Good afternoon. Went to town this morning for the weekly shopping trip. Chilly and windy at
23 degrees at 2 PM. Temps are expected to get colder next week with lows possibly below zero and high lucky to get near 20.
Justin - Those motors are very good. I remotored a couple of locomotives with them when I couldn't get any NWSL can motors. Good luck with the light project.
Willie - Here are a few of the old blue box cars that I used the dry transfers on. I had bought probably around 40 undecorated kits and saw some dry transfers for box cars that were different than the run of the mill cars available and figured that I would try them out.
This last car had a problem with the herald and with a bit of weathering and a bit of paint to make it look like the paint ran, it worked out fine.
There are some more scattered around the layout. These have got to be over 25 years old and I am perfectly happy with them. I just can't see some of the prices that some manufacturers are asking for freight cars. My old eyes aren't as good as they used to be so I don't need all of the fine detail.
Tankless Water Heaters. I did a lot of research before I installed one. When we built our house almost 40 years ago natural gas was not available so we either had to go with propane of electricity for the water heater. Electric was also the choice for heat back then also. We had really cheap electricity at the time. We heated the upper level of the house with wood for years and then tried a pellet stove, which I really liked a lot, until the price of a ton of pellets went from $30 a ton to over $135 a ton. Around 15 years ago, the utility company ran natural gas lines to the lane to the west of us and we were able to get them to run it to our lane by giving them permission to run the line through a pasture. Out went the pellet stove and in went a gas stove that looks like a wood stove. It does a great job even in the coldest weather.
Now to the water heater. One of the rites of spring with the old electric water was to drain it and remove the lower heating element and use the shop vac to suck out the calcium build up in the bottom of the tank. We are on well water. While researching water heaters, we got interested in the tankless heaters. In all of the write up we checked out, gas was the recommended way to go, not electric. We ended up with a Rennai. One thing we did have to do was to install a water softener to keep it under warrantee. We had been thinking about that for years because even though the water taste great, it was hard.
We are completely satisfied with it. We reduced our electric bill by more than half, and even with the increased use of natural gas, out utility bill is half of what it used to be. You're not heating the water when you're asleep of gone from the house. We have had the washing machine going at the same time the dish washer was going, plus filling a bath tub and the wife using hot water I the kitchen. The only drawback, which is a very slight one, is that it takes a few seconds for the water heater to sense water flow and light off. I can live with that.
I did get to spend a little time in the train room today, running trains. I think I am going to station a small switcher in the town of Churchill. There are 8 rail customers there and a local switcher stopping at towns along the line has to spend a lot of time switching all of the cars because of the switching problem built into the town. This way the little switcher stationed in the town can gather up all of the outbound freight cars and set them on the passing siding. The local through freight can pick them up and drop off any inbound cars and be on its way and the little switcher can set them out at the customers.
I did plant a couple of trees in front of a couple of the homes on the left side of main street also.
The wife has her company Christmas party tonight. I have skipped lunch because they are supposed to have prime rib on the menu.
Catch you later.
