Busy Productive Day

For a nice change, I had a very productive day today.  I was feeling relatively well...  just the typical quite painful spinal pain as well as some long-COVID breathing issues...  so, since I was feeling relatively well, I started my day at around 8am.  

The first thing I did was to jump right into staining the backstops that I assembled last night for the new horseshoe pits.  I'm running quite low on stain so I had to mix two different colors but it looks "okay".  I would prefer a darker color like the rest of the outdoor wood on our property but it will be just fine.

Sheila and I installed these backstops just before the sun set last night.  After installing them, we tossed a few horseshoes to see how the new horseshoe pits are doing.  Unfortunately, I quickly found that I'm not too happy with the quality of the horseshoe set I purchased.  The first thing I noticed is that the stakes are a bit skimpy.  Then I picked up one of the horseshoes and found that they are a bit flat and skimpy too.  It is actually a really lousy, cheesy set.  Sheila and I tossed a few horseshoe anyway.  Sheila foud that she doesn't have the shoulders for this activity so she won't be playing horseshoes.  

Here is one of the stained backstops after I stained them first thing this morning...

Then I jumped right into starting on the trackwork for the garden railroad.  The first part to install was the long straight-away.  This is the benchmark for the whole layout since it sets the elevation of the tracks for the entire layout.  This is a solid section that will be the foundation for the whole layout.  

It didn't take long before the flies, gnats and mosquitoes were a significant distraction so I took a quick break to spray the yard with Yard Guard.  That did the trick!  I didn't have any further problems with bugs for the rest of the day!

I always have a plan.  I actually have pages of plans for this little garden railroad...

Sheila is checking out the progress at lunchtime...

At the end of the day, before dinnertime, I cleaned up the yard, raked the lawn, watered the flowers as well as the lawn and shot a few more photos of what I accomplished today.  It was definitely a very productive day!

The plan is to have a train station and passenger platform between these two tracks.  The siding on the left then turns toward an old abandoned coal facility.  Honestly, I have no idea when the train station and the coal facility will be built.  Maybe I'll get to them later this summer or it will be a winter project for next summer.  I do plan to do a quick build of a passenger platform to place between the tracks very soon though.  

I'm pretty much out of lumber now so we'll need to make another trip to Lowes soon.  The rest of this layout is all sweeping compound curves so creating the roadbed for the rest of the track will be a bit more time consuming since it will require a lot more cutting and piecing together of curved treated wood.  

This is coming along nicely though!