We left off with the ballasting being finished for now. When more scenery is complete I'll do more.
Just after my last update I replaced that trainset power pack I mentioned with this MRC Railpower 2400. It will certainly be able to drive those IRDOTs in the staging yard!
In mid-November I bought a brass Burlington M2A class 2-10-2 (a "Santa Fe") off ebay. It showed up right after Thanksgiving:
It will be a lot of work to convert to DCC and tune up, but once it's running well I'll give it to a friend to paint and weather. It will make a nice addition to the roster, and should be able to handle those long reefer trains coming up the helix from east staging to Casper.
In early December I began working on Powell again. On the 1st I added some of the mainline roadbed in town.
I also finished, for now, the subroadbed installation heading west of town:
To push on towards Cody I'll need to add benchwork underneath the Thermopolis peninsula to the left.
By December 4th I had all the mainline subroadbed installed at Powell...
...And by the 6th I had the mainline laid all the way through town and heading out to the west (left in this shot):
I was ready to start laying the sidings in Powell, but I discovered I only had one piece of code 55 track left. I checked online and found that Iron Planet Hobbies had it in stock, and at a good price, too. I ordered two bundles, or 12 sticks.
At this point I spent the next few days removing the cab lettering and road number from a Proto 2000 2-10-2 I got from a friend in Sheridan, WY. The loco was numbered 6302, which I already had one of. I needed to give it a new number.
I began using my usual method to remove lettering, and quickly discovered that the Proto 2000 lettering is much more stubborn than it is on either BLI or Spectrum locomotives. After about an hour of work, which would be a completely cleaned loco on either BLI or Spectrum, I was only at this point:
About another 45 minutes of work netted a completely cleaned-off number, but some of the paint had also come off right down to the plastic body. That's the green streaks you can see in this photo.
This wasn't a major problem - I simply repainted the panel (on both sides of the cab) with Vallejo black, then applied the decals.
Turns out while I was in New Jersey I caught Covid, which put me in bed for a couple days beginning Christmas day. It wasn't real bad, and by December 27th I felt good enough to go down to the train room and open the pack of track I'd received from Iron Planet. Gave me a pretty good surprise, too - they'd mistakenly sent me N scale track instead of HO!
A phone call resolved that. I put the track back into the mailing tube and prepared to return it. I had to wait until the 2nd of January because I needed to stay away from folks until I was no longer contagious with the Covid. Five days is recommended after symptoms abate.
I felt okay though, so I finished up the 2-10-2 by applying flat finish over the decals to protect them. I did that on the 27th, then on the 28th I lubed and tuned the mechanism and reprogrammed the decoder. It's now number 6309, seen here sitting in Casper and awaiting its first assignment.
I finished out 2024 by adding ties blocks under most of the turnouts in Powell. I'm out of them now, so I'll have to print more.
On January 3rd I turned to making some adjustments on the swing gate. It's been pretty trouble free since I built it about 18 months ago, but there has been some minor shrinkage of the benchwork and frame, which resulted in the rail gaps on the hinge end of the door closing up (and gaps at the free end widening):
Once I shimmed the gate framework a bit the gaps were better:
Just yesterday I had to go back and make some more adjustments. We'll see how everything is in a few months when the weather warms back up and the humidity rises a bit (it's extremely dry right now, even with a humidifier running).
On the 6th I finally got to work on those hopper cars that were busted up in shipping. First order of business was to repair the broken stirrup steps. I drilled small holes in the corner of the cars:
Then I added A Line stirrup steps. I already have this series of cars on the layout, so I needed to renumber these new ones. Along with the stirrup step you can see where I tried to remove part of the car number. Didn't work out so well.
I tried several different methods for removing the numbers, but all of them affected the underlying paint as well. After I wound up with this on one car, I gave up and went to the Accurail renumber decals.
These hoppers predate Accurail's renumbering decals program, but I discovered that the decals for their CNW series of hoppers is a close match to the body color and number style. I was fortunate to have a set of those decals on hand, so I began applying them. Here's one renumbered car:
By the 18th of January I had five of the seven cars completed (including weathering) and sitting on the track at Worland. Not perfect, but not bad either:
Meanwhile I received the replacement track from Iron Planet Hobbies on the 15th. I was a bit concerned when I received the package - the end wasn't properly set in place. It was just taped onto the end of the tube:
When I extracted the track it was all scrunched from being stuffed into a tube that was a bit too short! It actually looks worse in person than it does in this photo:
I checked each piece of track carefully for damage, and found that on about half the pieces one rail was bent about half an inch from the end:
There's also one piece with a rail slightly kinked vertically in the middle. I'll have to be careful to use that section for fill pieces where I can just discard the kinked bit. Beyond that, snipping off the bent rail isn't a problem. The track is probably over 95 percent useable, so I kept it. Still, Iron Planet Hobbies will be my "last resort" shop in the future.
With the track now on hand, plus a couple pieces I got from Dave in Basin, I took to installing the sidings in Powell. In this shot I've tick-marked the layout of the masking tape ramp I use to lower the sidings down a bit off the mainline.
After a few days' work, all the Powell sidings are now in place and wired. Yesterday I ran a Mikado through them to test the track. Everything seems to be working.
