Please excuse the tardiness of my Monday morning WMA thread. A combination of 20 hours in a car, time change to ESDT and vacation is to blame. I have pretty much summed up my weekend, however a chance to see the remnants of the B&M yesterday was enjoyable. More ideas for the layout will occur today as we visit the town of Potter Place, the town I am modeling, by bike. So how about you? What did you accomplish this past weekend? Be it track work or scenery, DCC to painting structures, let us know. We will do it all over again on Friday the 19th. Until then, have a safe and great week and... ​High Greens!
1. Got the passing siding installed to complete the track work on my Section 1 - L&A/KCS/BRS yard area. 2. Using some PC board switch ties kindly donated by a friend, I managed to repair a three way switch that will allow me to solve a track problem that exists between section 2 and 3 of the benchwork. 3. Managed to add a couple details to the n scale BQ23-7 I'm building from a Shapeways cab and Atlas body. I'll try to run out some photos tonight. 4. Ran trains Saturday on a friend's N scale modern era layout. He was doing his inaugural ops session run with JMRI generated switchlists. We had a lot of fun - when you have a switching layout, having friends with large layouts for open throttle running makes your lcocs very happy.
To pass the time on a hot afternoon, I put together an Atlas boxcar kit. All in all, they're pretty good kits, fun to assemble, and I appreciated the metal wheels. Gripes? The usual - "press fit the brake wheel in place" is just instructions for breaking it. I have never seen a brake wheel that will easily insert into the small hole provided in the car end. Same goes for the roofwalks and their tiny holes. And the sliding door doohickey? I figured out how it works but doubt its ability to hold the door in place. So I just glued the doors in the closed position. Last, I hate those two-part couplers - way too fiddly for my tastes. I just dropped some good old Kadee #5s in. But I had fun, and learned some things. What more can one ask for?
Added grabs and lights to my Athearn BB GP35. It still has that wide hood but that is just more room for weight.
I am in the process of converting a 2-rail, O gauge, engine to 3-rail. Over the weekend, I had to design and build two coupler pockets in order to bodymount the 3-rail couplers. I got the forms built. Now just waiting for the couplers to arrive. Then I can work on getting the correct coupler heighth so they match up with the cars. A slow and tedous process for sure, but when it is all said and done, it will be time well spent.
Added a couple more trees to my fall corner Laid some roads with WS Road Kit And decaled and weathered a few DPM kits Ta-Da! Cheers
Worked on the foam board scenery base over the weekend, got most of it down and 'glued' down with Great Stuff. Also started carving, I found recommendations to use various knives, but I had better results with a hacksaw blade just held in my hands (gloves on of course) and worked it around as needed.
I got my roadbed glued down and it's dried over night, so this morning before I head off to work, I'll replace the track and maybe get a train running. Finally!
Amen. That's why I keep a pin vise with a very small bit by my night table. You just never know when you'll have to defend yourself against a kit where pin A doesn't fit into hole B. It wasn't the least bit train related, but I went to a charity hockey game (my daughter was a volunteer) and got the autographs of Ray Bourque and he sons Chris and Ryan. After everything died down, the three of them were just 3 guys in shorts and T-shirts, walking out of a hockey rink with their sticks in one hand and their bags over their shoulders, no different from us pick-up hockey players. There's a real brotherhood in this sport. I did one new thing. I was running the trains over on the car float, trying to figure out how all of this would work operationally. And, I went to the kitchen, found a bamboo skewer, flattened the business end a bit and used it to uncouple cars. Easy as that. I'd never quite gotten the hang of it before, but I think it may change the way I do switching from now on. Just a guy in shorts and a T-shirt, with a stick in one hand....
This weekend I finished up putting foamboard behind "kneewalls" in the attic. Dang tedious job crawling back there and nailing that nasty stuff down. But I'm ready to have the insulation put in, which immediately leads to putting up sheetrock and putting the heat pump up there. My goal is to have a "golden spike" party in 8 months. That's a tough road 'a hoe, but bear w/ me.
