Weekend Report

The Shapeways order has been put to good use and the bookshop is now open for business. I also put some lights in the police station and fire house. I have two of the reclaimed buildings to finish and one more corner turret building to do and then all of the DPM buildings will be complete. A little back-alley work will get those two blocks done and then it's on to the manufactory.

I also ordered a pair of Soundtraxx Tsunami 2 decoders for heavy steam along with some 15mm speakers. They fit perfectly into the Bachmann J class tenders and now I have a pair of them chuffing merrily through the countryside. Unfortunately my layout has curves that are too tight for them to pull any cars with their body mounted couplers, so they are chuffing on alone.

In a happy set of circumstances they also run exactly the same speed at all throttle settings, so if I ever want to go crazy and double-head them they will run perfectly together. I don't know if the Norfolk and Western ever did that, but refer to rule number one (it's my railroad and I'll do what I want).

The MRC sound decoder (which does not use BEMF, unlike the Soundtraxx) that was previously installed in J class 601 is now installed in the Erie Hudson and basically set up, it doesn't work any better than it did before but at least the Hudson now has a whistle and a bell. It does not have a body mounted coupler, so it happily pulls its set of streamlined cars around with no problems.

I also put another decoder into the semi-streamlined Pacific that was a good runner while in Lackawanna paint but doesn't run well at all since it has been disassembled for paint. It still does not run well. I have a plan to take all the wipers out of the engine and put some Bachmann all wheel pickup trucks in the tender, picking up power only from the tender trucks. Perhaps this will finally solve the running ills on that locomotive.

The Neuse River Valley Model RR Show is this weekend at the NC fairgrounds in Raleigh. The club I belong to has a layout there, so I took my newly-decodered locomotives there to run some laps. Unfortunately I couldn't get my phone to connect as a throttle, so no laps for me. I also brought my Nn3 but didn't get a chance to set it up today. Maybe I'll have better luck with it tomorrow.

Finally, I found a Rivarossi heavy pacific that I hope to be able to use the shell off of for my K5A project. I have all of the pieces, now I have to figure out how to put them together. I also got a casting kit, I'm going to try to see if I can make some castings and use them for my experiments rather than damage a good shell. Perhaps I can cast the Arnold shell as well and see which one works better.

And that's about all that is going on for now.