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.

This morning, Wayne and Drew came over for a long overdue work day on the layout. Santi tried to talk me into heading out to the Pass, but we have our N scale version of Cajon to work on instead.
We made some adjustments to the lighting; added safety bariers to the hidden tracks; completed the grade transition at Summit; removed the backdrops at San Bernardino; repaired the backdrop at Drawbar Flats and Silverwood; plus ran trains.

Drew spent some time experimenting with his digital camera and the movie editing software that comes with XP. You can see the results here (2.5 Mb). Somehow I think I'll be posting more movies in the future.

Just because something was posted on the Internet doesn't mean it's true, but if it is, there was an interesting post over on TrainOrders. "On Saturday, November 20, BNSF, UP and Amtrak put a record number of trains (by BNSF's count) over Cajon Pass - 118. That was 89 BNSF and 26 UP freights and 3 Amtrak movements. Not counted: an unusually high number of helper movements (16). This eclipsed a record of 111 trains set four days earlier." Now the biggest problem with this is that Amtrak only runs two trains a day. So what was the third Amtrak train? There is no mention of this in the BNSF news releases, nor in a news search on Google.

What a storm! Last night we had a tremendous storm roll into the area. Thunder that shook the house, and no gap between the flash of lightning and the clap of the thunder. When the sun came up, the hills south of the house had snow covering them down to just a thousand feet. I knew that Cajon had to be spectacular. I had some family obligations so I couldn't head out. Santi was out there though, and got some fantastic photos.

Stuart posted his photos of last Sunday's railfan trip here. I can't figure out what happened with that photo of me. It looks like I rubbed a maple bar on my teeth, and I don't know why my feet are pointed like that. I like the dramatic lighting on the trains through the cut at Summit.

After the Cajon Group discussion on the extent of the Union Pacific property rights, I thought I'd post something from the California Penal Code...

369i. (a) Any person who enters or remains upon the property of any railroad without the permission of the owner of the land, the owner's agent, or the person in lawful possession and whose entry, presence, or conduct upon the property interferes with, interrupts, or hinders, or which, if allowed to continue, would interfere with, interrupt, or hinder the safe and efficient operation of any locomotive, railway car, or train is guilty of a misdemeanor.

As used in this subdivision, "property of any railroad" means any land owned, leased, or possessed by a railroad upon which is placed a railroad track and the land immediately adjacent thereto, to the distance of 20 feet on either side of the track, which is owned, leased, or possessed by a railroad.

Within a few seconds of my post, I got a reply from Ted York, "Just don't hinder the operation of the BNSF and you are ok. In the case of the UP just spot them a five dollar bill!" I responded with, "You ain't kidding. My buddy and I were at LAUPT Sunday checking out the Officer's Special when "Security" told us we were in a restricted area and needed to leave. His accent was so thick we could barely understand him. Should've asked if I could buy him a cup of (insert regional hot
drink here).

For those who don't know, Ted York is featured in the current Model Railroad Planning Guide. He has a great HO scale layout depicting Cajon Pass.