well-i-spent-several-hours-today

well-i-spent-several-hours-today

Well, I spent several hours today working on the layout. After the last work day with Wayne and Drew, I had decided to go with the Woodland Scenics foam for the grades. This turned out to be pretty expensive, but the math and engineering on the alternatives was driving me crazy! It's not that easy to do cookie cutter on a 500 square-foot layout.

It cost $110 for the foam just to do the UP line, BUT the grades are perfect. Since I plan on keeping this layout for ten years or more, perfect grades seem worth the expense.


The InterMountain tunnel motors are starting to hit the shelves and I expect mine in the mail soon. The buzz has been mixed on these. Some comments about thick glue lines, distorted details, and headlight locations. Much of the noise seems to be coming from the usual rivet counters. That is not a concern of mine, unless they are poor runners. I've got a Cotton Belt, a Southern Pacific and a Union Pacific on order. My roster was light for the UP tracks, and with the UP trademark crap going on, I figured I better get some while I can. If I don't like them, I can always sell them on eBay. They're already getting about $20 more than I paid for mine.

Tonight was the annual holiday party for the Corona Model Railroad Society. We had a model contest with a citrus theme. I built an N scale diorama of a fruit stand which won Grand Prize for best use of theme! I donated my prize money back to the club, but kept the blue ribbon. You can click on the thumbnail for a bigger version. On the left of the fruit stand there is an old hound sleeping next to two old guys playing checkers. Inside the stand is a lady with boxes of oranges. Leaning on the side of the stand is a guy watching the traffic stop out front where the local cop has pulled over a hot-rodder. An orange grove is at the back of the diorama.

I was feeling artsie-fartsie tonight so I started working on a diorama for the modeling contest at the train club. I got to a point where I couldn't do anything else on the diorama tonight so I started working on the backdrop for the layout. Before I knew it I had painted the backdrops from Blue Cut to Silverwood.

I'm not sure just who Charlie Burns is, but someone who knows him has posted this web site of Charlie's N Scale Layout.


I don't know too much about his layout except what I can deduce from the photos. It uses spline roadbed; a high rail height; lower-level staging; and lots of track. It says on one of the pages, "To move the 7 trains through the layout once and back into the helixes to where they started took about 90 minutes." Cool!

Long's Trains in Moreno Valley is having a 30% off sale on selected locomotives. I picked up a couple Kato locomotives for $54 each. One is an SD40 in CP Rail paint for eBay. The other is an SD80 in Norfolk Southern paint to run on my layout. NS and BNSF have an agreement to run coast to coast trains, so I frequently see their locomotives in the Cajon subdivision. This new loco will be a great addition to the roster.

Stuart just emailed to ask how many times I stuck my head into the fans while installing the fluorescent lamps. The answer is zero. I had stuck my head into the fan blades and ripped them out soon after. It was pretty dramatic. My head hit the spinning blade, setting the fan into an odd orbit and striking the garage door. The strike caused the blade to skew, creating a mean shimmy, which led to splinters of fan blades flying everywhere. Each strike against the aluminum garage door, clanged out, causing my dogs to flee in horror. Argh! The fans worked great on previous layouts, but the layouts were never this high off the ground.