After the operating session I took a couple days off from the layout. Then, because I didn't feel like doing anything else, I began staining the ballast on the mainline in Casper on the 26th of October. The very white ballast to the right just didn't look right. Staining it gave me what you see on the left.
Late in the month I ordered a long-out-of-production set of C&S hoppers off ebay, for use in beet service. Here's what they looked like in the listing:
When they showed up a few days later, they looked like this:
Idiot seller didn't pack them properly for shipment. By the time they arrived, nearly all the stirrup steps had been broken off by the jostling in transit! Seller did refund about 25% of the purchase price, but still...
Now what would have taken maybe 90 minutes of prep time to get them on the layout (change trucks and weather) will now take three to four hours with the repair work I have to do.
I also ordered a Blueline Mikado from ebay about that same time. It showed up a few days later:
Unlike the hoppers and the locomotive I bought early in October, this one was fine. I programmed a motor decoder to 5502 (the Bluelines are dual-decoder locos) and installed it. If I'd had a decoder with a harness everything would have fit fine, but because the decoder didn't have a harness, it sat too high up for the tender shell to go back on. I shaved down the spacers that mount the sound decoder to the bottom plate in the tender, and then the shell popped right back on. Here's the modified tender before adding the shell:
Just yesterday I got around to re-lubricating 5502, and suddenly the chuffing sound was missing! All the other sounds worked fine - bell, whistle, blow-down, etc. With a bit of research I discovered that the chuff sensor sometimes fails on these locos. Hopefully BLI has a replacement I can purchase and install. Meanwhile I have a loco with intermittent chuffing. But I got the chassis and mechanism lubed and tuned, so it runs just fine, even if it sounds a bit funny. Here it is:
In the center of this shot is the board with the bad chuff sensor - a small reed switch which has gotten sticky.
That loco with the bad driver set I bought in early October, which I renumbered to 5506, was acting a bit funny during the operating session. I need to do some additional work on its mechanism. That's slated for sometime over the next few weeks. Here it is still coupled to the reefer train it was assigned to for the session:
Here's a shot of the trainset power pack I was using to power the staging occupancy detectors. It doesn't have quite enough oomph! to power all 18 of the detectors, so after about an hour it goes into thermal shutdown and won't turn back on until it cools off. It's going to be replaced during the next few days with an MRC powerpack.
On November 4th I finished the first siding in Powell (finally) by tying it in to the main track at the west switch. Here the track is weighted to hold down on the ramp while the caulk cures.
Later that afternoon I continued working in Powell, adding the new subroadbed for the west end of town.
A couple days later I had the cork sheeting installed.
I left Powell for a couple of weeks for other projects, but the a couple days ago I got back to it. I cut all the subroadbed to take the line from Powell to Vocation, and hopefully around the turnback curve on into Cody. Here it is leaning against the wall in the garage. This will require new benchwork to support everything under Thermopolis and Wind River Canyon.
Yesterday I added a bit more of the subroadbed west of Powell, along the wall between Thermopolis and Worland. Other than adding risers under the tangent along the wall, this is as far as I can go without building the new benchwork.
One of the other projects I did was add a small whiteboard for listing projects I need to work on. Right now it lists all the locos that I need to address, including a brief comment of what work needs to be done. This took all of an hour or so to do.
By far the biggest project I tackled so far this month is ballasting the mainline from the middle of Casper all the way to Powder River. That wasn't on my list of things to do, but since I'd stained all the existing Casper mainline ballast (well, almost all of it - I still have to a couple feet of the far east end), I just decided to add more ballast. I've been wanting to ballast the track through the scenicked area towards Powder River, so I decided now was the time.
Here's the first stretch of new ballast on November 10th:
Yeah, it's that white ballast again. I'll just stain it like I did the rest.
I continued with the ballast, finishing clear around the roundhouse. Then, at the west yard limits, I switched to a more prototypical reddish-brown ballast. At this point it was November 14th.
On the 15th I was working my way around the curve west of Casper towards Powder River. I'd lay a foot or so of ballast, then groom it and glue it in place. I was using the truck sideframe and center beam to mark what I had just glued.
After getting the ballast all the way to the Powder River turnout I went back and began cleaning up the stray ballast on top of the ties and against the sides of the rail. That's when I found out two things - my grooming job wasn't all that good, and in many spots I didn't use enough glue. As I scraped away ballast in some spots it exposed loose ballast underneath. When I vacuumed up the ballast I'd chipped loose, in a few spots I had holes where the underlying ballast was sucked up as well! It took hours and hours to scrape away the stray ballast and then repair the holes.
Here's the brown ballast west of Casper. The darker spots are where I did some ballast repair. I made sure to use plenty of glue on these spots!
I needed a very small scoop to place the ballast in the repairs without dumping it all over the place, and I found exactly what I needed in, of all places, a vape shop. Apparently this small scoop is used by marijuana smokers in some fashion, but it turned out to be perfect for delivering small amounts of ballast in just the right spots.
Here's the finished ballast looking back towards Casper from the Powder River turnout. I have a bit more scenery work to do in Powder River before I can ballast any further west.
Picking up where we left off mid-September...
On the 17th I installed the fascia three sections I'd painted.
A couple days before that I also cut the piece that would extend the fascia behind the furnace wall and painted it. I installed it on the 18th.
On the 20th I installed the new Thermopolis turntable controller into the new fascia. Walthers didn't make this easy - they don't always think much about how their products will be used before they turn them out. But with a few hours' work I got the controller mounted.
During those same few days I also re-lettered the second Milwaukee Mikado for the Burlington. Here it is almost completed, on the 20th of September. This one is numbered as an O2A. The others are all numbered as O4's.
By the end of the 23rd I had the new fascia at Thermopolis completed, with the re-installation of the throttle port, pocket, drink holder and signs.
Late in September I got a wild hare and built a train with 30 out of the 31 tank cars I have on the layout (I forgot there was one over at Holly Sugar). It was kind of impressive looking!
Since I was working around Thermopolis anyway, I decided to go ahead and finally paint the track. First I cleaned off all the structures and other stuff.
Half an hour later all the track was painted.
Next step was to clean off the railheads. That took about another hour. The next day, after the paint had hardened, I used a brite boy to final clean the rails.
I just kept right on with Thermopolis, this time filling seams in the skyboard and sanding them down, then adding the sky blue paint. Here painting is in progress...
And here the skyboard is finished. All structures have been set back in place. Thermopolis is done for now.
I bought another BLI Mikado on ebay, from a seller who said it was "like new." Well, it was clean, but it moved about a quarter of a driver revolution and lock up solid! You have to be very careful buying on ebay! The problem turned out to be that the front driver set wouldn't stay in quarter. One of the drivers just spun on the axle! Fortunately I have a damaged unit I use for spare parts, and I was able to use the front driver set from that to repair the loco. I re-numbered it as 5506. We used it in the operating session a couple days ago, but it needs a bit more work before it's completely satisfactory.
Work on the layout slowed down to almost nothing for several weeks, as I turned my attention to preparing for the Operating Session coming up later in the month. As part of those preparations I trimmed off the extra braces from the decades-old tunnel portal I had for Wind River Canyon, and set it into place. With the light shining into the hole, you can see some of the pink foam at the far back where the track curves away to the left.
I also added some reflective tape adjacent to the occupancy detectors in staging, hoping it would show up clearly on the cameras. It's not as obvious as I'd hoped, but you can see it (you can't see the detectors at all).
Another thing I did was upgrade my job assignments board with grid tape. Here was the original board at the last operating session:
And here's the reworked panel. I also put the wifi information in a frame to the right of the board, leaving more room for the train list.
Over this past weekend I cleaned up the layout and the train room and got ready for Tuesday's operating session. Here's a few shots of the cleaned-up and staged layout:
