General Discussion (Model Railroader)

Hey Joe...It's the Wednesday PM check of the "Barn"! I'll have a tap, make it a Meininger "Backwoods Black" and I'll buy a round for any comers too!

Got out to the Trainroom the other day to discover that it's time for "cleanup" again! I hate how I let the place get out of control when I'm not "Working on the Railroad" for a while. Of course it's also a bit out of control when I am working out there...Just worse when I'm not.

I got a good start on the off pike staging for the upper level with the supports for benchwork and even one section of "shelf" installed. I really hope to get trackage down, this season, for the mainline both to and from staging on both levels....Wish me luck!!

Mike, good to hear from you and know you are doing better! But, SSI...WOW! I had NO idea you were that bad off. Here in MN it seems that therapy, surgery, therapy and surgery again...followed by more therapy and / or surgery is the order before SSI. Sorry to hear you are in that bad of shape!

Hope to get out to the Trainroom again this week (hope it rains again) and get a bit more trackage done....Sure would be great to be able to run "off pike to off pike"

And with that, another thought for the week: If I'm late...Wait another 5 minutes! Then you can give up on me!

Good morning, Joe.  I will have a cinnamon roll with my coffee, please.  Maybe some of my MR buddies will show up for coffee before they get active on their layouts.  Larry should be home within the hour.  We had our first killing frost last night, so we won't be heading outside too early today.  Maybe I can get him back on track with his trestle.

Glad to see that everyone is dropping by even if they don't stay long.

Sue

I'll have coffee and a roll this morning...Missed you yesterday Sue.

We are having rain this AM so I hope to play in the Trainroom a bit again today. I have a good start on the "clean-up" and will work at that alnog with the staging.

Hope you are all having a good one!

Ah, a quiet Sunday morning.  I'll have some bacon 'n' eggs, Joe, and keep the coffee coming.  Yeah, I stayed up to watch the Sox last night.  Well, at least they're coming home to Fenway even up after taking one of two in the other guys' house.

I just couldn't take waiting any longer, so yesterday I cut out the space on the other side of the engine house where the pond and stream will continue.  This brings it right out to the edge of the layout, so I carefully left a thin ridge to hold in the Envirotex.  I've still got the track pinned down with paper clips around that curve, because it will have to come up when I do "Moose Bay" and need to remove the chord bridge and all nearby track.  So, it was a piece of cake (no, Joe, I don't want any cake.  It makes my benchwork wider.) to lift up the track and cut under it.  I got the plaster cloth down over the bed of the pond area, too, so the next step is Gypsolite.

I'm going to put a series of short timber trestle bents under the track here where it crosses the waterway.  They'll only be about an inch high, so I should be able to knock them out pretty quickly.  I've been googling around for pictures, and it looks like I can put the bents right down into the water.  I took a bicycle ride down by some streams yesterday, too, and studied the flow patterns around obstructions to get an idea of how the ripples should look.  It was a beautiful day, by the way, and my riding was almost entirely on old railroad rights-of-way.  As I pedal down those long, straight tree-tunnels, I can imagine what it must have been like back in the Age of Steam...

   Morning all, I will have the bacon n' eggs with Mr. B. this morning. Thanks Joe.

  I am going to take a trip Tuesday up in the St. Louis area to visit my sister and we will stop in Tulsa and visit my Dads sister for a day or two, Should be a lot of fun if my back doesn't give me to much trouble. My sister and mom and dad are comming up from the Dallas area and pick me up on Tuesday. My sister got a new Caddy a couple of weeks ago so we will go in style. I am hoping to get to go to a few Hobby Shops along the way if possible. I should have my DCC system here when we get back and am going to need some DCC equipped locos to start. Modeling in N scale for now, I cannot see well enough to install the decoders myself so for now I will get the DCC equiped models.

   It is supposed to start raining here this afternoon or evening, we are needing some rain. I hope it doesn't rain on us all the way to St. Louis.

   Anyone know of any Hobby Shops between Tulsa and St. Louis? I see joe has my breakfast here so I will eat while it is still hot.

    Have a good day, I will try to post some  along the trip, I am going to take my new digital camera and laptop.    Mike

Hey, Joe....I'll buy a round this evening!! Need a tall cold one, make it amber or a dark in a frosted mug!

Well...I did spend better than three hours in the Trainroom today and have all of the staging figured out (did some major cleaning too), with most of the upper level of it in place. Now, just to add some additional space (a blob) at the end of the "yard" for a reversing loop and I'll have the big projects out of the way!

The thought for today: Getting older is a snap....Just wait.

I thought that I should stop in for some light refreshments.  Joe, if anyone else shows put it on my tab.  A hot cider sounds good for now, thankyou.

JB,  Cleanup is always hard to get started on.  I am guilty of scouping things into a box. Never to be found again.

MrB,  Are you gearing up for hockey yet?  The bicycle  usage can be good conditioning.  The bents on your waterway should go quickly since they are so small.  I love the thought process.  You have to do this before you start something else.  We had part of our track pinned down so that the loco cleared smoothly.

Mike,  Have a nice trip.  You are braver  than I would be trying N scale.  I use my dental magnefying loups for HO.  And sometimes that isn't enough when you are working in such a small world.

We didn't work on the layout this weekend.  We mostly discussed future construction  projects while the locos exercised.  Poor Larry has not been getting two full days off on the weekend.  They are running him ragged.  I suspect that things will slow down in the winter, but who knows.

   Sue 

Good morning, everyone.  How about some waffles with maple syrup today?  Thanks.

Sue & Larry, it's better to be working on a weekend than not working at all, particularly these days.  The experts are all out there scratching their heads, so I think we should all be out hiding nuts for the winter.  On a more icy note, hockey is a year-round sport for me.  I've been playing Tuesday nights at 8 PM for over 30 years now.  Last month, that long string was broken as our 8 o'clock hour was taken from us and given to the more lucrative Youth Hockey program.  So, now we start at 9:10, still not a bad time, and we'll go back to 8 in the spring.  For those of us who remember the Bobby Orr years, when pick-up ice time was at midnight or 6 AM, that 9:10 faceoff isn't bad at all.

I did the first pour into the wider pond last night.  I should have put the trestles in first, but that will only impact 1 or 2 of them.  Besides, the "water" is actually more solid than the rocks underneath it!

I just dropped in for coffee.  I wanted to make sure that Joe made the transition as well.

MrB,  How do you work a full schedule and manage the late night hockey?  For me, 5:00  comes way too early to be out that late.  If I get home by 9:00 and in bed by 10:00, I am pushing it.

By the way, does anyone know where the Font button is?

Sue

Yeah, Joe, where is the font button.  (Oh rats.  I just noticed that the old trick of using CTRL-i to go to italics no longer works.  Instead, it toggles the "favorites" window on and off.  Foo.

I made up 5 very short trestle bents (15 mm tall - I found it was easier to measure these in Metric units than English.)  These will go under the short section of track crossing the pond/stream area.  I have to get these in place before I can continue pouring layers of Envirotex, so they're #1 on the railroad to-do list.  I looked at them in place, and I think I may want 1 or 2 more.

I have a weird schedule on hockey days.  I get to work at about 7, so I'm home at 4 and I take a nap for an hour or two.  But, I really only get about 4, maybe 5 hours of sleep after hockey, so Wednesday is kind of a drag-myself-through-the-day situation.  After I finished up those trestle bents, I went to bed at 8:30 to catch up a bit.  I'm usually back to normal by Friday.

Looks like you are progressing well, MrB.  We cut wood for a while, and now we plan to head into the train room for a while.  Larry says, that he needs to noodle out the next part of his trestle.

Later,  Sue

    Morning all, Joe, I'll have a black coffee and some cheese toast. Thanks.

   Well we made it to MO. yesterday evening about 6 PM after stopping in Tulsa for a while, We had a good trip, my back did pretty well for the most part, it started giving me trouble after we had been driving for about 8 hours or so. Once we arrived and I got to moving around some it got better.

  I brought along a small HO scale train to play with my great nephew who is 3, I set it up last night and I wish you all could have seen him, He had the time of his life! my sister has been telling me how much he likes trains and she was right. I got it up and running and he was simply amazed watching it go around "All By Itself" he said. I showed him how to run the throttle and he really enjoyed making it go fast then slow. Once he stopped it and said the people were getting off the caboose. I took some really good pics,  will try to post some later.

  I have been studing the manual on my DCC system and don't believe it is going to be as hard to figure it out as I was thinking.

  I see joe has my toast here, Take cary and I will see you all later.   Mike

Good morning, Joe.  I will have a coffee, please.

Larry is working on the girders for the trestle.  His sister and her husband are coming over, so I am doing a little light cleaning.

Mike,  Great job on the mentoring of your nephew. Have a great time on your trip.

Back to work,  Sue

    Morning all. Joe bring me a light breakfast of waffles and coffee this morning, Thanks.

   We are still in Cape Girardeua MO. and will be leaving this morning. I thought you all might be interested in seeing a pic of a future Model RR'er

   This is Bryce, he just turned 3 and loves trains! We played ''trains'' most all weekend, had a memorable time to say the least.

  Friday morning we were getting ready to go out and see some sights when my mother fell and we had to take her to the emergency room, (She is 73) we spent all Friday morning at the hospital, and found she had broken her ankle and had to spent the weekend in a recliner with her foot propped up with an ice pack on her ankle. They put it in a ''boot'' and she will  see her Dr. when she gets home. What a bummer.

  We had a pretty good time in spite of everything, My sister did take me to see the Mississippi River, I thought it was pretty neat.

  We will be leaving this morning heading back to Okla. We will have to make lots of ''rest stops'' partally for my mother and myself. I am not able to ride in the car for long periods of time before my back starts hurting really badly.  We are planning on making the 650 mile trip in two days and not rush things as none of us have to be anywhere soon.

  You all take care and I will check back when I can.         Mike

Joe, I'll have coffee and a bagel with cream cheese this morning.  A glass of OJ, too, if it's the fresh-squeezed stuff.  Mmmm...

Love that picture, Mike.  I know I was like that when I was a little kid.  He's going to remember that day for years.

Looks like you and your Mom are going to have to apply a model railroading slogan to your car travel: "It's not a race, it's a journey."  As long as you've got the time, splitting a long drive up into two shorter ones can turn an ordeal into something closer to a vacation.  On our camping trip to Nova Scotia last summer, we did a lot of driving, but we gave ourselves a lot of time, avoided the highways, and got to see a lot of great scenery.

We had a leak in our sunroom roof some time back, and we finally got it repaired.  This past weekend was spent cleaning up the residual damage to the wall and the paint job.  I did the joint compound a while back, but I finally picked up some sanding screen and smoothed it out.  Once again, I discovered that blue painters' tape is just as good for painting walls as it is for painting trolley cars.

I did get to work a bit on the layout while the paint was drying, though.  The larger pond is almost done.  I got some marsh grass in last night, while watching the end of a great and entertaining season for the Boston Red Sox.  I think the whole scene will come together once I put some more trees around the pond.  After that, I'll add some ducks and geese and it should look pretty good.