has it been this long?

Wow, it seems like forever ago I visited or posted on this blog.

Things have changed quite significantly in the land of model railroading for me. The layout has taken a huge turn in my new home and has gone through numerous rebuilds of varying degrees of success. I had some pretty impressive and ambitious track work done, but never got something I was happy with till recently.

I'll make sure to post an updated track plan with some photos later on. But I fear my hobby may take a turn to the shelf in the following years as the wife and I are planning on having a baby and that means goodbye to the train room, hello nursery.

Just when you think things couldn't get worse...

I got two nice steamers for Christmas this year...

A wonderfuly beautiful Con-Cor 2-10-2 USRA, and an equally appealing Bachmann Spectrum 2-8-0

The Consolidation has some damage, was obviously used and returned, and my wife paid full pop for it for Christmas... so naturally a lil pissed off. Oh well, the shop says they will replace it for me. Anyways... I proceeded to install my DZ123 decoder from my shelf... when stripping the wires, they all popped off the decoder! how wonderful! I can't even find a pinout... I decided I should probably test the lil bugger before tearing it apart on my workbench... yup, don't run. Fuck.

The 2-10-2 is a similar story of pain and suffering. This one came via Ebay thanks to ma & pa, so I really have no idea what recourse I have. It was a sealed loco though... very pretty. I painted it right away, slopping on the grimy black paint over the light blue gray of the Pennsy naming it had before. I then...without testing it first... installed a Soundtraxx Tusnami decoder. Thing sounds brilliant! Too bad it don't freakin run!

So I spent a good 4 hours troubleshooting it and getting it hooked up to run properly... finally with many wires running that were not there before... I got it running for 20 minutes on my test oval.... Then...and this is where it gets good... I hear chugging from the decoder, but I don't hear it moving! WTF?! The MOTOR FUCKING SIEZED!

I'm about ready to go sell it all and play with airplanes...

Some photos in Calgary

Just some photos from my recent trip to Calgary

video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-U81eun5OA

is a nice video that inspired me for the top layer of that layout plan below... in fact I wanna re-create this scene as much as possible!