Scattered Thoughts . . .

Bachmann, O scale, narrow gauge, 4-6-0 steam locomotive. I've been trying to get up to speed with Digital Command Control (DCC) for model trains for the past few months. Well... I started trying to educate myself a couple of years ago but have had difficulty grasping how to fully utilize DCC without having a locomotive to program or even a DCC controller. Over the past year or so, I've collected some DCC locomotives and a couple of different control systems. I'm learning more but it is a bit frustrating for a few reasons. First off, if you want to take a fairly easy route, you can just buy a DCC locomotive and use it in its default configuration with just about any DCC controller. This is certainly the easiest and quickest way to get up and running in DCC. That is not me though. I like to perfect things to my own preferences. I'd like to write a blog post about all the difficulties in programming... all the different DCC systems available today... compatibili

I managed to get a little bit more work done on this hopper conversion project today. (As mentioned in previous blog entries, I'm converting four American Flyer S scale hoppers to O scale narrow gauge hoppers.)  Last weekend, I had previously cut two different sizes of bulkhead shims for shimming the coupler boxes to the correct height from the rail but I had not glued them in place. That was today's job.  Since I had already pre-cut all the shims, today's work was fairly easy. I had a little bit of trimming to do on the first of eight sets of shims but I today's task was to simply glue each shim in place with some super-glue gel.  Next, I can glue some brake wheels in place on one end of each hopper. Hopefully that will be quick and easy task too. Hmmm... I need to pick up more glue first... I just remembered that I also need to build or buy some stirrup steps for each of the four hoppers. Once these are installed then I can spray paint each of the cars...  L

My health has been quite lousy the past few days... I clearly overdid it this past weekend... and even my spine is painfully inflamed so I've been doing very little. I have, however, managed to spend a little time each day with a camera in my hand and that has been nice. This morning, I had intended to work on a different project but some trains from the long weekend with Lukey and Kenzie were in my way. As I was thinking about whether or not to use up the precious energy needed to put away these trains, I decided to shoot some photos of this particular set of trains instead (mostly, the locomotive interested me). It seemed like this option would use less energy than my original plan and, besides, this is another project I have been wanting to accomplish for quite some time anyway. So, here we have an O scale Hudson steam locomotive... with real smoke coming out of the boiler... and, I must say, this was a difficult shot to capture and it was a time consuming little project!

This morning, I started gluing the grab irons on the O scale narrow gauge hoppers that I am converting and detailing. As usual, this is not working out the way I expected. Getting the Crazy Glue Gel into the tiny holes is a sloppy task even while using a toothpick. The glue is bunching up and I am leaving spiderweb-like glue trails between all parts. It seems to be taking forever to dry too. I expected this to require me to work quickly before the glue set with the grab irons solidly in place. It is not working that way. It turns out to be a bit messy and it is not holding quickly. I stopped after adding the grab irons to just one of the four hoppers. I decided it would be best to wait to see if the glue will indeed set up well enough to hold these tiny grab irons in place. I don't want to do all four hoppers this way only to find out it won't work.  In addition to seeing how well the glue holds after allowing some extra drying time, I also want to see how

Sometimes the light magically falls on an interesting subject perfectly.  I had a small fleet of fairly large sized O scale (same scale as Lionel trains) F9 diesel engines sitting on a couple of tracks and the sun was low and streaming in a nearby window as a sliver of light... this light was reflecting off a windshield, which was nice, and some of the light was reflecting down in between the two tracks softly illuminating the sides of the locomotives in shadow... I really like the period when late steam engines shared the tracks with early diesel engines. It was a time of change... a time of growth... a time of moving forward... a time when railroads were the way to travel and move freight. This was a period at the pinnacle of the golden age of railroads and, unfortunately, as time would prove, the beginning of the end of the golden age of railroads. The only thing I can think of to improve this shot would be to have had a late steam engine softly illuminated in the background

My two newly procured Atlas F9 O scale diesel locomotives arrived in the mail today. (Thank you to our friend and mail-carrier, Christine! By the way, we all need to get together for a few drinks soon!) These two fairly large locomotives were packaged very nicely. When I finally unwrapped all of the protective wrapping, they were in much nicer condition than I had imagined. They actually look significantly less used than my previously procured Atlas F9 diesel. This was great news! Next was to set up a test track so I could see how well they run... I pulled out some 2 rail, O scale track... I assembled about a dozen straight pieces to make a 12 foot test track... grabbed my old trusty power pack (these are old analog DC locomotives)... I quickly dug out a couple of power leads with alligator clips... connected the clips to the track... plugged in the power... and placed the first locomotive on the track... The lights came on and it runs very nicely! It runs smoothly at slo

Back a couple of years ago, I happened to win an O scale (the old Lionel size) diesel locomotive on eBay for about $25. It runs on traditional 2 rails rather than 3 rails and can even run well on the tight curves necessary in a relatively small room (I have no room for large sweeping curves). I wanted to find a few more of these EMD F9 locomotives. About a week ago, someone advertised three of these locomotives up for auction on eBay. Finally! Long story short... I won the first one... was quickly outbidded for the second one... and then won the third one! The two diesels I won are still in the hands of the US Post Office but I'm already putting together a plan for this small fleet of locomotives. First, I needed to come up with a numbering scheme. There is a big "853" on the side of each of these diesels. Repainting is too much work so I decided to just add a suffix to each number...  853A, 853B, and 853C. This morning, I set out to create backlit numberboards for

Sheila and I had a nice weekend and actually managed to get out of the house again. We said goodbye to a friend on Saturday... had a few drinks and some food... but my health crashed quite quickly near the end of our socializing. I spent the following 24 hours sick as a dog begging for some relief. For the most part, I have a fairly good handle on balancing my health with a lot of medications. When my health gets really poor, however, there is nothing that can be done but to ride it out and hope it passes quickly. Even though I say I have a fairly good handle on balancing my health, this still happens weekly but which symptoms appear seems to be quite random and experiencing this weekly is far better than daily! So, Sunday was a down day for me. It was pouring rain outside, windy, with thunderstorms all day so I knew I would be staying indoors anyway. I decided to take advantage of being stuck indoors and worked on some of my model railroad locomotives.   I pulled out some tool

This past weekend we met up with a group of friends and family for one of the largest annual train shows in the country. The grandchildren accompanied us this year as well. This was their first visit to any train show and I suspect it was probably the first of many train shows for them. I shot quite a few photos as well as some video... a bit of each will be shared here in the coming days depending upon how my health is holding up through the rest of this week. Right now I could use about a month of sleep! Before I get into any specifics about our trip, I thought I would start with something simple and show some photos of a train I bought while at the show. I always begin the show with a long list of items that I want to purchase and/or research while we are at the show but, by the end of the day on Saturday, I was a bit disappointed in that I didn't find anything I was hoping to see. Just as I was sharing my disappointment with Sheila, George and Barb, and as the words

My new O scale, 2 rail, F-unit diesel locomotive on a short test track...  (that yellow locomotive in the background is a Lionel GP unit on 3 rail track). My health has been quite lousy for the past week so I have not gotten much of anything accomplished in this new year. I don't want to write about my health right now so this blog post is about something less painful to read. The first good thing that happened this morning is that my health was in the "fair" range.  The next good thing that happened this morning is my car started! It is frigid here... well below zero with wind chills approaching -50 degrees. I know I need a new battery so it was a small miracle that my car actually started this morning.  I ran some errands and arrived home to find our postal carrier leaving a package at my door. Just yesterday, I had found a few trains online in eBay at great prices. These are all O scale, 2 rail (same size as the 3 rail Lionel trains everyone knows except using