I have to be honest, the past three weeks or I have done absolutely nothing with regards to model railroading, other than read the forums ever now and again, a few magazines and a spend a few hours down at the club, and that was spent more on adminstrative stuff than running trains. Not that I haven’t wanted to but, the wife has once again made large donations towards the pensions and college funds of Lowes and Home Depot shareholders and I have dutifully playing the role of day laborer. “They” call it home improvement. I see it as somewhat strange that I have to go to work to relax…
So anyway…what are you folks working on?..train related that is…The last thing I was working on was another CF7 for my Maritime roadname, which is near completion…and just starting on a pair of SD40-2s for the same. There’s more waiting in que, but I think they’ll be waiting a little while longer.
By the way, this is a thinly veiled attempt to hijack the forum from bashing and flaming.
Now may others follow in your footsteps and do a little walking on the keyboard. [:D]
There have been several threads lately talking about military equipment and military railroads. So I have been thinking along those lines too. Some of the larger railway guns are just models for show and not really rolling stock. They would still make an interesting scene for a side track though. I have heard that they would “hide” in tunnels during the day and come out to lob one large shell at a time. So maybe a tunnel and the gun would be an idea to consider. [;)]
Between regular summer activities, family visits, and yes the ever popular majority stockholder’s lists of non railroad upgrades, I have had very ltiitle time myself. I have managed to assemble a transistor throttle and have been trying to get that to work but have had limited success. All of the smoke escaped from one of the component this evening so it’s back to square one.
I’m pretty much in the same boat gondola with you Dan, train wise speaking. The sale will be entering its third weekend, with no end in sight. Revenue has been fair at best, but the mountains of clothes do not seem to be shrinking. I have promised myself that my truck will be back in the garage before the snow flies. In the meantime, I am here off and on, but not for hours on end as before. [swg]
By the way, I bought a bunch of lumber for my layout, but I am using it for the tables for the sale. So, when the sale ends I can get my stuff back.[banghead][:P][sigh][(-D]
I’ve been trying to clean up my train room and organize things when I have the time. I was hoping to spend fridays paycheck on lumber for my empire but I have other things that need my attention. Hopefully I’ll have enough money left over to finish my benchwork. We’ll just have to see. Everyonce in a while, I’ll get an idea or find a peice of track and through somoe track down but it’s becoming rarer and rarer. Money and time have been short lately.
Andrew
I have fixed my 2 track problems that were causing my BLI Mike to derail. I re-laid the trackage into my mine complex. I built the Walthers New RIver Mine and modified it to look like my prototype mine in central Illinois. I used my airbrush for the first time to paint it and am really happy with the results. I made about 40 trees using Supertrees (What a great product this is!). I hope to get them installed on my hillside this evening. All in all a good week. My wife was at a bead show last weekend and attending some seminars at a local fabric shop this weekend, so I have had plenty of time without the boss!
Bravo Dan,
Getting away from the flaming and bashing is well worth trying to do. We also have a number of home improvement projects underway. I just finished stripping wallpaper and reapainting in the kitchen and we’re well underway with planning the redo in our daughter’s room. Plus this time of year gardening and yard work are are constant and ongoing.
Despite all this, I’m making steady progress on the railroad. I’ve got the mainline and sidings in on the last section to be revised. I’m currently installing the roadbed for the Graham County RR, which is a small shortline RR. It will run from a siding and interchange through the wall to a staging track in an adjacent room. Once that is comp-lete I can get started seriously on scenery.
I’ve not done much. It’s still allergy season (at least it feels like it to me) here in Houston. I have trouble working on fine details of N scale stuff with a piercing sinus headache. If I bludgeon myself with sufficient medication I am no longer in possession of the necessary motor skills to do the work anyway.
Well…we (as in spouse and self) are painting our house. Got the front and two sides done, still need to do the back if we can get some rain free days under 90 degrees. Have you priced Sherwin Williams Durations exterior paint recently? Eats up a lot of model railroad budget! I am also in the building stages of a small business, so past week between the two about 90 hours of mine time was consumed. I did manage to order the car card/waybill package from Micro-Mark. I’m anxious for it to arrive, so I can try and find the time to enter the data on the cards…hmmmmm. Before we started the house painting project I did get some additional track ballested. By this time next year I’d like to be trying to find time for structures and scenery and an occassional operating session with friends. I did get the workbench “sort of” cleaned up last night and that will make any upcoming model building projects more pleasant.
What I need is a climate with consistent temperatures near 75 degrees, no grass and a house that paints itself. Maybe vinyl siding is in the future, eh?
Over the summer I have managed to back date my rolling stock to the 1960s. We were running late 1970s stuff. Nice to see running boards again!
I have a maintenance schedule for my layout. I’m supposed to be cleaning track today, which is why I’m hanging out here. Hey, it’s model railroad related, besides, I might get a tip on how to make my track self-cleaning.
I’m in the middle of building my bench work for my layout. It seems though that the only time I have for it is late at night because the wife has me doing a bunch of stuff, we just moved into a new house. I’m hoping to have it finished in a few weeks.
Lucky for me that it rained Sunday. Went to Menards for blacktop driveway sealer and convinced wife that I should save gas by getting materials for new train room that my son and I are building in my garage. Size 14’ x 18’. We put sealer in corner and got the walls done and the door installed. Sooooo— I’d say a good day for workin’ on the railroad !!! Now at work and doodleing layout designs. Great day to all.
Dan, I can really empathize with you (empathize means “to suffer with”.) LOL It’s amazing how I have to not only work so hard to make the money, but to then have to work even harder after that hard earned money has been spent (at Home Depot, Lowe’s, etc) doing major home projects including adding two rooms to the house - doing everything myself (framing, electrical, HVAC, drywalling, etc) but the carpeting, installing lawn sprinkler system and lawn, adding a patio, painting the house (inside and out), putting on a new roof on part of the house, major landscaping, etc ad nauseum (which means “to the point of disgust or getting sick)”. Get this, we bought the house new and have only been in it for 11 years. I am unfortunate to have grown up in a family of contractors and to own the code books, and worse yet - to live 3,000 miles from my contractor brothers and cousins. So it has all been a team of one!! Now you know why I feel justified in spending as much as I have in this great hobby of ours. I feel I’ve more than earned it. LOL It’s a wonder I have any time for the hobby. So I can really appreciate what you are saying. I go to work to get a vacation. Pardon my venting here, in an unusual sort of way! Thanks for listening.
Greg
PS - A word of advice to those who are about to get married - after the honeymoon, play dumb, ignorant, and incompetent with regards to anything mechanical or involving tools. Be all thumbs / have two let hands, claim a history of medical conditions in your family,etc. Otherwise, be prepared to learn to hate the likes of Home Depot.
Greg - your last paragraph above really hit home ! My home.
I too have stayed away from this Forum for the past week or so in the hopes that I’d come back to a peaceful and friendly place to talk trains and modeling, and the first two posts I make have to deal w/ how I’m fed up with all the garbage that is infitrating and polluting this forum lately. Go figure - there I go getting sucked right back in !
The past week or 52, I’ve been remodeling, re-landscaping, painting, plumbing, ducting, trimming, framing, wiring, one house to get it sold, and then my wife buys another one that “just needed some flowers, grass seed, and a little paint.” Right. We weren’t here but a month, when we maxed out the 10% off one-time newcomer discount from both Loew’s and the big orange box store. Now I know why HD’s stock is slowly rebounding! Here we go again, or should I more acurately state, “here I go again. . .”
At least the past two week I have been framing the basement for my wood shop and model railroad room - a luxury that I have never had, and have certainly earned, for all the ‘honey-dos’ that I have had to do all of the 23 years we’ve been married. (Shouldn’t there be a ‘honey-due’ for guys, since they have a ‘honey-do’ for us?)
I’ve been adding a few scratchbuilt details to a Walthers Dash 8-40B that I picked up as a non-runner on eBay - fixed the fault and it now runs well, I’ve since added the anti-climb pilot that came in the box and fitted Kadees. Most recently, I’ve drilled holes in both pilots to take some fine wire - representing mulitple working cables. I found that single wires from a multi-core telephone cable are ideal for this - with the insulation on they make a good representation of the horizontal wire running just below frame level (not sure what purpose this serves, I just copied the arrangement seen in photos), and with the insulation stripped this wire makes good MU cables. I also have an Athearn Dash 9-44CW dummy in BNSF livery awaiting assembly, and have built the first (my LHS still has some of the kit versions) of a planned train of Walthers auto-carriers - the covered variety. I’m aiming at creating the consist shown here: www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=63825