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!

New plans

What you see here (why the hell is it typing a link?)

is the original track plan for my Great Falls layout... but I started to grow unhappy with it and stopped liking the operational abilities of it... so it's time to move on.

That and I convinced the wife to let me take the door off the room, so that gives me a few more square feet of construction room! :)











The new plan... wtf?

is what you see here...

it's a double decker, with the first image being the top layer. Think of this as a scenic run along the Pacific Ocean coming outa the rocky mountains...

So the track won't be as straight as you see it, but will curve along the beach front. Should be a really cool scene!




....


And this is the bottom section. Terminal is as constructed so far... I can't really change it now... but the rest is all new! The lower left section is a return loop as this layout is now a point to point style with two terminals. There will be a small lumber yard inside the loop.

The other side of the layout is a nice branch line with the mainline run. The mainline will actually pass underneath the branchline into the helix which will take the train up 16 inches to the top layer.

I'm pretty excited about this... not only should it be 100x easier to construct that of the first plan, but it should also be more entertaining to operate. Sure it does not have a few of the things I wanted to incorperate... but thats compromise I guess...

Canadian National Mountain U-1-F Class

Conversion of my Bachmann Light Mountain locomotive with vandy tender has started.

First things first, I believe the color is off... True Line Trains Olive is the color I used here...which should be correct but does not seem to be bright enough. So I'll be checking into that PDQ.

The other issue I'm having is that the tender is FRAKING HUGE compared to the prototype... and will be a royal pain in the ass to shorten to the proper size. But that's okay. I'm building this for me. :)

The side rails are made from ting styrene, as is the backing for the cab... which is not completed yet.

But for a first attempt at kitbashing I'm actually quite pleased with my progress. It was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. The cone is the next step...which I still don't know what I'm gonna do...