Coffee Shop Twenty is now open fer business

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I'll also wish a Happy Birthday to David, Rico and LatentTrainFan.

UP2CSX- I've always thought it'd be neat to be a police officer. Best of luck with your future son-in-law, and as for the "I love to blow things up", you and my father would get along well, he purchased a miniature cannon for our camp.... This thing shoots beer cans filled with concrete.... and it cleared the other side of the pond.....

Larry- Im sorry to hear about your father-in-law, cancer runs in my family as well, and one of the members of my hunting camp passed a few summers ago due to skin cancer, he was a mentor to me and i know its not something pleasant to deal with. Best of luck with the treatments and with how your family handles it.

Sandy- One of the things i did a few years ago was to curl up with my dog Victory, whose an elkhound and just reminds me of snow for some reason, under the blanket thats appeared at Christmas for as long as i can remember, and watch the Polar Express (hey its all about a train too, its a win-win!) Dont worry though, as soon as the 24th appears on the calender, you'll feel it.

Chris- I still dont know what a DMSF is, and i'm almost alittle afraid to ask lol.

I have a couple of questions to ask about model railroading.

During a power-move, do all the locomotives run?

What color is the actual engine inside a locomotive?, i cut open some side doors on an old shell, and i have a model motor, and i need to know what color to paint it.

Theres an old boxcar on the bike trail a few miles from my house, its about a 20yds back in the woods and you wouldnt know it was there unless someone showed you. The nearest railroad tracks are at least a 1/4 mile from where the boxcar lays today, and its uphill from the tracks. I guess i have a few questions about it,

Any ideas as to how or why it was put there?
Did railroads use to paralell canals?
 
Evening everyone!

I know I haven't been around here much lately, I'll explain about that shortly.

Matt - welcome to the Coffee Shop! Great buncha people here, even if a few of them sometimes get...um...a bit messy!:D I'll try to answer your questions.

I suspect the bike trail may be an old abandoned railroad right-of-way. It's quite common for them to be turned into bike paths once the rail gets pulled up. The boxcar probably was parked on a spur off of that R-O-W.

About railroads and canals: RR companies try to run their tracks parallel to rivers wherever possible, because riverbanks have the least amount of slope running lengthwise. IOW, they don't have to do a lot of expensive earth-moving to get a level right-of-way. Canals often paralleled rivers; ergo, you will probably see railroads near the old canals. The B&O (now CSX) main line between Point-Of-Rocks, MD, and Harpers Ferry, WV, parallels the old C&O canal alongside the Potomac River.

Jeff - bummer about the fracture, but at least the mystery's been solved as to why your ankle was hurting so much. Hope that wound-vac speeds the healing process as Jim is predicting.

Larry - sorry to hear about the FIL. As if he wasn't already hurting enough with the loss of his wife! I know this has to be especially tough on Glendia, but as Phillip was saying, I'm sure God will give all of you the strength to get thru this.

Jim - look at the bright side, at least your area is no longer in a draught! My prayers go out for Dianna and her mom.

David - HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Here's why I haven't been posting much in the Coffee Shop: On Sunday I retrieved ~20 old B&O loco models from my MIL's crawl space, where they'd been stored since I moved out of my previous house. Over the past 2 days I've been testing them with the old MRC power pak. Most of them run fine, but two of them had problems. I've been focusing on getting them working again; I've succeeded in fixing one of them, but I'll have to scavenge some spare parts to use on the second unit. I've decided to revert back to my original modeling era, for two reasons: (1) I'll be able to run cabeese; and (2) I can avoid having to install ditch lights on both ends of all my locos!
 
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Littlefoot14 said:
Theres an old boxcar on the bike trail a few miles from my house, its about a 20yds back in the woods and you wouldnt know it was there unless someone showed you. The nearest railroad tracks are at least a 1/4 mile from where the boxcar lays today, and its uphill from the tracks. I guess i have a few questions about it,
Click to expand...
A good look at the box cars reporting marks (if any) will probably give you a good clue as to why it was left there. In Leesville there's an old KCS Southern Belle baggage car sitting in the middle of a bunch of piles of rocks that are higher than the car itself.
 
Ken, you forgot the "I'll explain about that shortly" thing. :) Thanks for the good wishes, I'm sure she'll do fine for an 81 year old woman.

Matt, there's no hard and fast rule about engines running when a power move is being made. Some railroads prefer that all engines be at least idling so an emrgency brake application uses all the air available. Others run only enough engines to drag the others along DIT (Dead in Transit). It even cahnges for the same railroad, given different circumstances.

The paint color of the inside of an engine varied by company. EMD painted the inside of the engines in a a color called seafoam green, often called puke green by railroaders. It's kind of turqoise looking green and googling around for EMD engines being scrapped should give you a good idea of the color. The prime mover was painted the same color. As the engines aged and got rebuilt, the could be painted almost any color the railroad or rebuilder had on hand.

GE painted the inside of their engines a light blue that matched the light blue of the GE logo. The prime movers were often painted in dull aluminum color in an apparent attempt to match their aircraft turbine colors. The light blue became filthy in a short time of service and customers hated it. About 1980, GE started to use a dark red, almost maroon color, which hid the grime better. They've now started using a leaf green on their "green" engines, which I predict customers will hate as much as the GE blue. :) Again, all these colors changed with repainting and rebuilding.

Boxcars were commonly sold off by railroads for storage use and trucked to different locations. As Ken said, it may be that the old boxcar was set out on a siding when the railroad line, which has now become a bike trail, was being torn up and used for tools and storage. When the line was gone, it abandoned in place. This is a good place for some detective work. You should be able to to see some sign of a grade, old ballast, and maybe even some spikes and ties if the boxcar got there by rail.

Canals and railroads were giant competitors in the early 19th century. Railroads were forced to build lines through more rugged territory because the water level routes were occupied by canals. As the railroads developed more powerful engines and bigger freight cars, they were able to outcompete the canals on both speed and cost, since canals and locks were incredibly expensive to maintain. A meeting of the minds occured (today, it would be known as the formation of a monoply) and railroads purchased canal companies and then, in some cases, relaid and extended their tracks along the former mule paths on the sides of the canals. As Ken said, many eastern railroads still run along the routes of former canals, even if the canal itself is long gone. Some railroad canals continued to transport heavy freight that wasn't time sensitive, like coal, into the 20th century. The B&O Canal didn't cease operations until 1924.
 
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UP2CSX said:
EMD painted the inside of the engines in a a color called seafoam green, often called puke green by railroaders. It's kind of turqoise looking green.
Click to expand...
color-seafoamgreen.jpg
color-seafoamgreen-1.jpg
 
Say Guys,

Thanks for all your Birtrhday well wishes, they were appreciated. I did some more work on my layout, wiring a couple of blocks, adjustred some track that was giving me problems and ran a test train a nuimber of times to check things out. Seems to be working just fine.

Talk with you all later.

Have a good day tomorrow!

David
 
Dang, Ken, you added that while I was tyoing my post and I missed it. Sounds like quite a treasure trove. I must admit that I'm not a huge steam fan but do like first and second generation diesels from about 1950 to about 1970. I can still run my cabooses and even have Mars lights. :eek:
 


Hello--

Spent last night doing a-caroling at a nursing home and the local mall---when we got home I found the little 'Spring' sleeping on the keyboard of the laptop---forgot to shut it down last night---oops:cool::confused::o

Tonight we are going a-caroling at the children's hospital and the mall---

Our group consists of 8 singers---just enough to hide my voice:)

Have a good one!!:):)
 
Good Morning from the not-so-sunny South!
I'm impressed with the traffic through the Coffee Shop in the last 24 hours.
Flo and the girls need the tip money!:D

Lots of news over the last couple days and birthday salutations where appropriate. We have lots of people who have been missing from the forum lately. And welcome to Matt, the most recent voice heard from.

Nothing newsworthy from me today, so I'm going back to lurking in the shadows.
Y'all have a good day!
 
Greetings all from Ye Olde London Towne.
We're finally getting what passes for winter over here. -2c (28f) and about 4 flakes of snow. That's enough to practically shut the city down.
Christmas has been well prepared for. All that remains now is Saturday's trip to Borough market for a few overly expensive fancy nibbles, then the main grocery haul at the supermarket. No modelling has been done for far too long but at least I've got 10 days off over the holidays so maybe, just maybe something magical will happen in the train shed. :)

SWMBO had quite the scare yesterday. She went to the ladies room and had just finished when the access panel at the back of the stall detached and crashed down. This thing is about 80lbs of MDF, it shattered the seat and cracked the toilet. 10 seconds earlier and it would have hit her on the head and neck. Needless to say she was quite shaken. We spend the evening wandering the West End looking at the lights on Regent & Oxford streets. A couple of pubs and Bodean's rib place were visited as well.

Matt: welcome to the coffee shop. Since Chris says you are buying, I'll have a pint of espresso please.

Chris: just an observation but you seem a hell of a lot happier and less stressed now that you are an independent small businessman.

Rex: I'll take the rain and gray mist over shovelling snow and scraping the frost of the car any day. As for your plastering problems, is there a wholesale drywall supplier or similar near you? I used to pick up 20kg bags of hydrocal from a local drywall supplier at about 10% of the cost of using Woodland scenics plaster or the PofP rubbish they sell at places like Home Depot.

Larry: sorry about FiL. So much of cancer survival is down to the attitude and fight of the patient. My FiL fought tooth and nail for months until one day the doctor told him they couldn't operate for some reason. He gave up at that point and passed away the next day. Lets hope he wants to keep on fighting.

A belated Happy Birthday to David, Rico and LTF. Hope the Birthday Bison brought you lots of goodies. :D

Take care all and have a good day where ever you are.
 
Hi Everyone!
A late Happy Birthday! to all.

I just heard a reminder on the news that it was 9 years ago today that the tornado came through T-town, killing 11, and severely injuring 75. It was 750 yards wide and cut a path 18 miles long. It missed the community college's brand new 43 million dollar campus where I worked by less than 1/4 mile. Terrible day!

Well, my plaster/Durabond adventure has been a failure. After first checking all the shop 'n box stores (including Birmingham), I either called or went to 6 wholesalers...none had Durabond or Hydrocal, but all had the "Sheetrock Brand" in other forms. I decided that enough was enough and just ordered some from Lowe's. It will take about 2 weeks, but what's time...(hair pull, kick the dog, fuss/cuss :eek:)

Ken: re-discovering that batch of engines must have been like an early Christmas.:D

Chris: just an observation but you seem a hell of a lot happier and less stressed now that you are an independent small businessman.
Click to expand...
Andy: It's the Budweiser!:D:D
 
Jim, Jeff and Ken Thanks for your help with answering those questions.

Andrew Thanks for the welcome.

Not a whole lot for news today, just your typical high school day. Right now im just sort of relaxing until my parents get home, then hopefully doing alittle Christmas shopping.

Btw, was anyone else alittle surprised that that kid turned out to be a troll? I'd say his user name but im not sure if thats allowed.
 
Greetings.


Phillip - cool interior shot of that Geep!

Rex, bummer about the durabond. I can't imagine why nobody sells something that common in your region? Well, at least you were able to get it online [even though you'll have to wait for it].

Andy - glad your wife was out of harm's way when that MDF panel came crashing down! My club's modular layout 'doorway' frame tipped over and grazed my shoulder and my back during setup at a show in early October. Ripped my flannel shirt wide open and left some interesting-looking scratches and bruises on my back. If I'd been standing another 4 inches (~10cm?) further back it would have landed directly on my head!

Barry - my young'ens went out carroling with the Church youth group on Sunday, they visited a dozen different nursing homes. My 14yr-old was complaining she felt like the only song they did was Silent Night - it was always the first one the nusring home patients requested.

After cannibalizing some drivetrain parts from an old Front Range GP30, I managed to get another one of my FR GP9's working last night. Now those Rangers don't win any awards for slow running performance, but their bodies are very nicely detailed. A consist of 3 of them will look great pulling one of my passing-thru coal drags! I'll let my P2K geeps do the yard and local switching.

Have a good'un
 
Matt I was dissappointed to see gcollin get banned, I never thought he acted like a troll but he must've done something that got one of the mods ticked-off...

BTW I'm curious, is your user handle a Native American name?
 


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