Good Morning All. Cloudy and 30°, it's actually warmer this morning than when I went to bed last night at 26°. But it is only expected to get up to 34° for a high today, not a lot of range! Forecast doesn't make a lot of sense though, the range tomorrow is supposed to be 40° to 43°; so there is a missing 6° jump in there somewhere??? The NWS is sticking with rain from Monday thru Saturday, but has now added ice to tonight's forecast. Why not? Since I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow morning to drive to. Remember that there is no such thing as road clearing in this part of the world.
Getting away from the Amazon commercial for a few minutes, I went to and enjoyed the train show yesterday, in Plano TX, a ritzy suburb of Dallas. I did a little shopping and met some people as documented by several of my posts yesterday evening. I was originally planning to visit three layouts on the home layout tour, but information was not available on the website. I had to wait until I picked up the circular at the show. It used to be that there was a booklet available with names, descriptions, hours and directions to all of the layouts on the tour. Not any more. There was just a single page with a QR code on it and you had to look stuff up. Well, I have issues with reading on a phone anyway, but this was worse. Yes, I could enlarge the print, but then I had to scroll left and right to read stuff. Much better to enlarge it and rearrange the words so one wouldn't have to scroll.
After reading up on the three that I was planning to visit, I dropped the third one. It was a live steam railroad club that was just beginning construction. According to the information, they had 150' of track down, of a planned 10,000' looping through two adjoining properties. It was 40 miles away, although it wasn't too difficult to take back roads back to my house, but I just decided to wait until they had more construction completed.
After a lunch, I set out to see the other two, one at a well known MRR club that I had been to before, and the other at an individual's home. It wasn't until I got to the home that I realized that I had visited this fellow's layout about 10 years ago. No problem as I like most layouts no matter how often I visit. This gentleman is really big into automation, animation and electronic wizardry.
He has 8 of those Miller Engineering neon type signs spread out over the layout. Here are a couple.
There's a highway in the backdrop mountains with moving vehicles. The cars are glued to a strip of sandpaper that continuously moves over two pairs of rollers, one in each direction. He is a mechanical engineer and he scratchbuilt the whole thing.
There is also the drive-in movie theater.
He has a large fairgrounds with an ice skating rink, parachute drop, several carousels and a roller coaster. All of them are animated.
Over in his city section,, there are cars that move over a Faller type system of buried guide wires and transponders, all scratchbuilt by him as well.
And there are trains. Nine trains to be specific, all which he ran at the same time on a DC layout, with appropriately placed sensors and other electronic gizmos to avoid collisions.
The downside to me, was that there was no switching opportunities anywhere; and you all know that I like switching.
I did not go out to the train shed yesterday, quite unusual for me.
Todd - I'm with you on taking the shortest distance, pisses my wife off. But I would have taken the cleared path rather than through the snow.
RE: Alexa. My wife still argues with her after three years. The conversation usually ends when she insults the damn machine.
Everybody have a great day.
" followed by the "with care" and "above and beyond" options.
Oh well, winners and losers in everything I suppose!
It doesn't argue back. It just 'doesn't understand'.
