Running Bear's September 2020 Coffee Shop


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Good Morning All. Mostly cloudy and 71° to start our day. I got up much earlier and looked in and just saw Terry here at that time. Got bored reading some online news stories and went back to bed, somewhat unusual for me! Slept 90 minutes (!!!) more and now I am behind in my day. I need to take care of my wife for a while and I'll be back later.
 
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FRISCO #2016 "Citation" ... Photographer should have crossed the track and put the Sun behind him.
Thayer MO Historical Society about 1966.
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Morning All a cool Double Nickel this morning in the Ozark Foothills. Flo. Coffee and a bowel of Oatmeal.

Tom. I like that message

Troy. Your layout is moving right along looking smart. Hope you have a good day I feel your pain I have 3 Daughters my self

Willie. Don’t be so hard on your self we’re getting old and need more rest. That’s why I think Toot needs to at least sleep a week.

Sherrel. Nice pics I’ve been through Thayer Mo. many times nice pics thanks for posting

Today I have I to go to the Feed Store for some Chicken feed got to keep those Cackel Berries on the table then it’s a lots of yard work the Cucumbers are dead only canned 6 quarts this year because of this virus everybody was Hoarding up the Dill this year and mine didn’t far to well.Tomatoes did well my second picking is on if I can keep those Squirrels from eating them. Sherrel this pic is for you it’s a old Atlas O I pick up several years ago. I’ll check in later be safe.




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Good morning all. A warm start for the day up here at 61 degrees and an expected high around 95. Next week we are expecting a drop in temperatures with the high only on the 50's. Yesterday we had a forest fire start just north of Bozeman in the Bridger Mountain range. Heard on the news that they are going to have slurry bombers on the scene today. There are some homes not too far south of the fire as so many people have moved into the area in recent years. This photo was taken shortly after it started. Sherrel must be shipping the hot temps up here.
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I will have to agree with those who commented about my grand daughter looking older that 11. Girls that age sure didn't look that way when I was growing up.

I will have to agree with the statements about the BL2 being an ugly locomotive. I sometimes wonder if the train crews had a paper bag over their heads when working with one. I have one that I custom painted for my railroad many moons ago. I can't remember who made it. The chassis and motor look just like an Athearn locomotive, but it is not. Had to remotor it also because it also ran just like an old Athearn locomotive.
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IBKen - Sounds like you learned an important lesson the hard way. Looking forward to the what you do with the shells.

Joe - fantastic photos again. Love the GG-1's and that Baldwin center cab switcher is a monster.

Karl - Like the mechanical conductor story. Quite interesting.

Troy - Sweet looking bench work.

Sherrel - Really like the photos of the Frisco F units. Don't melt down there.

Have the laundry going now as the wife has already left for town for the weekly shopping trip. Will have to move the rainbirds to try to keep some of the lawn green. Tonight will probably be my last visit to the club for quite a while because as I mentioned yesterday, league bowling starts next Friday.

Instead of archive photos, here an archive video of a trip part way around the club layout. Notice the track cleaning car behind the locomotives. They are a necessity because normally the door to the street is open and we get a lot of dust build up in the layout area. Going to have to find out how to quiet the locomotives. One thing I have noticed watching MRR videos is that the sound is really bad, nothing like the prototype. It's alright in person. but in videos, it's annoying.


Later
 
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I will have to agree with the statements about the BL2 being an ugly locomotive. I sometimes wonder if the train crews had a paper bag over their heads when working with one. I have one that I custom painted for my railroad many moons ago. I can't remember who made it. The chassis and motor look just like an Athearn locomotive, but it is not. Had to remotor it also because it also ran just like an old Athearn locomotive.
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That's an early Proto 2000 model. The drive was a Chinese clone of an Athearn drive.
 
Good Morning Everybody, again. Clouds have disappeared and temperature has risen to 74°. Once again the weatherman has missed the forecast for the last two days, predicting the non-existent thundershowers, thankfully since we didn't really need any more just yet. I'll do some preemptive mowing this morning after the dew dries away.
While out for my wife's doctor visit yesterday, which went well, we stopped by Sam's Club where I got all of my artificial body parts fixed. Got my glasses adjusted so they would quit falling off when I bent over, and had my hearing aids cleaned and some new "ear buds" installed so I now no longer have to "fish" the left one out of my ear when it comes off. I'm still not really used to having eyeglasses since I went 68 years without them. Now that things have settled down a bit here in Texas, I'll get the cataracts taken care of soon.

Make it ham and scrambled eggs for me this morning Flo. Toasted English Muffin and OJ to go with it.

Thanks for the comments and likes regarding the additional residence pictures yesterday; Lee, Karl, Patrick, Sherrel, Garry, Chad, Rick, Chet, Tom O, Curt, Justin, Ken, Tom.

Out in the train shed yesterday, I started applying ground cover to the two structures to the south of the piggyback facility. No pictures yet. Made a couple of trees a well.
On the train front, but sitting in front of the computer yesterday. Last week I posted that I rediscovered a misplaced notebook with my freight car maintenance records from 1994-2003. I have been logging them into my maintenance database off and on lately. I noted how many covered hoppers that I had back then, and Troy's post of the other day regarding how many cars and engines we had came to mind. I checked the database and I have 150+ covered hoppers dedicated to grain traffic which is a major commodity on my railroad. There are additional ones dedicated to cement, sugar, sand, plastic pellets, fertilizer and other chemicals. I have eight grain elevators (ninth one is not yet built) distributed around my layout. So I thought that they would make a good subject matter for photo posting. Here's a few of them. Some of these have been posted before but these are all new pictures.
In the town of Budville there is a small one for Farmer's Grain Company, associated with Coop Feeds. This is a small town elevator that loads only one car at a time.
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This is a styrene kit from American Model Builders, with a Rix grain bin.
Going south in Gainesville there is a large ADM facility that has two spurs holding eight cars apiece.
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ADM is a combination of a Walther's elevator kit and Rix grain bins.
In the town of Graham, there is another Walther's kit for Valley Growers, along with the ever popular Rix bin to add capacity.
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I'll pick up on some more tomorrow.

Garry - Happy Anniversary. Your wife is a lucky gal.
Chet - It seems that every time I see pictures and videos from your layout, I see many of the same structures that I have. We must have together kept Walther's in business over the years!;)
Mike - Sorry to read that you have to work Monday, at least you get overtime. I went to salaried in 1978 and didn't collect any darn overtime after that.:(

Are we entertaining Sherrel this week? Here's a couple from me. P2K gondola with Jaeger pipe load.
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MDC Roundhouse boxcar.
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Everybody have a great day.
 
Good morning y'all. This morning's low was 61, going to 79 today. Nice weekend to close out the Shore Tourist (BENNY) Season.

I have two projects for the weekend, one, to consolidate some of my modeling notes, concerning my current layout, the other is to actually do some wiring, and set up the second power district on the layout.

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Four car Northward MU departing Gladstone in 1965...Gladstone locates on the PRR/PC Media - West Chester commuter line. This line has numerous close together stations, and many many road crossings, and was / is popular with commuters from Chester and Delaware Counties.
 
I found time to work on the layout yesterday... procrastination/Writer's Block is good for that at least. Managed to get all of the OSB screwed onto the top of the benchwork. Had to fix the height of two sets of legs, and add bracing where I forgot that I'd have edges of the OSB falling. Most of that I could handle by gluing/screw scraps onto the next joist over.

Here she is in all her glory:

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I also managed to string the 12 gauge main bus wire. Right now, I'm planning on using Ron's (Ron's trains and things) wiring method. Ordered everything I didn't have from allectronics.com and was only $10 away from free shipping. Darnit... add more terminal blocks... Oh, crap, I crossed the quantity-discount level, what else can I add... more wire!

Troy - I missed this post earlier today. Really nice start. At your pace, you'll have track and trains in no time.
 
Cucumbers are dead only canned 6 quarts this year because of this virus everybody was Hoarding up the Dill this year and mine didn’t far to well.Tomatoes did well my second picking is on if I can keep those Squirrels from eating them.
Lee - I didn't realize that you were also another gardener. Looks like the heat of August got to my tomato plants and I won't be having a second picking this year. But I had already canned 24 quarts of spaghetti sauce and six pints of salsa earlier in the spring. I had them all of the way up through July, and we ate the last remaining one about two weeks ago. The pepper plants, both bell and jalapeno all have survived and I may get a second round from them. I never had any luck with pickles so I gave up twenty years ago.
Here's a shot of some of the tomato harvest from 2017.
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Needless to say, we were overwhelmed that year.
 
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Good morning from Wisconsin. High today is 75 and later this coming week the highs will be 55, I am enjoying this weather on the front porch. Not much going on today, we are taking the daughter and family out to dinner tonight. I may have to wear jeans for the 1st time since early May, been wearing shorts. No modeling planned this weekend. Be safe, have fun. TomO
 
Willie. Been gardening for years your Tomatoes look great. We had a lot of rain this year then it would turn hot the Cucumbers was hit as miss. I tried some new Green Beans this called stringless they was a disaster I’m going back to Blue Lake 274 next year. Here’s a few pics of the garden this year

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Here's my last garden. This photo is at least 20 years old. The original garden was a lot larger. Where the two trees are used to be a gate and the garden was fenced in to keep critters out. Where the two trees are used to be where the gate posts used to be. When you buy trees, they don't include holes to put them in so the holes from the gate posts were used. The garden went down to where the 5th wheel is parked and up as far as the tree for the right gate post.

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The second photo is a few years later. The garden area just went to weeds. I would mow them down occasionally. The aspens where the old gate posts were had grown some. They started off around 10 feet tall. Now they are over 60 feet tall.
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The old garden area was cleaned up and is now an established lawn. It dried up a lot when I was gone for a week. I probably won't try to water it as it is so late in the summer. The trees have also grown a lot.
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No more garden for me. Getting too old to try to keep it up. We have such a short growing season up here. We figure from Memorial Day to Labor Day (if it doesn't snow or have hail tear it up). Anything longer than that is considered lucky.

Willie can send up some of his 'maters.
 
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Well I found the new diner. Good afternoon all. Logged in and started reading the great posts and pictures and realized I was in August. Crap there's 8 page in September already, I'll never catch up.
Sadly I lost another brother-in-law this week. In fact I just watched his funeral service "live streamed" from Fort Worth this morning. He makes 3 BIL's lost since June. Throw in my neighbor and 2020 has been a lousy year. On the positive side I have put diabetes in remission. I am already on 1/2 the meds I was on and hopefully off the remainder by end of this month.
Did a little train running yesterday and on the way back there after this post. Still haven't pulled the trigger on redesigning the layout.
 
Lee - This was a good tomato year for me, but I didn't take any pictures of the harvest. Here's the tomato valley on May 23rd. Those on the right were planted two weeks before the ones on the left, March 29 versus April 11.
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Those cages are 48" tall.
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I backed off some this year with only 42 plants instead of my customary 60.
 
Good morning y'all. This morning's low was 61, going to 79 today. Nice weekend to close out the Shore Tourist (BENNY) Season.

I have two projects for the weekend, one, to consolidate some of my modeling notes, concerning my current layout, the other is to actually do some wiring, and set up the second power district on the layout.

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Four car Northward MU departing Gladstone in 1965...Gladstone locates on the PRR/PC Media - West Chester commuter line. This line has numerous close together stations, and many many road crossings, and was / is popular with commuters from Chester and Delaware Counties.
When I was in Jr High/HS, our church youth group always went to OC for our annual district MYF conference. The weekend after peak Shoobie season.
 
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