It seems I've been stuck in my recliner for the last week or so. Can't seem to get motivated to work on anything I can't do with a DVD playing. Blame it on this head cold, or too much work, who cares. Anyway, I've managed to catch up on some work on the web sites.

Bill Messecar is a long time member of the Cajon Pass group. He's put together a history of the Corona Packinghouses which I assembled on a web page for the Corona Model Railroad Society. He's coming out on the 27th to check out relics of the Elsinore Branch as research for a future layout. I snuck out for a couple hours yesterday and found the remnants of five old bridges along the right-of-way.

While doing some other research on the history of the Cajon Group, I stumbled onto a great website by Richard D. Thompson, which includes a history of the Toll Road through Cajon Pass. On the site, there is a portion of an 1875 Los Angeles and Independence Railway map through the Pass. There are some nice photos of the ranches that eventually became the places we know and love today.

I was saddened to learn that the owner of Joe's Cafe in Devore has sold the place to a new owner. I'm bummed. Not so much because of his apparent (and well deserved) retirement, but the fact that he got away without a send off from the regulars. I hope he knows how much we valued his fine establishment. I hope the new guy can do chorizo and eggs like Joe did.

As for today, well it's Super Bowl Sunday. I gotta stay in the recliner for that!

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.

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.