Scattered Thoughts . . .

I made a bit more progress on the caboose project for our garden railroad over the past few days.  I am definitely at a nice stopping point now.  I think I can call this little project "completed".  I'll probably change a few more things in the future but, for now, this project is done. Here is a photo, below, showing the 'before' version of this caboose when I first purchased it...  note that this caboose started life with only two axles and four wheels...  no window panes...  no lighting...  shiny molded plastic with molded-in color...   and, generally, very toy-like...  there really was nothing special nor attractive about it.  It didn't even roll well! My goal was to make it a bit more realistic-looking and I had a lot of ideas.   The first thing I wanted to do was to remove those two axles and replace them with two typical railroad trucks which would make it roll much more smooothly.  This required a lot of cutt...

W e finally had a weekend of solid nice weather so I had no problems doing some electronics work out at our little garden railroad.  I expected this project to take an hour or so...  it took all day so I'm very glad I waited for solid nice weather.   I spent far too much time running in and out of the house retrieving tools.  Plus, I always forget how time consuming soldering tiny electronic parts can be for someone who rarely solders.  Needless to say, this phase of this project was far more time consuming than I anticipated.   I set up everything in the late afternoon including some photography gear.  This way, when it did get dark enough outside at around 8pm, I was ready.  I did get some photos and video clips during the day simply to show the new streetlamps installed in position on the bridge.   There is a short video after all these photos below. I captured a photo of my tablet as it was running the software that control...

I t rained all day yesterday (and I thought it was supposed to be a rainy day today too but the sun is shining at the moment...  but it is far too humid for me!) so I stayed indoors and did a little more work on the caboose for our garden railroad.   I cut some basswood to make small awnings for each of the windows on both sides of the caboose.  I carefully glued them in place.  I even painted them after gluing them in place.  It was an easy job but a little bit time consuming.   I feel this adds a bit of depth to the caboose.  It was looking quite flat before and lacking some sort of extra detail.  These awnings fit well.   It is a little easier to see in this photo, below, how I had roughed up the planking on the sides of the caboose the other day.  Before I had done this, the caboose was perfectly molded plastic on a perfectly flat plane.  Now the planking boards are a bit wonky making them look a bit worn which i...

I 've been down for a couple of weeks due to significant spinal pain so I've been taking things slow and easy.  While I've been mostly sedentary, I've been working on a caboose kitbash I've had planned for a few years.   Unfortunately, I never thought about capturing a photo of my caboose before I started cutting away parts of the caboose so the photo below is someone else's photo of the same exact caboose.   This caboose is what is known as a bobber caboose and these cabooses have the distinct characteristics of being very short in length and having only two fixed axles.  The first thing I wanted to change was this fixed two axle configuration.  This caboose never rolled well and it sometimes would derail on our small garden railroad.  I wanted to remove this whole undercarriage and install two typical railroad trucks with two axles each under this little caboose. In these photos, below, you can see that I now have two trucks under the caboose....

W hile Lukey and Kenzie were spending the week with us, Lukey got in plenty of time running trains on the garden railroad...  the Kenzington Gardens Railroad.  As I've mentioned in previous blog entries about this little garden railroad, we control the trains via Bluetooth and the power is supplied by a battery in each train.  There is no need for power in the rails which makes things far easier. It can get a bit complicated running multiple trains at once by yourself but Lukey is now able to control two trains at the same time using his iPhone.  And, he was even shooting photos while running both trains at one point! I don't know if I've ever shared a photo showing the entire garden railroad so I shot one photo showing almost all of it (below).  The only thing missing in the photo is the curve on the right side of the frame that brings the trains back around the bend to the train station on the front side of the garden railroad.  This is very small for a b...