Good Morning All. Clear and 68° here in North Central Texas. Looking at 87° for a high today, weather geeks have reluctantly added a 50% chance of rain tomorrow afternoon. They are currently showing wind gusts of 0 mph!
Fine day yesterday except the mosquitoes have come out. I normally don't get bitten, but I got one on the elbow and my wife is a slow moving target for them.
I indulged in my second favorite summer pastime of mowing for a while yesterday. Tried to get my 13 year old grandson to try, but his feet wouldn't reach the tractor pedals. He really wasn't enthused to begin with. I did get the two of them to assist with a couple of other projects though. We moved about fifteen years of my wife's IRS training manuals and notebooks out to the dumpster, and
finally loaded up the car with a whole lot of obsolete computer equipment to take to the recyclers today. It included our first home PC from 1991, a HP model with an unheard of (at the time) 600 MB hard drive.
I am going to try to get in to see the dentist this morning, as the temporary crown that they put on about a week and a half ago slipped off Friday night. I have been holding it in by using some thick toothpaste reapplied daily as a temporary adhesive. Seems to work as I have been eating without incident. It still slips off easily though. Who knows, they might even have the permanent one ready a week early and just install it instead of next week.
Let's try out Mel's new grill this morning Flo. Two over-easy eggs and lots of bacon with a toasted whole wheat English Muffin to go with it.
Thanks for the likes and comments regarding the progress on CUP yesterday;
Guy, Jerome, Louis, Karl, Phil, Chet, Garry, Hughie, Chad, Justin, Curt, Ken, Patrick.
Out in the train shed yesterday, I made a lot more progress on ballasting track. I completed about 8' more of passing siding and 3' of main line.
Located and temporarily placed the first two structures that will go on the aisle side of the tracks.
The first is a corner cafe that I have had for over 25 years. I think that it is a Walther's kit but I honestly don't remember.
It's missing a spire on the cupola.
Did some ground cover and a parking area behind it.
Across the street is a Smalltown structure, Kevin's Toys.
Added a sidewalk along the aisle side that butts up to the unseen off-layout street.
I also started with the first step in constructing a grade crossing in this area.
That section of roadway between the tracks is a piece of tarpaper glued to a piece of .020" styrene. The pipe is just a straw painted concrete on both ends. Nothing fancy here yet, nothing fastened down yet.
I work backward sometimes, as I will have to move everything out of the way when I work on the area behind this, but this area's layout was already pretty much predetermined and I can show some quick progress.
Things will slow down today as I have a few other things to do.
Alan - I continue to enjoy your progress reports on the COSF project, both the ups and downs.
Curt - In my experience, many of the Walther's kits suffer from poor design. This is complicated by poor or incomplete instructions. But I still purchase them as they are the only real "pike-size" industries available to the model railroader.
Justin - As others have posted, all of the issues with the GP38 look to be fixable with some time and effort.
Everybody have a great day.