Good evening. It's sunny and 57 here. Supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow.
I had an interesting solution to the brass engine painting question yesterday. I asked the owner of my LHS if he could recommend anybody to paint my 4-8-4 (the guy I had the lead on is booked up until sometime in 2013), and he told me to bring it by. I thought he either had a custom painter in mind, or maybe he was going to paint it for me. Not so. He looked it over carefully, ran it on his test track, and asked me how emotionally attached I was to it
. It seems he had a standing order for one of them if it ever came into the shop. I left without the brass steamer, but took home an Atlas Gold GP38 (custom painted), Athearn RTR GP40X, and Atlas Gold MP15DC, all in Southern. The Athearn unit had a decoder installed, and he gave me a sound only decoder to put in it. Street price of this stuff was around $450 or a touch more. It wasn't exactly the way I thought it was going to turn out, but these are units I can use, are regionally topical, and I don't have to worry about how I'm going to install DCC and sound in a brass steam engine, as well as get it painted.
Other than that, I got an email from one of the mucky-mucks from the local club, it seems the HO layout had a meltdown yesterday, and with our annual swap meet coming up next Saturday. I guess maybe it wasn't my equipment that had the problems, after all...