4005 Big Boy

This film was taken at our clubs local exhibition. My son and I were in charge of running the American layout. Near the end of the exhibit we had her pulling about 60 carriages. How many is she pulling in this shot?

Diamond point update

Not a lot has been going on the Railroad of late except for the completion of the railway station and some repairs to some dodgy track work. Josh had decided to take it upon himself to relay a portion of track that was causing some railroad staff to forever call in the cranes and heavy equipment due to derailments in the station tracks. So out went the curved Peco turnout and in came the Peco y turnout. It ended up giving us more straight track to fit the Heavy weight Union Pacific passenger express as well as the Sante Fe express as seen in the photo.

A friend from club came by on Monday night with a friend who needed some questions answered. It was good to get the railroad running and to remember that this is a work in progress and the most fun comes from careful, slow steps. The joy is not in the completion but in the creation and creating. He also took some photos, which I thought are well worth putting in the blog.

I think the next stage will be some more work on the river valley and bridge work as depicted in these photos.

The waterfall in the background was part of some careful thinking and looking on the internet to establish how to do it. In the end we went for a cut up piece of a plastic bottle for the behind the water scene and used som silicon to form the water cascading effect with bits of cotton wool thrown in. Josh did the placement and creating the water effect. He is quite handy to have around sometimes. The other thing that we have begun to delve into is using the computer for programming and running trains. we have been using with some success Decoder pro. We also discovered an application on the Ipod that uses the wireless network in conjunction with the computer so we can use out Ipod touches as hand held wireless controllers. Quite nifty.