Topic: Progress Reports
The garden railroad is back in business! It has been a long and frustrating time coming, but with a new source for ballast finally found things moved ahead quickly. We put down new ballast on all 301 feet of track. We also replaced several of the rail joiners. The aluminum rail joiners didn't get along well with the crushed slag we used for roadbase and the original ballast. Most of the joiners looked like corroded battery terminals. A few of them were completely devoured but many could be cleaned and slavaged. Crushed slag works well as a roadbase, but in the future I'll avoid it as a ballast. When we first hooked up the power pack - nothing! But Doug replaced the GFI socket and the locomotive took off. Doug also found another way to mount the couplers on the passenger cars so they match up with the LGB 2-4-0. The 4-6-0 in the photo was used only for a set shot. It has a broken side rod which must be replaced before it can be run.
That brings up another repair item, i.e., my camera. I was all set to take a picture of some prototype switching action on the UP over in Alton, Illinois. I turned on the camera and all I saw was a magenta blur. Play-back was fine so it wasn't the LCD viewfinder. A trip over to the CSI repair center confirmed my suspicion; the CCD was fried! That was the bad news. The good news was that the chip was defective and the manufacturer is replacing them for free. Seems that laptop batteries aren't the only defective item Sony has been selling to go into other companies products. Now I must wait for the camera to come back from the service center.
Due to the lack of a camera, I have temporarily suspended work on the new mountain area. I plan to do a series of photos showing the process of adding color to the rocks. This will be something of a repeat of an earlier post, but this a larger area which I hope will demonstrate the method more clearly. It will also be another chapter in showing how I go about creating mountains. I did take the first step in coloring the rocks doing the shading with the black dry tempra paint. And I completed coloring the rock retaining walls along the tourist railroad route and in the mountain towns of Nighthawk and Buena Vista. All of the white plaster has disappeared from the mountains.
With the mountain on hold, I've turned my attention to other things. This morning I completed ballasting the last of the track in Mound City. This means all of our track finally has ballast. I still have to clean the track tomorrow and I left the turnouts un-ballasted until we can activate all of them and make sure they are functioning proerly. I also made sketches of nearly all the remaining turnouts in yards and on spurs. I will use these sketches to draw the diagrams for David to use in building the diode matrixes and control panels to operate all those turnouts. With what was left of today I began work on two more buildings for the soy bean oil processing plant. After that I'll have to come with sufficient confusing piping and do-dads to disguise the fact I don't know everthing there is to know about one of these plants.
