Scattered Thoughts . . .

L ast weekend, Lukey and Kenzie were staying with us so we had a small fire in the backyard to make some hot dogs, corn on the cob and S'mores.  The weather was beautiful, for a change, we had music playing, and we had all sorts of activities and games to keep everyone busy.   It was a nice afternoon and evening but, once it started getting dark, Lukey and I were able to have our first nighttime garden railroad operating session...  which was a lot of fun!   I plan to eventually add more lighting to this little garden railroad along with more people figures, another bridge and a few other interesting features.  The current lack of lighting became very obvious when the sky was completely darkened so I'm thinking I could use a few more features that are illuminated.      This first nighttime session was fun though!  Here is a short video of some of the action...

T oday, Kenzie and I had a really nice "art day" and we produced some nice pieces of art.  I need to purchase a few more frames and mat board because I realized today that I don't have any on hand anymore for framing small pieces of artwork.  Actually, I found that we are short on a few art supplies so I'll need to remedy that also before I forget. After spending far too much time searching for and digging out our art supplies, we sorted out what we would need for today and then came up with a plan.  We chose a couple of ideas and decided upon some nice compositions for two pieces of artwork each.   We sketched a few ideas and then did a little practice on some scrap paper before we touched the watercolor paper.  Then we talked about shapes, colors, values, light and shadows for our compositions.  Below are a couple of our initial sketches to help iron out sizes of the basic shapes... The first watercolor piece of art was sort of a memento of our Christmas week in Man

Y esterday, for the first time, I had the opportunity to run two trains in our garden at the same time.  I was able to run my newly upgraded trolley (reassembled yesterday morning) and my big steam locomotive with its tender and two passenger cars.  I have little to no experience running two trains at the same time, by myself, so I did everything much more slowly than usual.  I didn't want a collision! While I was running these two trains, I kept moving the camera around the garden to get a few different perspectives.  The next time I do this, however, I need to pay closer attention to the levelness of the camera.  The camera I used doesn't have an electronic level so I eyeballed it on the small LCD screen in bright daylight...  less than an ideal way to clearly see things I need to see clearly.  I also need to be more creative and careful with different angles.  That being said, this is a fairly nice first video showing two trains running at the same time in our garden.  The p

I spent much of the day yesterday finishing up wiring the large scale trolley for the new electronics, new motor block, and new battery power.   I had all sorts of room in my big steam locomotive's tender when I did this same upgrade to that locomotive but this trolley has far less room so it was a frustratingly tight fit and things are not fitting as well as I would have preferred.  That being said, even with seeing some wires inside the trolley, this was definitely a worthwhile upgrade because I would not have used the trolley otherwise.     My plan was to keep everything I added to this trolley out of sight.  I added a lot...  the battery was perhaps the largest thing, a speaker in a homemade speaker box is large too, the electronic circuit board, a charging jack, a fuse holder, an on-off-on switch, and all the wiring.  I was hoping to be able to hide everything snugly up against the underside of the roof while the jack, switch and fuse would be under the seats with access from

M ore than a week ago, I decided to put together some photos and a video that more closely show the vast upgrades I accomplished on my large scale steam locomotive.  Since I was so busy getting ready for a barbeque with the grandchidren, I completely forgot about all these photos as well as the video until I was showing Sheila a photo of something our grandson, Lukey, noticed about one of my gondolas that I had never noticed.  He noticed that it is a model of a gondola meant specifically to carry gold from mines.  I had no idea but it makes sense since these old ten-wheelers were among the first locomotives sent out to the wild west.   Since I never really finished showing better photos of these upgrades, I guess I'll try to get this blog entry completed before heading to bed tonight. _______________________________________________________ First, let me preface this with a quick update on my health since things weren't so great today.   Quite simply, today was a rather lousy he

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

P arts of downtown Waterbury are under water again.  There are photos of this all over Facebook but I don't want to share other people's photos on my blog so you'll need to find the photos on Facebook.  In addition to extensive property damage to homes that were damaged just last July, there are significant road closures mostly due to the roads being washed out.  Some of the road closures are to keep people out of the areas that are still under water. Below is a map of northern Vermont showing the road closures.  As you can see, there is a big concentration of road closures in Waterbury.   At the moment, the status of our barbeque scheduled for Saturday is unknown.  Liza and Whitney are both trapped with no way to get out of there immediate area.  This may change by later today or tomorrow but, for now, they cannot go anywhere. We had some water in the house at a known roof leak.  Actually, it is a leak around the furnace flue.  Every few years I need to patch it so apparen

W e're having a fairly big barbeque on Saturday for all the combined summertime birthdays so all the grandchildren will be here.  As luck would have it, about a week before we are having people over to eat some food, our oven broke.  After waiting on parts to arrive and for me to squeeze in some time and effort in fixing it, we finally have a working oven again. We've been sort of neglecting the oven since COVID so it needed some work.  In order to replace this part, I had to disassemble quite a bit of the oven.  While I had the oven disassembled, I decided to give it a good cleaning too.  We can actually see through the glass door now!   This was a last minute task for today before dinner.  I was only about 30 minutes late with dinner tonight so this task wasn't too time consuming.  It was a pretty dirty and disgusting task though. Most of the day was spent programming my large scale steam locomotive.  I've spent quite a bit of time on this project!  After programming

T oday was the day for working on the big curved trestle bridge on the new garden railroad in our backyard.  I had no problem squeezing in and completing everything...  cutting wood, installing foundation blocks, assembling the bents, and then installing the bents.   The only casualty is me!  My spinal injuries are killing me...  my knees are killing me...  every few feet, I buckle in pain.  I don't hit the floor but I drop about a foot and freeze for a few seconds in excruciating pain.  Hopefully this will pass quickly. This morning, I started with installing the foundation blocks.  Honestly, this part of the install went far more quickly than I had anticipated.  Then again, I went at this very heavy handedly which wasn't my initial intention.  I completely removed a whole wheelbarrow-full of dirt and roots by the big shovelful.  Once I cleared the area under the track completely, I then installed the foundation blocks.  Once I had all the blocks where I needed them, I backfil