A Rainy Day

The weather was generally lousy while Lukey and Kenzie were staying with us for a few weeks.  We didn't have many rainy days of solid rain but we had a lot of dark days with intermittent rain.  One particular day was indeed a solid rainy morning so we set up Lukey's trains in the kitchen while Gee worked from her home office.  

Due to the pandemic, we converted our "train room" into Sheila's home office so we had to find another place to run Lukey's trains since Gee was working from home while Lukey and Kenzie stayed with us.  

We cleared off the kitchen table and set his HO scale layout on the table.  That actually worked far better than I thought it would!  The layout hung off the end of the kitchen table but the layout itself was solid enough to handle the weight of the trains without the support of the table under the last foot of one end of the layout.  Having the train set on a table was far more comfortable than running them while the layout is placed on the floor.  (My knees can't take that kind of abuse anymore!)  So, we were running trains in the kitchen on the kitchen table while Gee was using her home office in our train room.  

Amtrak making a stop at a rural train station...

One of the structures on this rather small HO scale layout is a house.  Lukey just noticed for the first time that this house is actually wired for interior illumination!  

The Amtrak engine, with its very distinctive rumble and horn, rounding the curve as it approaches a train station.  The sound of this little locomotive is so realistic that it always reminds me of all of our Amtrak journeys...

I have some O scale trains that are narrow gauge trains so they can run on HO scale track even though they are scaled at double the size of Lukey's HO scale trains.  After Lukey spent some time running his trains, including his steam locomotive and some freight cars, I pulled out some of my O narrow gauge locomotives.  I haven't run them in quite some time so they needed some attention...  cleaning, lubing, and in some cases, some electrical work.  It was nice to see my bigger locomotives running smoothly though after some much-needed attention.

On another rainy morning, Lukey and I built, painted and installed some railroad crossings on his little layout.  I'll write more about that in another blog entry.