Mornin’ boys. Sunny & 36 here in the Mid-Atlantic region. Had a nice dinner with friends last night, and they presented me with a handsome railroad watch (a kind of pre-retirement retirement gift).
**Buckeye -**James J. Andrews would be proud… I am doing all my posts in OHIO state red in honor of this successful raid. Good to know that the Carolina Crippler is back where it belongs. [;)]
WOO HOO!!! BUCKEYE DID IT!!! GREAT RAID!!! Saw it right off way to go. Watch your topknot the rest of the way home. Scallywags down there.
Hi GUYZ,
Ran trains last nite after doing my churchin and took WIFE out for dinner. Had Veal cor don blu. Good eats. Came home and took MINNIE for a walk then ran trains for 3 hrs. All ran good NO PILE UPs!!! Ran MTH NS F7s, MTH Readin BM T1, and Lionel AC 600 Santa fe, on the 3 ovals and on my coal layout had the K-line 4-6-6 tank engine pulling a coal drag. Graet fun I needed my fix and got it.
Today going to make beff stew in crock pot let simmer all day. Eat tonite. Take my gal MINNIE for a run in the woods about 3 miles she needs to run.
BANKS nice layout. Boy you sure keep the Christmas spirit up a long time. Good for you.
Good morning. It’s 36° and sunny. The high will be 63°.
Nothing special planned for today. There’s some clean-up work needing to be done on the layout so I’ll probably be busy sorting things out and putting them away.
Sunny and cooler than yesterday but still high 50’s. Grest visit from the Buckeye. Good to see him. Actually escaped with contraband. Got some items from Miss Edna’s.
Getting ready to make a trip to the lake house. Haven’t been in a while as working on the box. Taking spare frig up and spending the night. Lucy and Finn will be happy. They get to run and play.
THE GREAT RAID and THE GREAT ESCAPE – The debriefing of Buckeye
To: All of you that have waited for this day since the Great Pennsylvania Grits Caper.
From: Buckeye
Re: The Great Raid – Objectives Met/Exceeded
On January 28, 2012 at approximately 2:15 pm EST, the flag of the Great State of Ohio was prominently displayed within the town limits of Roseyville, NC. Chocolate covered Buckeyes were used to replace grits in the Mayor’s mansion as displayed below by the First Lady of Roseyville. As they say, timing is everything and the mission was carried out flawlessly with absolutely stunning results. This most dangerous mission is dedicated to those poor souls who were forced to digest grits during that awful day in Pennsylvania.
Looks like a great time for everyone, and that is the most important thing! Life is way to short not to have some fun everyday, good job Buckeye & Chief [swg]
Sunny and cold here. Just finished watching The Longert Day. Now watching the end of the Daytona race. The new Corvette bodies are interesting. Still trying to get over whatever it was I caught earlier this week. Taking it easy today,
Buckeye, is that a real sign on the front of the box or is it photo shop or something? Glad you had a good time at the Chief’s palace. Sounds like you escaped the dragnet and handcuffs they had planned for you. Where are the pictures of you? I saw the nice pictures of Mr. and Mrs Chief. Fess up now, how many bowls of grits did you have to eat to get a pass out of confederate lines?
Ray**…I ate no grits and drank no sweet tea.** The plan was for the Roseyville Police to cuff me and then force feed me grits. Needless to say, Roseyville is a very tough and rough town reflecting the personality of the mayor. [swg] Watching the Dukes of Hazard, Mission Impossible and Combat during my formative years as a youngster really paid dividends and probably saved my life.
Thanks BUCKEYE for those beautiful photos. Now as I see it the front steps looks like it could be taken apart and reused for a good firepit to fry up some Pa. Scrapple, and sit around drinking some Ol Mills. BUCKEYE tell us more of this so called BOX with wooden floors. Does it have pipes for plumbing? Running water? Heat? Or can you bring heat inside? Flush toilets or just a hole?
Earlier today I took a couple of locos back to my bedroom to place them back in the display rack. After I’d put them back in their places I spotted a Stewart F9 A-B set and realized I had forgotten their address. I looked on the bottom of both locos but it wasn’t there. I usually write the address on the bottom. So I took them to the layout to put them on the program track. In short order I had the address on the display. I wrote it on the bottom of the A unit and realized that I’d forgotten what kind of decoders I put in them. I did remember that these locos are a pain to open so I the Zephyr do the investigating. A quick check came back with 101. That was easy enough. 101 is Bachmann. I do remember all the work I put into these to get them operational again. When I got them they both had motor problems and the B unit had a problem in one truck as well. Both have Kato type chassis. The A unit was easy to remotor as I had a good motor that was virtually a drop-in replacement. I put the motor in, tested for shorts then wired in a Bachmann decoder and checked to make sure the address was set at three. That will become clear later. The B unit required more work. So much so that I almost shelved it. However what’s life without some adventure and adversity. The motor was useless junk. The front truck had a broken gear in the top of the tower. One side of the shaft was snapped completely off and the gear below it was missing some teeth. It wasn’t hard to determine that the broken shaft had fallen down onto the other gear and jammed it and stripped those teeth off. That truck was junk and I didn’t have a any spare Kato trucks. I also didn’t have a motor to match the old one. It was time to get creative. With a little work and a lot of imagination I fit an Athearn motor into the chassis. As for the trucks, in for a penny - in for a pound. I cut out part of the frame to allow for the installation of a pair of Proto 2000 AAR trucks. Now I’ve had people tell me this is impossible. Well, it was impossible, until I did it.
We got the module layout up and running in a class room. It’s really noisy in a closed space. Lots of tables and it looked like there was a decent attendance…S.J.
A beautiful day up here on the mountain. So good we are using the high frequency receiver: 691 Gigahertz (for Chief’s benefit, that means a lot…).
Well I just got the call from my future boss. I got the job. Looking to making the changeover in early March. Now to find a place to live in Safford, pack up, move, oh, and reassemble a '62 Corvair van that is sitting on jackstands with only the rear crossmember installed in the back. This will be the third time in 10 years where I’ve had to become the mad mechanic. I guess I must like it.[D)]
The 2025 is now happily smoking along. The front truck hangs up every once and a while. Has the same problem as the 2026 where the pin came loose. Today I ordered another front truck, the headlight bracket for the 2026 (which I broke right after I had ordered the front truck for it), and a box of O-27 track clips from Brasseurs.
Jeffrey - Nice work on the F9 units! As Laz would say you da man! FYI: Mobile homes and another surprise will be heading east soon.
Buckeye - great job on the raid! Hopefully the Rolesville RR yard got the switching back in order…