Weekend Update - 11-29-2009

[BCRail_FSJ]

...continued painting the backdrop for the Peace River scene and began kitbashing two Central Valley Pratt Truss Kits (http://www.cvmw.com/1900/1810.htm)
to form one box girder truss for the final bridge.  I have another eight kits on order as it takes two kits per span and I need five spans.   Crossing this river is going to keep me busy for a while

[Dave V]

Dave-

I have to say, I'm a little disappointed that you of all people didn't comment on Abel's Bakery, Charlie.  ;D

Sorry!  For me it's "Alpha-Bravo-Charlie."  I'm a young man.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Ugh... did a bunch of building placement changes on my urban onetrak module, reorienting it since it usually ends up showing "backwards", with the big building (and it's big black butt) facing the crowds.

I shot a bunch of "study" photos for it, and now (thanks to my recent move), I can't find my camera cable to download the pics.

[asciibaron]

worked on the benchwork for the L&HR v2.0 - it's coming along.  just need to get to the store for the plywood.

[eric220]

Sorry!  For me it's "Alpha-Bravo-Charlie."  I'm a young man.

That's OK, for me it's "Adam-Boy-Charles".  Periodically rearranging the phonetic alphabet seems to be a hobby of some sort.

[wm3798]

Not too much railroadin' this weekend.  Busied myself painting some kitchen cabinets.  I did get a visit from my friend Ken and his son Alex (you may have met them at the summer Rail B Q).  Alex jumped out of the car, grabbed my hand, and said "Let's operate some trains."







And for those of you fretting about the complexity of DCC, Alex, 5, was running his train in about 2 minutes, including delicately backing some cars up the coal branch and switching the mine.

Lee

[Erik W]

I'm still hanging out with my family in Edgewater, MD so no modeling this week.  We're trying to figure out what to do today.  It's raining again.

Erik

[wm3798]

Jeezey Chreezy, Erik!  You're about 20 minutes from John's house, 15 from Seusscaboose, a half hour from Rock GP40's, and an hour from mine!  What are you doing this evening?  Perhaps an impromptu ops session is in order!

Lee

[sizemore]

Changed the oil in the GPW, waiting on parts. Caught up on sleep. Watched the Ravens win against the Steelers farm team. Modeling to commence again this week.

The S.

[Philip H]

Jeezey Chreezy, Erik!  You're about 20 minutes from John's house, 15 from Seusscaboose, a half hour from Rock GP40's, and an hour from mine!  What are you doing this evening?  Perhaps an impromptu ops session is in order!

Lee

yeah - what are you thinking man?! : : :

[chuck geiger]

Lee - Great stuff, my son is 21 now and when he was 5, could build Athearn Blue Boxes with Kadee #5
couplers. Now coming up on the bench, my Grandson who is 3 in Feb is into Thomas and can build some
cool track plans. We are going to build my new layout together. Going to start with letting him help build
a 2x4 N layout with a simple loop and siding.

[tom mann]

Jeezey Chreezy, Erik!  You're about 20 minutes from John's house, 15 from Seusscaboose, a half hour from Rock GP40's, and an hour from mine!  What are you doing this evening?  Perhaps an impromptu ops session is in order!

Lee

About 15 minutes from me, too.

[asciibaron]

Jeezey Chreezy, Erik!  You're about 20 minutes from John's house, 15 from Seusscaboose, a half hour from Rock GP40's, and an hour from mine!  What are you doing this evening?  Perhaps an impromptu ops session is in order!

he can swing past my place with 2 sheets of plywood and help me cut the subroadbed

[C855B]

No kitchen remodeling this time - this weekend was complete saturation in N scale, and, frankly, I'm a little fried. We had a Great Train Expo in town, and our N-Trak club was committed to bring a layout. We assembled a 25-module roundy-round, a rectangle with a staging tee; we run DCC. Setup was Friday afternoon, and the show was 10 to 4 both days. I brought a camera on Saturday but was up to my eyeballs in operations, so no pix. Highlights:

1) My Bachmann "J" with 10 Kato cars ran for the entire show. Once people finally stopped knocking bits of scenery onto the tracks, it was flawless. Say what you want about Bachmann, it was the only trouble-free train of the session, and it looked good. One of the guys was giving me grief about it being "so polished", upon which I pointed to a photograph I brought of the real thing, equally polished. Not everything has to be weathered!

2) One of the guys brought his Kato Nozomi Shinkansen 500-series trainset with all the add-on cars. Very impressive. It seemed "toy train" fast, but once we clocked it we determined that it was +/-5 mph from the real thing.

3) Learning experience: don't bring 85' auto-parts boxcars and auto racks to an N-Trak running session unless everything is completely debugged. Three of us had a mix of Trainworx, Bluford and Red Caboose cars, and none of us could keep trains together because of drawbar droop exacerbated by uneven module joins. Undaunted, I spread out tools and cars on one of the tables and corrected at least the Bluford cars enough to run reliably. The Trainworx cars are completely unrunnable until the couplers are body-mounted - has anybody else noticed that?

4) Longest train we ran was three Kato SDs on 65 MTL 2-bay center flows. It was a crowd-pleaser; I caught many counting cars.

5) We are trying something new - we display a small poster highlighting the history of a particular locomotive or train, with various posters for a train on the layout at the time. The idea is to educate the public that, no, these are not random locomotives and cars we throw together, but, rather, there is a rhyme and reason to many of the trains you see here.

We get to do this again in February for another local GTE show at a different venue.

[sizemore]

Jeezey Chreezy, Erik!  You're about 20 minutes from John's house, 15 from Seusscaboose, a half hour from Rock GP40's, and an hour from mine!  What are you doing this evening?  Perhaps an impromptu ops session is in order!

Lee

About 15 minutes from me, too.

Same boat, I'm literally 5 minutes from John.