Running Bear’s July 2021 Coffee Shop


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Hmmm! Seems kinda slow in here. Did you folks eat all the ice-cream?

I was in the local staging area with the dog. Had to walk across the Athabaska rail bridge 4 times; once there and back to get to and back from where I was going. Then once there and back to collect the pack-bag I forgot to pick up the first time I went across. That bag held all our water.

Anyway, many photos were collected along the way.

This one is of railcars that were brought into the staging yard this very day. I saw some of the action from outside the yard, and did get photos of the switchers at work. Maybe I'll share them tomorrow.
WtCrt Staging_07-14-2021.jpg

You can see smoke in the air in the photo, and I believe you can tell it is hot. Lots of forest fires burning, and the temps are 80F+.
That photo was taken at the end of the day, on my way home from our hike. The two SD40's are long gone by the time this photo was taken.

Hope you are all well! Have a good one!
 
Good evening Shop Dwellers! 81*F, calm and humid (with a "feels like" of 84) here in central MD. Many thanks for the "likes" on my Tuesday post.

No mrr news to report. My Ford plant facade project has been waiting in the siding for want of the correct color paints; I'll see if Home Depot has something in a rattle-can that is similar to PollyScale Zinc Chromate Primer as a base for the brickwork. I did several of my steel mill structures with that, I like the finish because it's truly flat and not matte like some of these modern-day "hybrid" combination primer+paint mixtures. I desperately want to avoid having shiny bricks. Another reason I want an oil-based paint is so I can brush-apply Tamiya concrete-colored paint over parts of it without having the red brick color dissolve and leach up from underneath.

I've arranged to use tomorrow as a vacation day so I can drive to the Hobbytown store in Frederick in the morning, then go to Best Buy after lunch to pick out a new laptop. I'm starting to have second thoughts about buying a new computer since my current machine has been behaving itself the last few days. If it seems like the ones that meet my specs are overpriced, I might just try to wait until the Windows 11 machines come out in November; I'm sure the 5yr-old one I'm using now won't be compatible with Win11.

Good Night - and have a Pleasant Tomorrow!
 
Good evening Shop Dwellers! 81*F, calm and humid (with a "feels like" of 84) here in central MD. Many thanks for the "likes" on my Tuesday post.

No mrr news to report. My Ford plant facade project has been waiting in the siding for want of the correct color paints; I'll see if Home Depot has something in a rattle-can that is similar to PollyScale Zinc Chromate Primer as a base for the brickwork. I did several of my steel mill structures with that, I like the finish because it's truly flat and not matte like some of these modern-day "hybrid" combination primer+paint mixtures. I desperately want to avoid having shiny bricks. Another reason I want an oil-based paint is so I can brush-apply Tamiya concrete-colored paint over parts of it without having the red brick color dissolve and leach up from underneath.

I've arranged to use tomorrow as a vacation day so I can drive to the Hobbytown store in Frederick in the morning, then go to Best Buy after lunch to pick out a new laptop. I'm starting to have second thoughts about buying a new computer since my current machine has been behaving itself the last few days. If it seems like the ones that meet my specs are overpriced, I might just try to wait until the Windows 11 machines come out in November; I'm sure the 5yr-old one I'm using now won't be compatible with Win11.

Good Night - and have a Pleasant Tomorrow!
Ken, 8th gen Intel or second gen Ryzen or newer, with trusted platform module are compatible with windoze 11.
 
Morning all,

Currently very humid and 78° in Doo-Dah. Heavy rain expected in the area today, enough so that a flood watch is up.
We have hazy skies due to the smoke in the upper atmosphere from the fires further west.

Do have time for large cup of coffee this morning and pair it up with a couple of those bacon, egg and cheese biscuits Mel's proud of. Thanks Flo!

On the Windows front, not looking forward to Win 11. Looks too much like the Apple platform. I was working with my PC tech yesterday troubleshooting a PC, and was moving about in the command screen (DOS) and he was trying to follow. If the explorer windows is gone, he's kind of lost, but a lot of that is I've been doing this since before he was born. He'll be 36 in the next couple of weeks. My kids are a year behind him.


33 for a lot of older cars, 36 for the newer high capacity cars.
Thank you sir. I thought that to be the case.
 
Good morning gang!

69° degrees and partly sunny out there, heading to 95° with gobs of humidity. Hey it's summer, what did you expect?

I did get down to the basement last night, found out that I need to make a LHS run soon for parts, and also started to get together the excess
locos for the next culling of the fleet.

BBL
 
Good Morning All. Clear and 72° here in North Central Texas. We did not make the predicted high of 94° yesterday, only reaching 87°! Contemplating the weekly grocery/beer run today, Don't need a lot in the way of groceries, but the liquids are low; Diet Coke, beer, iced coffee, sugar-free lemonade, sugar-free A&W Root Beer. I could actually make another week or two on beer, but the wife's Coke and coffee are perilously low.
I'm getting a lot more done outdoors right now with the cooler temperatures. Besides mowing and raking grass clippings, I was able to prune a limb from an oak tree that partially broke about two weeks ago. Got it about 2/3 cut into firewood for fall of 2022.

Just a buttered English Muffin and a handful of bacon for me this morning Flo.

Thanks for the likes and comments regarding the post with the Salvation Army Thrift Store in it yesterday; Tom O, Guy, Christian, Steve, Garry, Patrick, Chad, Karl, Sherrel, Rick, Ken, Tom.

Worked on two projects in the train shed yesterday. I crawled into the far LH corner to finalize structure placement there and move forward.
IMG_6869.JPG

As I previously posted, the RH structure is a John Deere Tractor sales and showroom. It was leftover from my previous layout where it also was a backdrop structure. I dusted it off, cleaned it up and checked out the interior lights that I had installed. I will most likely remove them since the showroom window that they illuminate is not visible here. It is scratchbuilt using DPM wall panels.
The structure on the LH side is Star Manufacturing where they make small appliances, ie window A/C's. It is made from Walther's modular walls. I never fastened the track down here as I wasn't absolutely sure of the clearances until I got the actual backdrop in. Imagine my surprise when I checked continuity and found problems. I had always switched them (not often) using idler cars so I didn't know. Found two missing rail joiners.
IMG_6878_LI.jpg

I don't always add feeders to short spurs. Well that got fixed and the track got painted.
IMG_6878.JPG

Time now to add ballast and paint that other backdrop wall.
After that I cleaned track on the upper level.

Patrick - Terry already posted correctly about the wheels, but as I recall, all Blue Box cars came with 33" wheels to begin with, even though that is incorrect for some of them. Using 36" wheels on them eliminates the need to add the Kadee red washer to bring the couplers up to NMRA recommended height. My rule of thumb is to use 36" on all cars with a capacity of 100 tons or greater.
Tom O - Just curious, is your [lap] pool indoors or outdoors?

Everybody have a great day.
 
Good morning y'all. 83°, and sunny and very humid. Going to 90°. Yesterday was 92° but the storms did not materialize South of 195, or North of the County line. We did hear the thunder from both however. It was a mundane day, the morning spent at Michael's and Trader Joe's. After lunch, I Dull coated the Middlesex building as a prep for weathering. Today looks like ore of the same, although I may drive over and have the Caddie inspected.

B&O GP30 consist.jpg

Note that the lead GP30, has a Capitol Dome on the nose, but is otherwise still in Sunburst scheme, while the second and the GP9 are in full Capitol Dome scheme. No notation as to photographer or location.
 
Good morning from Wisconsin. Our area dodged a bullet weather wise. We got about 2” of rain and some heavy l&t but spread out over a few runs. 1-2:30 then briefly at 6-6:15 and then again around 9. North of us got slammed with heavy rain, winds and lose of power.
I am on the pool deck facing south and I think we are going to get some pop up showers.

Willie, the lap pool is 100 meters or 328’ and it is indoor. It is a 2 lane setup and is 4 meters or 13’ wide. There is a play section that juts out from the lap area midway that is 20’ wide and 60’ long. Terry had it built as a surprise for me as my doctor said it is great exercise for me. It is great exercise but I can’t tell you how times I thought I would drown when I first started doing laps. There hasn’t been too many days go bye that I am not in the pool except during lightning. I exercise in the lap pool 3 days a week but I swim almost everyday. The pool has 60’ of glass wall that can slide open to the deck I am sitting on now. The best thing is that maintenance is minimal as it is a salt water pool, no chemicals. It is also the reason my trainroom went from a nice 32’ long to almost 80’ as it is now the connection to the house and pool. I admit it, I am happily spoiled.

I had the grandkids over early and late yesterday so other then walking into the trainroom to see if some glued foam sheets had dried nothing happened. Hockey practice for the grandson was interesting as the coaches called it a fun day but I could see the skills they were reinforcing. Terry should be back by noon today. She said the crowd was so loud at the game she turned off her hearing aides. The Bucks won it in basically the last 7 minutes.

Enjoy your day
TomO

the pulp yard for the paper mill
A6C8A1C3-7F75-40B5-8AE1-89E44ACCD3F2.jpeg
 
Good Morning!
I'm not a big fan of the weather guessers using words like 'maybe', and 'I think'. 'Maybe' it's going to rain tomorrow, 'I think' it will hit around 32C. Shouldn't they be a bit more precise, considering they are backed by millions of dollars worth of modern weather predicting equipment and radar.
The guess for today is hot and 0% chance of rain. The guess for tomorrow is sunny and hot, but, bring an umbrella.

Joe - That's a wonderful, close-up GP30 photo. I like that.

Willie - The backdrop structures angle cut like that for 3d effect look good. I'm going to try that when I get to my layout this winter. It seems to me that I could lessen the width of my layout table using that technique. - I assume those short spurs are for a single railcar on point.

Karl - I hope we're going to see a photo of what you pick up at the LHS, and frankly, a photo of the LHS would be cool. It's always interesting to see what kind of shops there are on the other side of the continent. In the west, we don't have alot of brick buildings, for example.

I've been taking a whole lot of prototype rail photos these last days. It's going to take me a few hours just to organize and file them, along with backing them up on the flash drive. Most are rail cars and track area landscapes, but there is also quite a few engine studies. I mean to take care of them on a rainy day, if it ever rains this summer.

Here's a short photo set from yesterday. This is the SD40-2W engines, CN 5272 and 5329, actively positioning rail cars into the Whitecourt staging area. I wasn't expecting these engines to show up, so I was already out of the yard going somewhere else when they came in. Counting myself lucky that I was able to get these shots of the engines at work.
These photos are in the order that they were taken:
SD40Switchers_07-14-2021 (1).jpg

SD40Switchers_07-14-2021 (2).jpg

SD40Switchers_07-14-2021 (3).jpg

A photo that was posted yesterday evening shows the final result of the railcar placements in the yard.

Won't be taking photos today. The wife is on a bird attracting mission since the birdbath I built for her proved to be a success. Now she bought more equipment and rabbit gnomes; she wants me to build better looking bird baths. - That's what I'm up to for today.

Have a good one!
 
Greetings all!

Blessed rain yesterday, and then cool and dry air moved in. Had our second glass of wine out on the front deck at sunset and it was almost chilly. But I refused to turn on the deck heater. We have one of those tall, mushroom looking propane heaters on both fore and aft deck (front and rear, that is) which gets lots of use here in Minnesota.

I was interested in an old MR article, so bought an Ebay lot of old MR magazines from 2003. I've mentioned that I have been having trouble sleeping through the night and Tuesday night was no different, so got up to read for a while in the basement sitting area where it is a comfy 66F. Broke out one of these old MR magazines and read a short bit about the "Minnesota Commercial" short line shunting RR here in the cities. Must have read that article about 03:00 Wednesday morning, and guess what I saw on an overpass while driving over to St. Paul? Sorry, I'm not good enough as a railfan to tell you what the loco was, but a switcher (road switcher?) was backing up on the overpass and clearly marked "Minnesota Commercial." I may have found my contemporary prototype to model! Article from 2003 stated they have one of the most diverse loco fleets in the nation. Might be fun!

No train work, yesterday. Wife-unit had a bad evening with some memories haunting her, so paid much attention to her. And still focusing on the bracelet project, which I hope to finish by the weekend. Golf tomorrow near St. Cloud, that'll be an all-day-er. Girls are planning a "day" Saturday so hope to do some serious wiring on the layout.

Blessings to all! ----- Steve J
 
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