Running Bear’s October 2020 Coffee Shop


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Afternoon All,

Ran errands and did chores this morning. After lunch I put in some more risers (2) some cardboard lattice work and plaster clothed what I could. After the plaster cloth dries I need to add another 3' section of track. Since it's still on risers I need to power it before plastering the back drop. I tested the back right corner with the steamer and was successful although I needed to give a couple of bushes a "haircut". o_O

Tomorrow is lawn camp with the boys while wife and daughter go to either Patrick or McDill AFB for groceries. They're both are roughly the same distance away (90 minutes).

Thank you for the likes on the layout progress.

Tom- Yes to both.

Joe- Thank you. Neat picture.

Karl- Pretty location.

Willie- The layout scenes look good.

Sherrel- Thank you.

I hope everyone has a good night.
 
Good Afternoon Everyone......mostly sunny and seasonal in this part of Wisconsin.

Being my Birthday today no model railroading today other than on the computer. Rummy later and then one of my favorites, crab legs.

We're having a tree planted later today to replace an ash killed by the EAB bugs. I planted the ash almost 40 years ago and we treated it annually for the EAB after the bugs started to become a deadly insect for ash in Wisconsin. Apparently, the landscaper didn't treat the tree properly.

Tomorrow we'll drop off our ballots and then down to Southside Trains.

TLOC: Glad you enjoyed your adventures into Southeastern Wisconsin. You traveled through the up and growing suburban areas. I remember them 40 years ago as being all small towns and mostly rural areas. Did you get to see the train run on the tracks near the downtown beach in Pewaukee?

Not much to report today..............

Greg

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New River Mine - Two.jpg

One of my favorite photos of the New River Mine on the layout.-Greg
 
Good Afternoon Everyone......mostly sunny and seasonal in this part of Wisconsin.

Being my Birthday today no model railroading today other than on the computer. Rummy later and then one of my favorites, crab legs.

We're having a tree planted later today to replace an ash killed by the EAB bugs. I planted the ash almost 40 years ago and we treated it annually for the EAB after the bugs started to become a deadly insect for ash in Wisconsin. Apparently, the landscaper didn't treat the tree properly.

Tomorrow we'll drop off our ballots and then down to Southside Trains.

TLOC: Glad you enjoyed your adventures into Southeastern Wisconsin. You traveled through the up and growing suburban areas. I remember them 40 years ago as being all small towns and mostly rural areas. Did you get to see the train run on the tracks near the downtown beach in Pewaukee?

Not much to report today..............

Greg

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One of my favorite photos of the New River Mine on the layout.-Greg

Greg happy birthday, enjoy the crab legs. My go to Friday dinner is a Fried Shrimp dinner.

Yes, right at the crossing, we saw a CP stack train running through. 2 GE engines on the train, 1 leader and a pusher at the end, nothing in the middle. We will come back in better weather to the village of Peewaukee. I love the low carriage clearance signs we saw at many of the RR crossings. This is an area, south of I94, east of Jefferson and north of Hwy 20 that we are not too familiar with. While the pandemic has stopped our overnight trips we are doing a weekly scenic drive where we get out of the car to walk only without folks around. We will eat if they have outdoor tables.

TomO
 
Curt- I'll do the Long runners first. (my version) I don't have all the pics for the couplers on the grain cars transferred to the computer.

I used Walthers 89' channelside flat cars painted and decaled. Bared them together and added the third hitch to the one car. The biggest challenge was to get the trailers to work on curves. The ones from Athearn have a wide space where the tires sit but the trailer never sits right after going through a turn. So I thought if I could make the running gear of the trailer rotate it will always come back to true. After looking at several makes of 53' trailers the Bowser were best suited for this task. The way they mount together I was able to drill a hole through the trailer frame,have a washer between the frame and the running gear and it was able to move for curves.
A couple of sticky weights added to the front to keep it on the hitch and ready to put on.
A few pieces of strip styrene to take up the gap for the wheels so they stay tight. Ready to go last pick shows it going on a curve.
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Good evening Y'all. 51° and cloudy with drizzle. Rutgers U's "Swampside Weather Station",reported 1.69" of rain since midnight. Today's been quite a day. Since noon, I have been to the Cardiologist, for a follow up with favorable results. Went to pick up the wife's new Rx and had stickershock when we picked up her RINVOQ a treatment for Rheumatoid Arthritis. One "covered" 30 supply instantly puts the recipient into the Part D Donut Hole.
($302.37). It is what it is, but when we spoke with the Person from MedImpact, they told us our share was $70.00, for #30. In addition, she had to have a Shingrix (Shingles) Vaccine prior to taking the RINVOQ. Time to look into alternative Part D Plans, eh?

Penn Central MU #222 @ Marcus Hook PA 10-16-1971 Hal Smith Photo.jpg

Penn Central MU train at Marcus Hook, PA. Adjacent to the Main Line, is the Sun Oil Co. #10 Plant.
 
Good good morning ballast tampers, I hope everybody is doing well this morning I'm not we have a lively group here at the coffee shop today ?!

Weather weather wise here in central California the low wa 60°F high will be 90° F. It will be sunny and right now the humidity is 31%.

Hello Flow, Francine, How are my two favorite waitresses doing this morning ? Good to hear you're both doing well just waiting on the railroad crowd to roll on in are you?
This morning I'd like a couple eggs scrambled with hash brown potatoes and either link sausage or sausage patty and some rye toast with butter of course and some black coffee to get me going. .Thanks it'll be good to put some food in the old gut.
 
Curt- the latest hoppers I'm doing were give to me by a friend. They were the first generation Genesis 5161 hoppers. They had a plastic coupler and a small pocket that wouldn't accept a Kadee coupler. The fix became the # 78 which required trimming the coupler pocket to fit the new coupler and box. I trimmed the sides keeping the center mount. (the kadee fix requires trimming everything) I use a #5 box and trimmed the ears off, glued it to the car. The small screws that mounted the original box are small and needed a washer. I had a brass spruce I was going to cut up for a scrap load which ended up being the perfect thickness for a washer. A #153 short shank scale coupler finishes it off.
 

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Morning all,

Went home early yesterday and fell asleep in the armchair. I knew I was tired and the got up when the wife got home went and got pizza for dinner. Shortly thereafter I feel asleep while doing my PT stretches and woke up at 4:20 this morning. Now I came back to the office to restart the copy job that failed overnight. Funny how a full backup of the system takes 15 hours, but restoration of that same data elsewhere may take a week.

I digress, Happy Birthday Greg! It's also my oldest grand daughter's 8th birthday. I'll be around for a bit.

On a side note (hoping not to be political): We got our mail in ballots from the state yesterday. One for the wife and 2 for the boy and none for me. Boy has Jr behind his name and both ballots for him have the same control number. If I don't get one, then I'll have to call the election office on Monday. I think someone screwed up the name in the mail in list.
 
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Good Morning All. Clear and 51° at this location, going up to 77° later today. Another beautiful day for outdoor chores.
Went to go vote absentee yesterday, but my wife had misread the website and they weren't open. We'll try again on Monday. My new desktop computer arrived yesterday, but I don't have the time to set it up yet. Interesting that the keyboard that came with it is the exact same one that I got with my old HP computer from 2009! One less thing to learn!:) You may ask why a desktop instead of a laptop or a notebook? Well, I like sitting at my desk with a place for my drink and note pad; I have never been adept at touchscreen or touchpad devices (phones included); and most of all I like my 23" monitor. I also don't have to deal with batteries or chargers.

How about a big ol' breakfast burrito for me this morning Francine. Spicy salsa on the side.

Thanks once again for the likes and comments yesterday regarding the layout progress; Karl, Tom O, Sherrel, Rick, Jerome, Phil, Curt, James, Tom, Guy.

Another gift from my wallet yesterday was some vinyl traffic pavement markings that I described earlier this week. Fellow member Jim (Jim69cuda) provided information regarding these over in his Walther's Motor Hotel thread (which looks really good), and I couldn't resist trying some out.
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I am most interested in the two lower sheets, the upper two contain numerous pieces of white or yellow highway stripes.
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Here is my first application to a asphalt covered street (made from tarpaper) in Charlottesville that I recently featured here.
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Kinda makes my hand-painted stripes made with a paint pen look rather anemic!:( More experimentation coming up.
Speaking of Charlottesville, I am going to return to that scene for a bit. As you may remember, I left off here because I ran out of suitable structures.
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So I found one elsewhere that just didn't quite fit where I had wanted to place it, and I bought the following structure kit from Walther's on my recent trip to the LHS.
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I temporarily assembled it (tab and slot construction) and here's the preliminary look.
10-17-20 007.JPG

And in position with the other structures on the block.
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So onward with actual assembly, and adding sidewalks and otherwise completing the other two structures.
Stay tuned.

Troy -
Sounds like most model railroaders I know. We all get confused (cornfused if you're in Indiana), and have lots of temporary lockups in our operating systems.
Mine actually only locks up when Media Player and Foxfire are competing for resources. The fact that I have 60,000 mp3 files most likely doesn't help.
Greg - Belated Happy Birthday.
Joe -
Willie: Welcome to the magical world of Windows 10.
That is my only apprehension. I don't handle significant changes very well. I am hoping that enough time has elapsed to have worked out all of the bugs. That's why I didn't take advantage of their free upgrade offer a few years ago. But my SIL says that I can make Win10 run like Win7. We'll see!
$302.37 is high, but I looked at the discount Rx site GoodRx and your cost may not be too bad.

Everyone have a great day and weekend.
 
Morning, everyone! Seems like a good Saturday to stay home and do some modeling! My blood hasn't adjusted to the 19°F temperature outside, with a wind chill making it feel cooler, yet. There is a skiff of snow on the ground; enough, that it made me scrap the patio before it turned into a slippery, unwalkable rink. So, I've already had my exercise, and it isn't even daylight.

I have been working, intermittently, on my Walthers store. Here is the state of play, with it not glued to the base:
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I scribed some break lines into the small sidewalk entrance, before painting. I'm reasonably happy with the aluminum frame and block work; not so enthused with the brick work. The brick walls on this kit seem harder to do than that last Atlas kit I built. Seems like the bricks are smaller on this building, with less relief. I need to do a-bit of learning, to get it right.
Today, I'll start working on the interior scene. That will be a Walthers printed background and a figure or two, along with a light.

Willie - Nice building you are working on. It has a DPM style of look to it; the design, I mean. Not the model construction method. - I like the crossing marks! They look like they need to be toned down a-bit in comparison to the surroundings , though. - You were a little short on photos, yesterday! I notice things like that.
Toot - I really liked that scenery photo you posted. I want to build a 1/87 barn that looks just like the one in the photo; think Bar Mills has a kit.
Karl - I enjoyed you're scenery photo very much, as well. I'm betting there's a Bass or two in that lake. - We don't have a whole lot of bass in Alberta, and what there is, was introduced.

Thanks for all the likes on my simple posts; and happy birthday to those who celebrate it! I don't count them anymore; just another day, with all the rest of them. Along with Halloween, Valentines, Anniversaries, and any other day that was only invented to be an expensive, commercial pain in the butt.

Have a good one!
 
Howdy.

I reviewed many of your posts and you Coffee Shop Payton’s certainly are busy.

Terry.. I just read your post. Thanks for suggesting a solid state hard drive. We already ordered the other type . It has 2 TB instead of 500 GB as the old one had. It should be more than adequate for the stuff we do. Again, thanks for your thoughts.

Greg ... Happy birthday . Nice nine scene.

Willie... As always, you are busy working on your layout. Nice.

I hope to catch up with all of you soon.


I have been running trains. ATSF Super Chief. GN Empire Builder. CB&Q Zephyr.

Othet stuff.... I got the boat covered and ready for winter storage. I moved it to the storage ubit
 
Good Morning y'all. 42° on the front porch this morning, sunny and very wet.Going up to 59° today. The Military is into major maneuvers at Joint Base Dix, Maguire, Lakehurst.. And I can hear the "Fire for Effect" some 30 miles away. Once the Armor starts blasting away, we will also feel it.

The wife is a bit under the weather today, feeling the effects of her 2020 Season Flu shot on Thursday, and her Shingrix shot yesterday.

Tom: I like your ingenuity coming up with a solution to the coupler pocket problem. Kadee # 153s are my standard, eventually everything will have the Kadee scale coupler with the shortest practicable shank.

Patrick: Pizza is also what we had last night. I can still "taste it".

Willie: The vinyl decals look great on your road. Really make a difference. Desktop, eh? To tell you the truth, if I still had the space available, that's what I would go with. The 23" screen is an incentive. The laptop was great when I needed the portability, but now, it just takes up space on the kitchen table.

The wife's new medication retails for $5900 / month (+ or - small change). Insurance carrier alleges they discount that to 4,000 / month. Good Rx shows a wholesale of $2,000 / month and a cost to us of about the same as insurance. Catch is the Insurance price we are quoted is a co-pay of $70 / month, per the contracted co-pay for a Tier 5 medication. The insurance carrier invokes a benefit payment of $4,000, which automatically throws us into the donut hole, something the insurance carrier should disclose, so there are no issues at the retail pharmacy. To further muddy the water, the donut hole price, is 25% of the medicare price or $302.37, meaning the Medicare wholesale cost is $1209.48 / month. So there is a huge amount of mark-up involved here, and the Plan Manager (MedImpact) gets to pocket the difference...and sluff off the cost of the more expensive products to Medicare. This just further reinforces my complete hatred of the Insurance Industry.

Interestingly enough, it's easy to fall into the donut hole, (i do it by October each year), but hard to climb out. The criteria to "fall in" is around $4K in drug expenses including plan payments, co-pays and any aid or promotional discount. To get out, one needs to spend an additional $ 2350 in medical out of pocket costs to put you into Catastrophic Coverage, which significantly reduces the monthly cost to the consumer. It's also interesting to note that once in the donut hole, the drug manufacturer discounts the cost by 70% and the insurance contribution of the insurance carrier is roughly 5%, and the end user gets to pay 25%. Oh yeah, You still have to pay your monthly Part D premium to the scumbag insurance company. In a calendar year, the wife will go into the donut hole the first purchase of the month, and go in to Catastrophic Level by September.

Considering that it's enrollment time, through December 7, We can change our part D plan...Trouble is so far neither Humana or United Healthcare will even tell me what drugs are covered until I sign up...Got a few more to check out. The agents probably don't know, and are more interested in up-selling me to a Part C Medicare Advantage Plan, most of which limit my treatment options and selection of providers to a network, rather than anyone. I had enough of cost sharing / cost containment with my healthcare policies while employed in the railroad Industry.

FL9 awaiting train in New Haven 10-14-1969 Hal Smith.jpg

FL9 waiting for its next assignment in New Haven, CT. October 1969. Hal Smith Photo. Note the PRR painted E8s (EP22), in the background. Glorious Penn Central days.

Have some work to do today to complete my warehouse. Photo promised when done.
 
Good Mid Morning from out West!
We still did not break into the triple digits yesterday (on my gauge) at only 99 °.
I noticed the TV weather had 102-105° in many surrounding towns. A nice drop to a projected 90° high for today - I haven't looked further down the road. NO rain - NOT even a cloud in a brilliant blue sky!
The Spousal Unit has been on a bitch-of-an-exercise program going for a 3-4 mile walk every morning with hills involved and she will come hobbling in the door in another hour complaining about joints hurting! If she ever can get her knee surgery set up, she is planning a European Paris museum trip in the spring depending on the Virus outlook. She wants me to go, but I tire of museums after a couple hours; she has been in them all but with a group hurriedly passing by and she wants to spend all day and not be rushed - if I am going to go with her then I better renew my passport pronto.
JOE - I'm very sorry that you have to go through all that with the medical prescriptions.
I count my blessings that I have not been in that position. I am not sure that I have the "smarts" to comprehend everything that you have to put up with.
BTW - I really enjoy your photos!
WILLIE - Good on TERRY about the suggestion on the Windows 7 format. Both my laptops have the Win7 desktop set up - otherwise I would be out of the computing business - in which case I might actually get things done as I did before sitting and looking at this thing hours and hours every day.
GREG - A belated Happy Birthday! I am in GUy's court ... seems like every day someone's having a "special" day of some sort and around this family it is expensive - (thank God for gift cards).
TOM - Nice work on the coupler replacements and the TOFC's!
GUY - Surly you can't be serious with thos temps and snow already? Then I think about my Colorado days and the fact that we were skiing in deep powder before Thanksgiving which is only a month away?

How about this - I think it's ugly - but some like it!
The only GE locos on the property.
MKT u23b.jpg
 
Good morning from the CDT zone in Wisconsin. As always I love the pictures.

Donut hole! What a lousy subject that affects so many of us and politicians and insurance carriers could care less. After they figured out I had Lyme’s I hit that frigging hole in August. A total rip off...

Finishing trees, redoing the paint booth. Helping the daughter redo her kitchen cabinets which is why I can redo my paint booth. Got her old kitchen range hood.

winds here are gusting at 45 so So. Central Wisconsin wind chill is at 40. Have a great day.

TomO
 
JOE - I'm very sorry that you have to go through all that with the medical prescriptions.
I count my blessings that I have not been in that position. I am not sure that I have the "smarts" to comprehend everything that you have to put up with.
BTW - I really enjoy your photos!
Sherrel: Having been involved with the sordid details of the Mother in law's medical mis-adventures and the resulting consequences has taught me a lot. Yesterday, struck a nerve, especially the deliberately obtuse insurance company patient representative's refusal to answer relevant direct questions concerning the coverage we are paying for.
 
Tom and Willie (and others, (self included), who survived the experience:
View attachment 118319
Sister Mary Martha.
Man, I took many a hack to my left hand. Dad finally went to school and said I was left handed and they might as well stop trying to change it. On the plus side I can pretty much do everything with either hand, except write legible, still must use left hand.
 
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