Scattered Thoughts . . .

N ow that my large scale steam locomotive is running nicely in the backyard garden railroad (although I have not had a chance to run it much), I started upgrading my large scale trolley this past week.   I had to order a few different parts for this project but our USPS delivery service is abysmally slow so this little project is going very slowly while I impatiently wait on parts to arrive.  That being said, I've still made some headway the past few days. Just as I did previously with the steam locomotive, I started by disassembling and stripping down the trolley.  I pulled out all the wiring, removed the motor block and started coming up with a new wiring plan.   I have a new motor block that runs much more smoothly than the stock motor block so that was a definite upgrade.  The issue was that I needed to figure out how to mount this new motor block to the trolley since it was not made for this particular train.  I needed to come up with some sort of adaptation. Anyway, the first

Y esterday, we had a barbeque at our house with all the grandchildren.  Just two days earlier, I had finally completed a month of work rebuilding an old locomotive as well as building a little garden railroad around one of our gardens.   At the moment, it isn't much of a garden after trampling it for a month while building the railroad but we plan to have various plants and flowers in this garden next season.  The goal is to have enough tall flowering plants to block seeing the trackwork on the other side of the garden.   Here is a brief review of the sequence of events...   About ten years ago, I found a large scale set of trains for sale at a train show.  The guy was asking $40 for the locomotive, tender, gondola, caboose, and track.  He indicated that he had no idea whether it runs or not which usually means it does not run.  Regardless, $40 for just one part of this set was a tremendous bargain.   I told him that my primary interest was just having a model to work on for a nice