There comes a time to paint.

My wife gave me some free time      ( read she went shopping) so I had some time to go up to the club. My procrastination has lasted long enough, time to paint the backdrop around the new tunnel portal.  I had a general idea in mind, blending in the stone cliff and the rock structure that had been installed around the tunnel portal. What was needed was a mountain with colours and structure that resembles the cliff, being careful to make the lines in the painting match the lines of the cliff. With a Timmy's in hand and an hour to paint, I got most of the basic part of the painting done.

Tuesday Night at the Huff & Puff

Well the gremlins were at work last night, and they seemed to center their attention on Tate. Every engine he tried gave him problems, but his big smile never left his face. After inching his way out of Wellington I took the third engine he had tried off the track and let him use mine and away he went. Taking that engine back to Wellington the gremlins were still there. Start stop, start stop, something was shorting out the Wellington block. We made sure all the rolling stock was on the track but the problem prevailed. Still having problems with 1 of Don's engines I moved it to the loading track and shut off the power, voila, everything started running. As this engine had recently lost it's sound we suspect it has a short, gremlins gone! The rest of the night was spent running. We then tested out Tate's CSX engine and it ran fine and he went home with a big smile. As we finished up our trains, we started talking about the upcoming work night. Scenery needs to be done in some areas and a general cleanup is needed. Ralph is adding to the ore car fleet, so we need a storage track for half of them at Elsewhere. Replacing the rest of the code 70 track on the branch was talked about, a big job for sure.



 Passenger train rolls over the McDonald River bridge.














Glen test fit the Bay Street Bridge.

flats waiting for loads

Tuesday Night at the Huff & Puff

Trains roll into Heron's Landing

What a change, last Tuesday was a snow day and this Tuesday we have heat! We all wish Cliff all the best with his upcoming surgery and were happy to see Trent could still climb the stairs after hurting his knee at a game. We had to do the slot max thing again and Jim thinks we should just do it once a month, I guess meeting night would be a good time. We have found out that the new card system works well and really moves a lot of rolling stock, maybe too much. We will have to get into using train orders so all the trains are run and spaced out. It was mentioned that 5 or 6 cars being picked up and delivered at one time may be too many. The fact that 3 industries in Heron's Landing all get that many cars at once doesn't help. The industries, Oxford Sand and Gravel, the Power Plant, and Coastal Oil can't be moved so maybe we can change the cards. If we had only 1 of the 3 getting 6 cars and the other 2 getting 1 or 2 on any given day may help. Or say the Power Plant could get 6 hoppers at a time but the others get a max of 3 or 4 but twice a day? What happens if both cards for 3 cars get picked for the same train? Is delivering twice a day adding to the congestion? Any ideas?

 New sanding rack, great job Jim
















gas electric stops at Miller station






editors note, load windows 10 on my laptop seems OK from this end if you see anything wrong please let me know.  It says this site is unsupported and may result in unexpected behavior. I guess it didn't dust the lake, lol.

Work night at the Huff and Puff

Good news, we will have heat soon, a transformer problem should be fixed this week. I had a smile on my face as I typed this, a lot of ballasting was completed, yes we are still ballasting. Some feeder wires were added to the coal mine siding, and a lot of scenery was done to various areas of the layout. Stats about the blog were laid out, in short, it has generated over 25,000 page views and is seen in many countries. Our pictures regularly show up in Internet searches, but we get very little feed back. Only a few of our members regularly visit the blog. The Sunset siding was briefly talked about, it could be used to hold a second passenger train and or have an industry on it. It was decided to keep the area between the tracks in Lincoln low profile, so only the switching tower and some maintenance  buildings will be added. Thanks to Jim who brought in some more dirt and Tate who supplied a couple containers of ground foam, that area had scenery applied to it. Mike gave the club a 6 axle diesel and a coaling tower for Wellington.



Mike's coaling tower will be a great addition to the Wellington engine servicing area. Once the sanding racks are done we can start planning changes we want to make to Wellington. We did decide the new factory there will be La France Textiles..








Glen has done a nice job on building the new tunnel portal and adding a rock wall to blend it in. Once scenery is added and the backdrop is repainted it will look like it has always been there.











Jim adds ballast to the new crossover in Valleyview, while Trent works on a secret project, hmm.












 NMRA weight standards added to out rolling stock test track. In this case this car should weigh at least 4.5 oz.

Running the yards by Jim

This idea was submitted by Jim Long. 

Rather than have one person (or two persons-top & bottom) handling all the switching while everyone else has "fun" running on the layout . Here is another option to consider .

The first person at each yard makes up two trains. One for themselves and one for the next person in line. That next person makes up a train for the person behind them, who could be sitting on a ready track, before leaving with the train made up for them.

If you did this from both tracks you should have a steady stream of freights arriving at both yards. Upon arrival, that engineer would park their freight in the yard and make up a consist before leaving with the units made up for them by the previous departing engineer. 

Done properly that should allow for a continuous flow of trains, make sure people didn't "cherry pick" for their consist, and give everyone a turn at all aspects of the layout every night.

I like this idea and would add if we did this, it would spill over to the next session, so there would always be a train made up in each yard. It would mean the trains would have to switch Wellington.

Tuesday night at the Huff and Puff

Hmmm, I got it wrong, tonight was not a work night, next Tuesday is. So we had to quickly clean up the layout to run a session. Everyone checked out the new Lincoln with no complains, now only time will tell how well it switches. We are almost through all the new cards and it seems to be working well. I didn't run, but I did observe. In my opinion, we are running trains that are too long, some trains should be shorter, we should adopt a courtesy movement policy, don't just arrive in the next town, if you are just passing through, ask for permission to pass, or wait until the switching ahead of you is done, we all start from the two yards, we need to leave trains on the layout to be completed and   Run the other trains, branch, ore, log, passenger trains, we should have a train schedule to gets the other trains running, we should be fixing rolling stock issues and need the supplies to do it, the good thing is we can do all of the above with little effort.
Looking to the new year. We have accomplished a lot. The upper loop is nearing completion. The changes in Lincoln just need some scenery. The 2 new cross overs just need testing and scenery. The code 100 replacement on the branch is working well. What's next? We still have updates to Wellington to be worked out and scheduled. Some have talked about replacing the rest of the code 70 track in Ortona, which would allow us to redesign it to allow for more industry there. But first we need to relax and enjoy what we have accomplished,
Happy New Year everyone!




Ore trains returns to Ortona.












 Glen switches Lincoln.














Passengers wait to board at the Lincoln station.













 Freight train arrives at Elsewhere

Rolling stock list

We counted the cars on the layout to see what we need.
Box cars need between 46 to 58, we have 47 and Glen is bringing a couple more.
Tank cars need between 19 to 23, we have 17, could use a few more.
Hoppers need between 31 to 43, we have 28 could use a few more.
Cov. Hoppers need 18 to 24, we have 19, could use a few more short ones.
Refers need 8 to 10, we have 10.
Gondolas need 10 to 13, we have 14.
Stock cars need 8 to 10, we have 9.
Flat cars need 14 to 17, we have 8, could use a few more.
Piggyback need ? We have 1, could use a couple more.
There is also cars to be repaired that we're not counted.
I think we should run for a while to see if we still get shortages before bringing in much more