Another weekend is in the books, hope you all had a good one. I actually got more done on Friday than anything. A purchase of an older Atlas GP9 at Galesburg a few years back was worked on. I paid about $16.00 for a SP GP9 and a fellow club member who recently retired installed a Digitrax DZ123 in it as well as a light set. First run had the locomotive running rough and derailing. I re-guaged the wheel sets, cleaned and polished the contact strips, set the speed at 128 and bam, it ran great. I swapped the SP shell for one of my custom B&M shells and soon it was working the layout. Saturday I went to the RC swap meet and was rewarded with getting rid of a lot of projects I no longer had time for as well as extra money for what is coming around the corner in a few weeks. Sunday was a bad day here in Illinois. We were hit by tornados and some towns such as Washington, Gifford and Pekin were devastated beyond recognition. Thankfully, the little Town of DeLand was spared and only received rain, hail and wind. Reports are still coming in as far as the intensity of the devastation and since these towns are nearby, myself and the family will be offering aid in any way we can. Sorry to put that in here this weekend, but please remember we have a lot of TB members that live in Illinois and Indiana where these twisters came through. I pray the rest of my fellow Trainboard members from the area are okay. Now, how about some good news? What did you get done this weekend? Let us know! We'll come back on Friday the 22nd and do it all over again. Until then, stay safe and... ​High Greens!
My repaint job on the Spectrum H16-44 is going along nicely. Though I didn't spend all that much time on it, I mostly was doing repeated applications of Micro Sol on the decals so they conformed to the chunky FM number boards and headlights on the ends of the hood.
I had a productive weekend, too. A bunch of Tichy truck frames I'd ordered came in, so I started by picking them up at my LHS, masking the bearings with blue tape and painting and weathering them. By the next morning I'd put the last of my old Tyco clamshell hoppers back in service with new metal wheels, along with an old B&M boxcar and a tanker. I even updated the spreadsheet listing my rolling stock. As promised, I installed lights in the tannery buildings and set them up to see how the illumination looked, to get an idea of how much effort I should put into interior details. That done, I took them off the layout and masked and painted the foundations, which I'm doing with a speckled Rustoleum spray. The next step is to finish up the roofs. And then, there's masochism. I started working on the underframe and brake components of one of the Tichy boxcars that will be used for "Hide Service" between the slaughterhouse and the tannery. So many small parts, and the added confusion of trying to do two different boxcars at once, one of which has a couple of extra sprues thrown in for good measure. I think I'll put the other one away until I get one finished so that "mix and match" ends up with all match and no mix. Best wishes to anyone affected by those tornados.
I (and a few friends) managed to finish laying the track on our school's Model RR Club layout. However, we did use some compromises that some of you more seasoned modelers would not use. We have a simple four corner modular layout with two oblong-ish circles at differing elevations (which ended up causing more issues than we had wanted). (The reason the track in the bridge photo isn't quite laid is due to us realigning it so it lined up better with the bridge)
Got all the bus wires run so I changed my attention to the track. Glued down some cork road bed for the HOn30 section and started to glue down some cork base for structures. Got a great deal on some 2' x 4' rolls at michaels. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk - now Free
