Scattered Thoughts . . .

T his year, it seemed like all the grandchildren were really excited to be watching the garden railroad which was nice.  It definitely held their attention for quite a long time!   Lukey enjoys running the trains so he definitely enjoyed himself with this little garden railroad.  Then again, that should come as no surprise since he has always been interested in trains.  I ran one of the trains for a bit but Lukey spent quite a bit of time running both trains. These trains run on battery packs rather than power through the rails.  I made sure both trains were fully charged the night before the barbeque and we had no problem running the trains all day long without a hiccup.  They still had power when I brought them back indoors at the end of the night.  Lukey and I control the locomotive and trolley using apps on two of my tablets so it is all wireless which makes things very easy. This year, the grandchildren got to see a few new structures around ...

I 've been feeling worse today than yesterday so I assume I overdid it yesterday.  Some of the ear infection pain has returned and I just feel kind of lousy.  Today was just the second day of antibiotics so I know this will take some time even though I seemed to feel great yesterday for some reason.  Plus, the antibiotics will do nothing for the COVID symptoms that I'm still feeling.  I'd really like to get beyond this ear infection pain though. So, while sitting on my butt today, I managed to put some paint on the couple of buildings I built yesterday for the garden railroad.  They are looking a bit more appropriate now. I applied a Barn Red stain on the little train station and painted the windows and doors white.  It is looking much better now even though I still need to install corrugated roofing panels and some trim... You can see the coal storage silos behind the station in this photo below... I applied a brown stain to the upper structure of the silo...

I don't know if I've mentioned it here in this blog, if so, I'll be repeating myself a bit.  Sheila and I had COVID again.  We both tested negative but at this point we're absolutely certain we've had COVID yet again.  I was at the doctor yesterday and they agree that we've had COVID again. When I got up out of bed yesterday, I was exhausted because I couldn't sleep the previous night due to significant pain.  The entire left side of my head was in unbearable pain.  The pain was radiating from my left ear and affected the entire left hemisphere of my head. I was so dizzy that it was making me extremely nauseated.  I took some Meclizine for the dizziness and some of my usual anti-nausea medication.  Then I took about 1000mg of Tylenol.  I was already loaded up on Aleve but that didn't seem to be touching this pain.  After calling the doctor to make an appointment, I even used a warm compress on my ear.  The combination of everything made...

M y goal for yesterday was to get the cockpit seat for the new biplane built, painted and installed.   As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, this biplane is for our garden railroad.  This plane is approximately 1:24 scale which is slightly smaller than the 1:20.3 scale of the trains.  Since this biplane will be positioned over tall plants a few feet over the garden railroad I figured being slightly smaller in scale was a good idea for getting just a little bit of forced perspective.   I needed to make a seat for the cockpit mostly so the pilot could be positioned correctly and not fall into the fuselage of the plane.  This wasn't about modeling an accurate seat but more about a sturdy place for the pilot to be mounted in the cockpit since the seat is not visible with the pilot in place.  If the seat was visible, then I would have spent more time making it look like it belonged in the open cockpit of an old biplane. I had already made one seat f...

A fter our recent visit to the annual train show in Springfield, I thought it would be a cool idea to add an airplane to our backyard garden railroad.  I figured it would look good swooping down right over the tallest of plants.   I haven't fully worked out how I'm going to do this but my first thought was to have a long, tall wood stake hidden in the plants.  I'm thinking that the top 12 inches or so could be clear acrylic.  Then the acrylic could be somehow inserted into the bottom of the plane.  I know I'll come up with some way to mount this plane over the plants but, at the moment, I'm not completely certain.  My timeframe for this railroad is the early 20th century so I decided that a biplane would be ideal.  Finding a biplane in the right scale turned out to be fairly easy (I found one at Wayfair).  Once I had the biplane, I realized that, since it has an open cockpit, I should also find a pilot to purchase. I found a pilot figure on e...

W e awoke to some snow again this morning.  There was only about six inches out there but it is supposed to warm up today with some mixed precipitation so I needed to clear the driveway and rake the roof before it got wet and heavy.  Wet and heavy isn't good for the roof nor is it good for my extensive spinal injuries.  Then it would all freeze again tonight and that would make it impossible to move so it needed to be done this morning.  While I was on the roof looking down on our little garden railroad in the backyard, I was reminded that I never did get a photo of this garden layout from the roof.   Lukey and I talked about capturing a few photos from the roof one day this summer but that day was far too hot to climb up on an asphalt roof!  As it was, we were chasing the shade with lawn chairs while we ran trains so we could stay as cool as possible.  At one point, I think our chairs were on the other side of the yard from the garden railroad si...

I put together a few comparison "before and after" photos of my large scale trolley and my large scale steam locomotive.  I've been wanting to do this for awhile but never got around to it.  Having just working on the trolley again, I figured it was a good time to capture some "after" photos and then compose "before and after" comparisons. In each comparison photo, the top photo is the train in its stock condition from the factory before I did any work on it while the bottom photo shows the same train after I rebuilt it, repainted it and added details. So, this first comparison photo below is of the trolley.  I purchased the trolley a little over a year ago and immediately started planning for an upgrade and rebuild.  It was not running well when it arrived at my door because the motor had a split gear.  I immediately replaced the motor with Bachmann's replacement drive but, disappointingly and unexpectedly, the brand new assembly still ran quite ...