Coffee Pot #3 March 2012 5+ years and going strong and its for all to chat. Plenty of coffee and sweet ice tea for all. Come and join us and chat. GRITS for the Yankees.

[KRM]

Well stayed home all day for a delivery that did not show.   So now they say tomorrow.   Kills my trip to Morton so I guess I have to stay home again.    Some things never change. At least I get paid waiting. 

Brent, nice pictures of the little one, hold on tight they grow so fast it is like a flash.

Jeffery, I had some problems with my CSX Dash 8, one motor would loose power in the tighter curves so I took it apart and re-tied the wire connections and I think I got it. Ran good on a 30 min test., 

Here is a shot of four generations from the March birthday party Sunday, Granddaughter, daughter, wifey, and MIL.

And some for Laz,  here is what I saw out of my office window today while I was doing classes.

 

Later.

Kev

 

 

 

 

 

[laz 57]

sir james I

Laz, saw the catalog, no beer reefers. Lot's of engines, lot's of these needed $$$.

Doug don't miss this day get out there.

Thanks SIR JAMES, now I gotta go cry in my beer, OLE MIL that is!,Better have a few more  AHHH!! that's better!

laz57

[jeffrey-wimberly]

KRM

 

Jeffery, I had some problems with my CSX Dash 8, one motor would loose power in the tighter curves so I took it apart and re-tied the wire connections and I think I got it. Ran good on a 30 min test., 

Hey, that's great! I hope that was the extent of the problem. Sounds like it was. I've had problems with some HO models that would derail on my 18" radius curves. Wire problems on every on of them. In their cases the wires were little too short and wouldn't let the trucks turn through their entire radius. And this was on models made to run on 18" radius and they were higher end models.

Looks like the four family generations are well represented.

[sir james I]

72 now, another record breaking day in the 80s. This is the last one though. Oh but it's been so nice. I'm tired tonight but I want to make the chat...S.J.

[dwiemer]

Wow, what a chatty bunch here.  Well, good evening everyone.  Had to go in early this morning for a case and will have to do the same in the morning.  Was nice here, had a afternoon shower that gave the trees a much needed drink and I think it knocked some of the pine pollen off the trees.

Jack, sorry for the loss.  No words help.  I pray that there is healing in the family. 

Doug, I will do a search.  Also, wanted to ask what would be the best external drive to get to clear up some of the space on my laptop?  I have a ton of photos here and it is about full.  I would like to move the images that we do not look at as much to a separate drive the store.  I have a buffalo drive somewhere, I think it is 500GB.

Bob, glad you and everyone are OK.  That is why they call them accidents.  Just make sure that you don't have too many more of these phase outs.  Keep track if you have any more incidents.

Rich, heard that several firefighters in the bayone area got hurt during a S&R drill when a concrete wall fell on them.  Lots of bad things out there that can get you....be careful.

Well, tomorrow will be here soon.  Hope everyone has a blessed night.
Dennis

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Time for me to call it a night. See y'all tomorrow.

[dougdagrump]

Evenin' All.

Museum tomorrow, body aches allowing. Was pulling weeds this afternoon and was quickly reminded of the connection between the laws of gravity & ones center of gravity. Went butt over apetite down the hill and hit the bottom pretty hard, took a couple of minutes to get ambulatory and clear the cobwebs. Apparently no real damage, just some aches & pains and severely bruised pride.

Joe, Good luck on the snowboarding, had a ball when I used to ski with my daughter. At least til she started kicking the old man's butt on the black diamonds.

Mike and all our pot friends, prayers being lifted up for those in need. 

Need to go for a hot soak, nite all. 

[dwiemer]

Good morning, about to go do a case.  Joe, enjoy the boarding and have fun!  Brutus, hope you enjoy Minecraft.  You have to get beyond the graphics and enjoy the creativity.  Really interesting to see what our son does with it.  If you go on YouTube, you can see some incredible things folks have done.

Well Friday is here!  A friend of ours is releasing a movie in theaters today called "October Baby".  If you get the chance, it is a great effort with a great story.  I am looking forward to it.

Gotta run, have a blessed day and weekend

Dennis

[laz 57]

Hi GUYZ,

  49 here going up to 79 then rain and cool again.  Took off the nets from the ponds and put away.  Tonite gonna pick up leaves and aerate the grass.  Then spread grass seed, then run trains.  Watched a good movies last nite with wife called Hodgie.  Movie about a dogs devotion to his master, even when his master died of a heat attack, dog still kept coming back to the train station waiting for him to come home from work.  Good tear jerker.  Based on a true story.

BUCKEYE & CHUCK, TGIF!!!!!!!

BLOWNOUT, LOVE those fotos.  Keep em coming.

SIR JAMES still feel empty.  Lionel said they were going to run beer reefers every year?  Engines seem to be toooooo high of price.

JOEY D, have fun.

DOUG DA GRUNP, OUCH!!!!

Stay frosty,

laz57

[Blueberryhill RR]

Good Morning from Blueberryhill RR....

It is a clear 58 degrees. Going up to 78 today with a chance of rain.

Today is an easy day. I have to finish up some paperwork and do a few chores. Then, I can relax and read my latest issue of CTT mag., which arrived yesterday. Looks good. Nap later.

Dining car is here with Cheerios for breakfast.

Buckeye & LAZ..... TGIF

Y'all have a great Friday.

Chuck

[ChiefEagles]

Morning.  Went to early meeting and then worked in yard and box all yesteray.  Got in the house at 7:30 and took shower.  We ate pizza and I crashed.  Real warm and foggy this AM.  Off to eat breakfast with Fred and work on Box until noon.  Interviews for Town Clerk this afternoon.

KRM

Here is a shot of four generations from the March birthday party Sunday, Granddaughter, daughter, wifey, and MIL.

Kev

 

Wife too pretty for an old Yankee scallowag like you.

Brent, thanks for the photos.  Pretty lady.  Will have to have your shotgun ready when she grows up.  Keep all those bad boys away from your house.

Prayers for Mike and Lucus.

TGIF, guess you workers can take the weekend off as my SS is doing good.

Later. 

[Banks]

Hello all

TGIF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Foggy mid 50's here. Record breaking 78 predicted.

Gas hit $3.959 yesterday.

Frying fish again tonight

Jack, Sorry to hear of your loss, Knowing how my grandkids make me feel I can't imagine your pain. Thanks for asking about Mom. She is doing fine. Next follow up is June. All though both my folks are failing they still do well for being 91 & 89 years young.

Sub-bob, Glad you're OK

Phish Where are you???????

Mrs told me this AM we'll have the grandkids at least one day this weekend as their Mom has to work and she's not sure of their Dad's plans

SS Fund calling

 

Prayers for those in need

[RockIsland52]

dwiemer

........Doug, I will do a search.  Also, wanted to ask what would be the best external drive to get to clear up some of the space on my laptop?  I have a ton of photos here and it is about full.  I would like to move the images that we do not look at as much to a separate drive the store.  I have a buffalo drive somewhere, I think it is 500GB.........

Well, tomorrow will be here soon.  Hope everyone has a blessed night.
Dennis

Dennis.........I wanted an external drive to back up my entire hard drive, everything.  Too much stuff there I couldn't afford to lose.  Some of the data files I needed or need to import to work at home off-line were/are large.   I have pre-loaded software and internet-loaded software (no disc) on my pc.  I have over 7,500 digital jpeg photos which does include ones I cropped and photoshopped and saved as separate files..  I plan to convert all of our analog (home) video tapes to digital.  And now my new camera takes HD video which I also want saved off my pc. 

What you need to do is make a list of what you want to save or what you may want to save going forward.  For instance, you have little ones on the way!!!!!!!!!.... 

500GB sounds like a lot of memory/capacity, but it was nothing for what I needed or planned to do.  So I went out and bought a Western Atlas 2 terabyte external drive.  Murphy's Law has prevailed. 

For example, my HD home movie video from the Nikon D3100 chews up 1.3GB in memory for just a single ten minute video clip!!!!!!  

My old camera took 5 megapixel photos, and the jpeg file for each came out to 2-3MB each.  But the new camera @ 14MP  is a whole different story, picture files are twice the size, each.  If I wanted to save the digital oucture files as RAW foles, even larger!   

As for brand of external drive, I don't know.  I used CNET I believe or some similar professional review web site to make my decision.  Buying storage space from an external vendor is also an option, but I want the control, it is not for me.

In this case, bigger IS better.

Jack

[cheapclassics]

Good morning all,

It is rainy in SE Indiana with temps in the 70s.  Thanks again guys for all the thoughts and prayers.  We go see him again on Saturday.  I did a lot of "tree" therapy yesterday in picking up the yard and trimming trees.  Edged the sidewalks and drained the oil out of the John Deere mower so it will be available as backup again.  I got the latest CTT and enjoyed it as well.  Read it cover to cover in one day.  Very good issue.  I had the regular fare on the dining car for breakfast before sending it on to "Points East".  TBIL and I can drive.  "Fasten your seat belts, it will be a bumpy road."  I hope everyone has a good day.

Keep on training,

Mike C.

[cnw1995]

Aloha and TGIF. Cool and grey today. Thank goodness I took your collected advice and went out yesterday into the last of the 80s and sun for a while.  

Dennis, that Coors SW8 is 3028251. It came out a while ago but still seems available. You can't go wrong with the 3 TB drives out there these days. There's all sorts of deals.  

Nice chatting with RT, Kev, SJ and Brutus on the Tardis last night.  

Kev, great 4-gen photo!

Jack, I've missed the rush hour trains and had to stooge around the station but they pretty much run on the hour up through 11 pm-ish. Even though the station is completely re-done, I just commiserated with the thousands of folks who waited in that same space for Chicago & North Western trains over the decades.

[Anonymous]

Mornin' Fellas

Not much going on today. Home sick... going to Dr. Hopefully I can get some recommendations on how to STAY healthy this time???

Re: Christina & Boys - She is NOT allowed to date till she is 35. If she does decide to date a young man prior to this age, he will be informed that I have many friends who are ex-police officers (I'm assuming Fife will have retired by this time), multiple friends with large arsenals, and I am ex-military - this will be part of an enlightenment in our kitchen while I am cleaning TheQ's Springfield 1911 .45, S&W 38 Magnum, my shotgun and soon to acquire rifle. I say this all in jest because I certainly hope that TheQ and I raise her to be smart enough to chose her friends and boyfriends wisely.

[KRM]

Good morning guys,

Looks like we got two drips and a drop of rain last night and that’s it.

Guess it will be another day at the home desk unless the UPS guy gets here early.

Doug DG. WOW for some reason Humpty Dumpty comes to mind reading you post.

DougM well I see that Chicago is now the highest in the US at something.. GAS PRICES!

Chief, What can I say?     Have fun in the box today.

Joe I hope you have better luck snowboarding than Doug DG had pulling weeds.

Laz, now that I will have a few extra bucks I will be getting some Miller High Life cars. 

Jack you don’t have to take every picture at 14MP turn it down and save some space.

Well i am going to take a class on My Supply Cabinet. Whatever that is?

Later guys,

Prayers for all in need.

88 hang in there and get better

Mike, Good luck this weekend with Lucas

Kev.

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

DougDG: That sounds like something I've done. Glad you're OK.

 

 

Good morning. It's 57° and partly cloudy with fog. The high will be 80°.

No plans for today except to work on the layout and run some trains. Sounds like a plan to me.

[sir james I]

59 now 71 for the day.

CTT arrived yesterday but I have not looked at it yet. We had a nice chat last night, no world problems solved though..S.J.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Stourbridge Lion]

Good Morning CTTFans!

Well two of my NCAA bracket teams won last night out of the three I had a chance with.  Tonight I have another 3 out of 4 with a better chance of getting all three.  We have 55 brackets in play in our company NCAA challenge and I moved up from #44 to #32 with those two wins.  No hope to get past the top players but its still nice to get out of the bottom ranks.

Looking at 70F - 80F over the next few days so summer is rapidly approaching.  It even looks like I will need to do some watering this weekend which is weird as March is normally a snowy month for us.

[RockIsland52]

KRM

Good morning guys,

........DougM well I see that Chicago is now the highest in the US at something.. GAS PRICES!

You forgot.  Chicago also ranks #1 in the number of former Governors indicted, convicted, fined, censured, and incarcerated.  Think the number now stands at 4-5 with Rod Blogojevich on his way to serve his sentence as I type this.

Jack you don’t have to take every picture at 14MP turn it down and save some space.

 

File size and storage space is secondary to me because the solution to storage capacity is an external-to-the- PC disc drive.   

Granted, I can reduce the megapixel setting on the camera and hence the file size, but this comes with an "expense":  the reduction in the resolution of the digital image at the time you take the photos, and from then on.     

For the sake of the highest quality reproduction and the highest quality digital image for enlargement, now and for posterity, I want to capture on the front end and then retain the highest resolution digital image I can.  

The digital image quality also degrades with the use of the zoom on the camera when taking photos, and I use zoom to varying degrees a lot. 

I prefer to take "natural light" pictures versus flash, even indoors, which can often yield a photo that requires some lightening up on Adobe Photoshop.  The lightening up process also degrades the digital image and can create a visible graininess on the picture.  Even the Adobe feature that sharpens up the image doesn't do much to improve the image sharpness. 

If I am forced to increase the ISO setting on the camera to capture more natural light, that ISO increase also degrades the digital image, and graininess enters in again.   

I find external storage on an external disc drive is very short money for these purposes, and the storage serves as a great safety net to boot should I lose content on my hard drive.

Later guys,

Kev

Jack

PS:  The SanDisc Extreme memory card I bought for my camera is 16GB and a class 10 (fastest), will capture and hold (even in burst mode) about 4,000 digital photos taken at the highest megapixel settin......or 4 hours of 1080P HD video (with sound).  Where this high camera storage capacity comes in handy is for folks like me that need to retain photos and video on the camera for extended periods of time and still have enough memory storage for a lot of additional picture and/or video taking.

[KRM]

[quote user="RockIsland52"]

KRM:

Good morning guys,

........DougM well I see that Chicago is now the highest in the US at something.. GAS PRICES!

You forgot.  Chicago also ranks #1 in the number of former Governors indicted, convicted, fined, censured, and incarcerated.  Think the number now stands at 4-5 with Rod Blogojevich on his way to serve his sentence as I type this.

 Hey Jack,

BTW Chicago dose not have a governor, it has a mayor. Kinda like Rosseyville. Right Chief?

Now Illinois is another thing. 

Thanks for the life lesson on things I may never need to know. WAY TMI for little old me.

Jack you STILL don’t have to take EVERYpicture at 14MP turn it down and save some space.

 

File size and storage space is secondary to me because the solution to storage capacity is an external-to-the- PC disc drive.   

Granted, I can reduce the megapixel setting on the camera and hence the file size, but this comes with an "expense":  the reduction in the resolution of the digital image at the time you take the photos, and from then on.     

For the sake of the highest quality reproduction and the highest quality digital image for enlargement, now and for posterity, I want to capture on the front end and then retain the highest resolution digital image I can.  

The digital image quality also degrades with the use of the zoom on the camera when taking photos, and I use zoom to varying degrees a lot. 

I prefer to take "natural light" pictures versus flash, even indoors, which can often yield a photo that requires some lightening up on Adobe Photoshop.  The lightening up process also degrades the digital image and can create a visible graininess on the picture.  Even the Adobe feature that sharpens up the image doesn't do much to improve the image sharpness. 

If I am forced to increase the ISO setting on the camera to capture more natural light, that ISO increase also degrades the digital image, and graininess enters in again.   

I find external storage on an external disc drive is very short money for these purposes, and the storage serves as a great safety net to boot should I lose content on my hard drive.

Later guys,

Kev

 

 

 

[SPMan]

Let me try this again.  Apparently my first post did not go through as I probably forgot to push the post button.  don't you hate that!

Neck is still sore but hoping for improvement.

Jack, touching thoughts about your little departed angel.  Prayers for healing in your family.

Jeffrey, hope your dislocated shoulder is better.  My wife had one of those a few years ago and had to go to ER.  It was not a pleasant experiece due to comedy of errors at the ER.  She is OK now.

Annual sale this weekend at Trainshack in Burbank.  Also TCA meet in Arcadia.  Don't know if I will make either.

later,

Ray

[jeffrey-wimberly]

RockIsland52

I find external storage on an external disc drive is very short money for these purposes, and the storage serves as a great safety net to boot should I lose content on my hard drive.

Ditto! I use an external disk drive myself for storing data and videos.

Ray: I hope your neck gets better. I have a compressed disk in mine due to a fall. It causes me some pain on occasion. Traction helps a lot.

I got my Atlas H24-66 Trainmaster running again. I test ran it yesterday and after two full laps around the layout the motor control part of the Digitrax DZ125 decoder fried. Oh well, it was a junk box decoder anyway. In looking through my stuff I found a Bachmann decoder that's in good shape. It would give me motor control but the light functions are on/off, bright/dim only. The Digitrax decoder though fried still worked for lighting and light effects and was already set up. It's also still addressable! So I set it for the same address as the Bachmann decoder then piggybacked the Bachmann decoder on the Digitrax. What the hey, it works.I still have the lighting control of the Digitrax and the Bachmann provides motor control. Now I have an operational loco for the tourist train.

[ChiefEagles]

When I left the box, only one small wall standing.  Grady left to take it down.  Town interviews for new Town Clerk [present one retiring] finished for today.  Two more next Friday.  Now to go home and take truck load of drywall [sheetrock for us REBS] to the dumpster site.

Later.  

[rtraincollector]

Evening all was on the desktop and heard boomers so switch to the laptop. Had a good chat with Doug M. last. Be for I left for the night. Guess I just missed kevin, brutus, and sj as I left right at 10 P.M. eastern time.

Not much going on here.

[KRM]

RT, Yeah I crashed early too.

I got the corp credit card today at 3:00 PM so now I can got to Morton on Monday

Kev

[submmbob]

Hello all

Nice day here on the hill again

No news on the car yet.

DougDG - your landscaping antics must be a big hit w/ the neighbors:)

Jack - 14.6 Gigawatts! I'm going to take my 3.2MP digital camera and quietly slink away...

Happy Friday everybody or TGIF as LAZ says!

Bob

 

[dwiemer]

Good evening everyone.  Was a long day, but not too bad.  Got home in time to get kids.  We made a quick turn around and got to violin lessons.  Found my CTT in the mailbox, time to sit and read.  

Doug/Jack. Thanks, I have a couple of sites to check for drives.  I am sure to get three TB, or more.  I do shoot RAW sometimes, and when you start edits and copies, it can take up some space.  I agree Jack, if a photo is worth taking, it is worth taking at a mp large enough to make a good size image.  

Doug, I looked at MTH's version of the SW Coors engine.  Theirs has the yellow with the Coors logo in silver.  The one I saw was all red, with a white logo.  I did see where Atlas makes one.  Might have to look into it.

With any luck, I will get a chance to check in later.

God bless,

Dennis

[sir james I]

63, was 74 today,

This will be short as some kind sole shared their cold type germs with me. Me and the couch are becoming the best of friends. A little Banilla tonight with blueberry pie mix for a topping..S.J.