Good evening. 67*F and calm in central MD. I don't have enough time to type-in comments on every post of the last ~10 pages, but I'll try to cover the highlights.
Sure hope
Eric's treatment went as planned...
Sherrell - I'll add you to our Prayer List for your mystery medical situation!
I see
Garry and
Willie celebrated anniversaries - congrats to you both!
Dave in MN - best of luck on your new job, glad you found a decent home for your layout!
15 years since 9-11; remembering the events of that tragic date always causes a visceral reaction in me, to the point where I have to quickly get my mind off it before I do or say something I might regret!
What a totally stressful week this has been!
First, my new iPhone 6S kept "dropping" calls when I was in my trainroom, and Verizon tech support couldn't do anything about it so I had to trade it in for a Samsung Galaxy S7; at least now I can have conversations in there with minimal breakup. All the troubleshooting wasted a lot of my would-be free time though. On Thursday night, Stephanie (my daughter in FL) calls and tells me she lost her purse, with some critical documents in it! So I scrambled to add her name to my ID theft protection service. [She called the following morning to report that she'd recovered it, *
whew*!] Then later Friday evening she calls MOH and says there is no money in her "flight" account - WTF!? The financial aid people had told us her loan had been approved and she was covered thru spring 2017? So that was another few hours of crisis resolution; we had been unaware of the fact that we were supposed to log onto the University website and click a few buttons to get the funds transferred.
So, not much mrr time for me the past few days. But I
did finally get out there and finish wiring-in the new trackwork, and tested it. I finally got enough of the tools and other clutter off the layout surface to get a few photos.
The first one shows the new spur (with the twin Pennsy Hi-Cubes on it) on the North end of the FMC plant:
Here is where I put in two new tracks (upper left) for receiving bulk liquids - apparently not only paint and solvents were shipped in tank cars, but also motor oil, brake fluid, etc.; hence the need for additional tank car spurs:
...and this one shows where I put in an extra spur for receiving later-stage assembly parts. There won't be any unloading dock there; I'll simulate a few roll-up doors on the end wall where the cars get pushed into the interior of the building, which can now only be represented in two dimensions as part of the backdrop.
In a nutshell, I
doubled the number of spur tracks for each type of freightcar that services the Ford plant.
The long-term plan is that there will be
two Ford plant locals scheduled during each op session - one at the beginning, the other during the last hour. Before that can happen, however, I also need to double my inventory of automobile industry-specific rolling stock; and that won't be happening any time soon since my daughter's start-up college expenses totally depleted our checking account!:rollyeyes: