Offensive? Heck no. What, and get a Beartoon!!!
David
Most bald-headed geezers I know all have a halo — at least on a sunny day!
Please keep up what you’re doing, Mark! Gosh darned the torpedoes — full speed ahead!
Cheers, Ed
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Oh, the abuse I have to take! 
Great cartoon, Bear! But in way of correction, angels don’t wear plaid; just us minor deities (and bald-headed geezers, Ed) do!
The issue has gone away over on the other forum. Thanks guys, for your input.
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No offense taken here. Love the videos.
Al
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10 May 2025
Been too long (or maybe not long enough, depending on your point of view).
I dug out a pack of bison I’d bought years ago and plopped them on the prairie near Powder River…
The lights arrived in early April. I added two at Powder River. Here’s the before view:
and after:
The lights made a more pronounced difference at Greybull. Here’s before…
… and here’s after:
During operating sessions, operators have difficulty sometimes seeing which way turnouts are thrown. I’d attribute this to carelessness, but sometimes I have a hard time too! So I painted the ground throws with red and green nail polish to indicate normal and reverse positions for the turnouts.
Did that all over the layout. On Mainline switches, green indicates the switch is set for the mainline. In yards, green indicates the switch is set to continue down the throat (as opposed to switching onto one of the classification tracks).
I had the operating session April 15th. Had fewer folks than usual because of the delayed date. Many people already had other plans. Worked out okay though - I even got to run a train! But I didn’t get any pictures - again.
I got the feedback I was looking for on the Lander benchwork width’s impact on Greybull operations. The week after the session I got busy narrowing the benchwork another inch and a half. I finished up the center section - the one I’d already narrowed a couple inches - on the 22nd.
On the 23rd I completed the end section and reinstalled all the lights.
I thought about leaving the corner section (that’s the one with the diagonal in the far distance in the above shots) as is, but the flow of the fascia would block the view of too much of the west Greybull yard throat. A couple friends are coming down in a few days for a work session on the layout, so we’ll adjust the diagonal section to match the new width of the rectangular sections then.
The last week of April I tackled two projects. The first was construction of the Casper icing platform ice house. While I’m not a big fan of Walthers kits (too common), I decided to use their ice house kit.
This is the location it will go:
The stock house is too long for the spot, so I had to trim it down to fit. I figured out how much I needed to trim it by and started with the roof. Here’s the first roof section being spliced back together after a section was cut out of the middle:
In this shot you can see how much I trimmed it by:
Then I did the other roof section, followed by similar trimming of the base and the long walls. Then I began assembling the walls:
I painted all the white pieces a few days later (after it warmed up enough to work in the garage). Next step is to add the tar paper (600 grit sandpaper) to the roof and assemble the kit. Then will come detailed painting (hinges and such) and weathering.
There will be some additional work to come later, when I finish the platform itself. Then I’ll add electrical conduit and a switch box to the side of the ice house for the platform lights.
The other late April job was adding power switches to the Casper roundhouse and garden tracks. To this point everything sitting there is always drawing power, and all those sound-equipped locos get pretty noisy!
I bought 16 sub-mini DPDT switches from Amazon and wired them all together. I also added long pigtails to make tying the switches into the track feeders easier (not much room behind the fascia):
Over several days (while waiting for glue to dry on the ice house) I finished the switch installation.
The green toggles indicate garden tracks. For the roundhouse, the operator will just have to count from one side or the other to pick the right switch (there’s only 11 stalls. Anyone can count that high!).
I used double pole switches instead of single pole switches so that I can add an SMD LED above each roundhouse stall if it turns out to be too difficult to select the right switch.
The last few days I went through my R-1 Prairie (2-6-2) mechanism to smooth out the running characteristics before installing DCC. That turned out to be really easy - the thing already had a small can motor, and the drive was pretty smooth. All I really did was add some grease to the worm and gears.
I’ve got a friend who likes stuffing electronics in small locos, so the Prairie is now in a box waiting for him to come get it (or for me to take it to him).
The last thing I did (just this morning) is weather the Powder River siding. It looked like this when I started:
And it looks like this now:
Cars were stored on this siding during the off-season for stock shipments, so it picked up a lot of grease and oil drippings through the years. Still need to add a few random grass tufts between the rails.
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Thanks for showing us more of your great work. I have the same number of days each month that you do, but I accomplish about one one-hundredth of the things that you do. Nice work! 
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