has to get on their to-do list NOW. We're also going overseas for a short vacation in May. Have to spend some time getting a few things in order for that. On the modeling front, the big idea(s) this weekend are: Upgrading my ESU programming software to LokSound5. I haven't used this in a while and I just had someone pull out the Paragon unit and put a Loksound5 in my BLI Mikado. So I have some things to I want to do w/ the whistle capabilities, etc. Work on the first F7 A-B-A lash-up I have almost ready and get that in service. The decoders were dropped in a couple of weeks ago and I have been "piddling" w/ the hand rails and other details. Need to get that off the list. Clean up the dang train room. It is a disaster up there. Have a great weekend all!
Back yard fire pit sounds like the "in" place to be. Time to "Divide and conquer". That Ntrak module is going to be a hit. Tire store needs to be "reconfigured". Rail Modeler Pro sounds fun. Pollen seems to be a necessary nuisance. Southern car looks unusual. Calling NTSB to Train Room. This past week saw the Union City, Tennessee passenger depot completed. A few highlights of the accompanying pics. This depot is adjacent to a sixty-degree crossing. To the left of the bay window is the GM&O side. And to the right is the NC&StL side. Terra cotta wainscoting is on all sides. Somewhat harder to see are the curved porch roof supports. Above is the Spanish tile porch roof. This roof wraps all sides. Almost all windows have the new “puddled pane” glazing. To the right is a size reference nickel. Just behind that the right corner of the building appears to be “flying”. On the extreme right is the old bay window assembly which was replaced. However, the new bay window assembly was discovered to be out of plumb. We’re gonna’ have to keep ‘er though. Next up will either be the William Hull house or module work or both. Have a wonderful weekend. And one more pic.
Not much going on in modeling until tomorrow - maybe. I started watching the DCC Program vol.1 from Model Railroader. But will have to wait for more time to take notes later. It sounds rather interesting. Like learning how to be an army Sergeant, Machinist, CNC machinist and the Quality Assurance Tech. and the Digital CMM measuring machines. Lots of fun. But didn't last.
Today was my last day of the stay-cation I took this week. I had some leave I needed to use so I took it to not be at work, hang out with my kids after school, and do some random home improvement stuff. And a lot of loafing. I thought I would do more with my track plan, but I just organized my workbench a bit, looked at the track plan, and did more loafing. I think I needed this time off more than I realized. Saturday I turn 40, so we’re going to my youngest daughter’s soccer game and then to to Audi Field for a women’s soccer game (Washington Spirit vs NJ/NY Gotham)-we have season tickets and my daughters really enjoy it so it’ll be a fun and full Saturday. Sunday I might sleep in and tackle some train stuff-ideally I’ll finish cleaning the workbench and I’ll tweak the track plan a little more before finally committing to laying track. I go back to work on Monday…sigh. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I am determined to get the layout building mojo pumping again. I have the Cobalt turnout motors, but need to build at least five #8 for staging(upper deck on right in photo). Then I can lay track and connect to the existing section around the curve and along that side wall. Nice and long. The first 8' is removable so I can do all the trackwork and wiring on the workbench.
This weekend is being dictated by what happened on Thursday with the surgery which is it did not happen. For some yet to be determined reason my blood pressure spiked and would not come down. After speaking with the cardiologist, I have to monitor my blood pressure over the weekend and report the readings and we will discuss them on Monday. Thus far the readings are still high but not as high as Thursday morning. Originally, I planned to take off from work starting yesterday until the following Wednesday. Since there was no surgery, I trimmed the leave time back to yesterday and today. I needed to take today off to get the car inspected. Since I was planning on recovery from surgery this weekend nothing was planned as far as chores, projects, and running errands. I guess we will just play it by ear. I was planning to work on tunning up some rolling stock and building some kits. I will probably stick to some of that and add running trains.
Hey All, If things go to plan, headed to the train show in New Braunfels, TX this weekend. Weather looks bad, so we will see. Other than "wallet based" modeling, I plan to work on the decaling for this shoving platform / caboose for the Wichita & Northwestern project. Progress Bar at 25%..... Hope you have a good one! -Bob T.
Wednesday - ripped out a niche in the bathtub wall that was not fitting right, filled the hole with leftover wall board. Thursday - sealed the new wall section Friday - put the first row of tiles up Saturday - Record Store Day and going to attempt to fish tiling. Sunday - work and recovery
Got a chance to work on the Mikado boiler during the week. Perhaps making up for last weekend's lack of modeling time. This weekend will have bit bigger focus. Moving from 1:160 to 1:1 railroading. Saturday morning, we are planning to walk to the depot and ride Amtrak Cascades to Seattle. There we will walk around for the afternoon before dinner and the Sounders game that evening. After staying overnight, we will catch the Reign game on Sunday. Then back to King Street Station for a ride back to Bellingham on Amtrak. I am very curious to see what type of cars we will be riding in. A couple years ago Amtrak pulled the aging Talgo cars from the Cascades. Word was the cars were being replaced and scrapped. Older Amtrack cars took their place. A few weeks ago, I spotted the Talgo cars back in service. So not much modeling, but some railroading will happen. Stay safe,
I'll likely sit down with my two latest RS-3 locos that are painted, but still not lettered or detailed. They're sitting on the table making doe eyes at me as if saying "when are you going to finish us?". Maybe it's the coffee that's too strong. New car sets are expected (we all know what that means ) to enter service in 2026, along with a gaggle of Siemens Chargers, after funding approval. The whole transition period is a mess. They have a couple of Talgo 8 sets supplemented by elderly Amfleet and Horizon sets. Count on government bureaucracy to scrap the existing cars way before even getting the new ones...
@Tompm --- Sending all-green vibes your way for smooth running. Best of luck sir in getting the medical aspects under control.
Not too much planned for this weekend.. Zero guarantees that any of these will be completed... 1) Test the Nexxt Throttle charging circuit, so far two items have been identified for the next revision (resistor value adjustments mainly). 2) Wrap up test builds and notes for a kit build clinic for the NMRA PCR convention next weekend. 3) Trace through Nexxt Gateway code to track down a bug in the LCC stack. 4) Hook up the Nexxt CS to the logic analyzer to confirm a bug fix in the generated DCC signal. 5) Finish prep of the garden for the season, we planted bush beans last weekend and hopefully this weekend we will get the drying beans planted and pick out the tomatoes and squash we want to grow.
