As we brace for another rain storm, I figured I'd post some quick notes.

BNSF has announced a new logo. I can't help but think the logo looks like the Penske truck logo.

Hugo has announced that he's moving out of the area. His absence will be deeply felt at the Corona Model Railroad Society. That's Hugo on the right.

I've been swapping out my Electrofrog turnouts for the DCC friendly Insulfrog turnouts. I think I need a higher wattage soldering iron so I can melt the old solder without screwing up the ties.

In my last post, I said there hadn't been a lot of work on the layout lately, and that hasn't changed. We had a week of incredible rains, and Prado Dam did it's job of backing the water up into the wildlife preserve behind our house. Usually, I can walk across Temescal Creek (150 yards behind my house) by hopping across about three rocks. At the peak of the storm, I couldn't throw a rock across the narrowest point. The water has receded now, and we have dozens of Snowy Egrets enjoying the feast of frogs and dead things. You can see the woods that are my back yard wildlife preserve at the top of this photo.

I took advantage of the MLK holiday to head up to the Pass and try to find my Mojo again. As this photo from Santi's website shows, it was absolutely gorgeous up there. Many ephemeral springs were flowing and there were animal tracks everywhere. Mondays are always slow on the Pass, but I managed to see a few trains before heading home.

There hasn't been too much going on with the trains lately becuase of the huge rain storms and working with Andy on his science fair project. He wanted to figure out which batteries work best for his toys, so we came up with a pretty cool little experiment. At first he wanted to just put each brand of battery in a flashlight and see how long it took to go out, but that is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Instead, we took a motor, built a pulley assembly and attached a bike odometer to the pulley. It measures to the millisecond each battery's duration and strength to the hundreth of a mile. So far the results spell doom for the Kodak brand battery.

I was checking out some photos from different layouts and found mention of Carsten Lundsten, a Danish guy, living in Copenhagen but building an N scale layout based on Lamy, New Mexico. Originaly, he was going to build a layout including the Mojave desert and Cadiz. I think his layout looks great. He is an electrical engineer working on railroad signal systems, and wrote a great guide to North American Signal Sytems.