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:
