Running Bear's Coffee Shop LXVII


True story,
Driving out to Missouri to retrieve son #3 last year, we were about to encounter a billboard that took us by surprise. It said" 25 miles til fun in Uranus". Then later another that said " 18 miles til you can get fudge packed in Uranus".
Needless to say after a few more billboards we passed the Uranus Fudge factory in Uranus Mo. Google it, it's real, just down the road from the Kum&Go fuel stop.

10390888_789856684417172_2055075090433128742_n.png
 
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kbkchooch said:
True story,
Driving out to Missouri to retrieve son #3 last year, we were about to encounter a billboard that took us by surprise. It said" 25 miles til fun in Uranus". Then later another that said " 18 miles til you can get fudge packed in Uranus".
Needless to say after a few more billboards we passed the Uranus Fudge factory in Uranus Mo. Google it, it's real, just down the road from the Kum&Go fuel stop.
Click to expand...

Nothing like making the most advertising potential from the town's name :rolleyes::confused:
 
Morning Gents. So it's raining in Texas and Floyd humbled Connor like I knew he was going to. Another slow news day.
 
Good Morning All. 72° and mostly cloudy today. High temperature yesterday was only 85° so I spent most of the day getting exercise doing outdoor chores. Stacked some previously cut firewood, raked some grass clippings, did some garden cleanup in preparation for fall planting, spread fertilizer and compost and vacuumed the pool (from within). Outer bands of light showers from Hurricane Harvey came as far north as Dallas and Denton yesterday, 25 miles south of me.
Managed to get a little more time in the train shed yesterday, and ballasted some more track and began adding some "field grass" to the area pictured last week. Still thinking about what to do in some of the adjacent areas. The fencing project is still on the workbench...I spoiled two fenceposts and stepped away for now. I need to conceive of a jig to hold the .070 round posts while I drill three .020 holes in them!

Beady - That scene just reinforces why I don't do movies!
Karl - Hmmm! Fudge from Uranus, sounds yummy.
Bruce - Yea! Still raining in Texas. Parts of Houston are getting slammed, around 20" so far in suburban Pasadena, while other areas had 8"-15". Meanwhile Corpus Christi only had 3". Weather Service is advising that people stay put since all major roads are under water. There's been over 1000 high water rescues in Houston. Of course one of the two fatalities was a woman who drove into high water and stalled. There was a lull in the rainfall last evening and thousands of Houstonians got out and went to eat or drink! Of course they all got stuck. The governor went on TV last night and admonished those that chose to stay by telling them "We told you three days ago to get out". Note that in Texas, they will send you a bill for high water rescue if you go around a barrier. In Rockport, authorities advised people "riding it out" to write their names or SSN's on their arms with a Sharpie marker to make identification easier! My son who lives in San Antonio says that things never got too bad there and that the rain has since moved eastward.

Anyone else notice that Tony (Wombat 457) made some return appearances on some other threads yesterday, glad that everything is OK with him.
Everybody have a great Sunday.

Willie
 
Good morning ..

Willie ... Houston is my birthplace, and I am very concerned about the city now. I have a brother-in-law who lives in Corpus Christi who does not communicate much, but we assume he is okay.

Karl .... Not sure that brand of fudge appeals to me. LOL

Everybody ..... Have good day.
 
Good Morning -- 101.7 yesterday ... near the same today!
Tomorrow they are calling for 105 with 107 on Tuesday

I knew those 85-ish days wouldn't last, but it was a nice break.
 
Good morning everybody......doing 54 this morning headed for mid 90's w/smoke. At least the smoke has thinned the last couple of days and we've reached 5-6 miles in sight distance now. On the layout front, I've been working on 5 new cars. The first, an Accurail S.P., SHASTA WATER CAR. It was built by S.P. 1940, had a wider door & four interior tanks. It was painted a light blue with a black underframe & trucks, running between Dunsmuir Cal. & San Fran. I replaced the trucks with Kadee 1563's & the couplers with Kadee 148's. I myself clip all the trip pins of the couplers, I just don't care for the way they look. Weight of the car is dead on 4 oz.
Cars 2&3 are a couple of new release GN 43' flat cars by Intermountain. The stock trucks are good with me, but before any car hits the layout, the wheels treads are cleaned. Kadee #158 couplers installed and 1&1/2 oz's of weight added to give each car a total weight of 2 5/8 oz. That will leave some leeway for "loads".
Cars 4$5 are two Rivarossi spine log cars for the Pacific Lumber Co. I didn't care for the trucks on these cars at all, so I drilled an tapped the bolsters for Kadee 1561 arch bar trucks. At the same time I tapped the log bunks so they are held on with the truck screws. Kadee 158 couplers all the way around and now it's make some log loads for the cars. The willow tree has shed some new log making material so now I've got some scale 5-6 ft logs to put on the cars. These are an all metal car weighing 1.5 oz. a log load adds another oz, and there just isn't much room to add any other weight, so for now they'll be 2.5 oz.
IMG_2317.jpg
Here's the Shasta Water car and one of the Rivarossi's with a log load.
IMG_2318.jpg
Making another log load for the 2nd Riv. and adding weight to the flat cars.
Have a good day, get out to the train room, behave yourselves................
 
Parts of Houston are getting slammed, around 20" so far in suburban Pasadena, while other areas had 8"-15". Meanwhile Corpus Christi only had 3". Weather Service is advising that people stay put since all major roads are under water. There's been over 1000 high water rescues in Houston. Of course one of the two fatalities was a woman who drove into high water and stalled. There was a lull in the rainfall last evening and thousands of Houstonians got out and went to eat or drink! Of course they all got stuck. The governor went on TV last night and admonished those that chose to stay by telling them "We told you three days ago to get out". Note that in Texas, they will send you a bill for high water rescue if you go around a barrier. In Rockport, authorities advised people "riding it out" to write their names or SSN's on their arms with a Sharpie marker to make identification easier! My son who lives in San Antonio says that things never got too bad there and that the rain has since moved eastward.[/QUOTE]

Willie: Having lived through SANDY, a few years ago, I feel sorry for all those people clobbered by the wind and rain. I also remember those, who knew best, and disregarded the advisories, and they get what they get. Happy y'all didn't get hit hard. Did notice that Tony, the Wombat is back. That's good.

For all those interested, the September Model railroad hobbyist is available for download. model-railroad-hobbyist.com/
Click to expand...
 
Good morning. We started the day off at 55 degrees with a lot of smoke (still).

Was watching the news reports on the rains coming from Harvey. Unbelievable. Really feel for those folks.

Was nice to see Tony posting yesterday. We'll have to try to get him to stop by and have a cup.

Caught a lot of posts yesterday, but we went up to Harlowtown to visit relatives and got home just in time to gag down dinner and get over the mountain to the club in Livingston.


Terry - I am with you when it comes to a manual transmission. I have been driving manual transmissions most of my life but now that I am mainly interested in a mid to full size sedan, not choice, automatics. Many manufacturers are going to the CVt transmission to get better fuel economy, but I wouldn't touch one with a 10 foot pole. They are noisy, have poor performance and require expensive transmission oil changes on a regular basis. I would ride a horse before I would get anything with a CVT transmission. All of my old classic cars have manual transmissions and I enjoy them a lot.

Boogietrain - Welcome.gif Welcome to the forum. There's a great bunch of folks here.


Sherrel - don't melt in all of that heat. We are lucky that things have cooled off a bit.

Jerry - Nice work. some nice looking cars. I have been replacing any plastic couplers and even older #5's with the 158 Kadee couplers. Bought a couple of bulk packs of them.

I ended up winning the Stewart F-3 in the NP Lowey paint scheme. Put in an opening bid of $35 and there were no other bids. Glad that I held off ordering any detail parts for the NP F-7 I won the other day. Stewart locomotives aren't the best detailed locomotives, but are excellent running units. A few details parts and a bit of work can turn them into nice looking locomotives. Here I thought I had ENUFF locomotives, but for under a hundred bucks for both, not bad, and they are DC.

Being that my RS-1 was sent back to Atlas last week for another shot at repairs, I brought my little Bachmann Alco S-2 to the club last night. I was really surprised at how well it performed. It is the first time it has run on a DCC layout. Here's a short video of it in action. I was running a bit faster than usual because they guys were hollering for me to get to the top of the pass and hit the passing siding at the top because there were two trains on the same track coming in the opposite direction.

[video=youtube;cBhMpSFP4vU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBhMpSFP4vU&feature=youtu.be[/video]

It was an interesting night as we had eight trains running and there were many meets that required some one to hit a passing siding. Being that I had the shortest train, I was elected most of the time as most were 25 cars and longer.

Here is my rail photo for the day.

Autumn_Railway-wallpaper-11119289.jpg

Later
 
2Tracks said:
Good morning everybody......doing 54 this morning headed for mid 90's w/smoke. At least the smoke has thinned the last couple of days and we've reached 5-6 miles in sight distance now. On the layout front, I've been working on 5 new cars. The first, an Accurail S.P., SHASTA WATER CAR. It was built by S.P. 1940, had a wider door & four interior tanks. It was painted a light blue with a black underframe & trucks, running between Dunsmuir Cal. & San Fran. I replaced the trucks with Kadee 1563's & the couplers with Kadee 148's. I myself clip all the trip pins of the couplers, I just don't care for the way they look. Weight of the car is dead on 4 oz.
Cars 2&3 are a couple of new release GN 43' flat cars by Intermountain. The stock trucks are good with me, but before any car hits the layout, the wheels treads are cleaned. Kadee #158 couplers installed and 1&1/2 oz's of weight added to give each car a total weight of 2 5/8 oz. That will leave some leeway for "loads".
Cars 4$5 are two Rivarossi spine log cars for the Pacific Lumber Co. I didn't care for the trucks on these cars at all, so I drilled an tapped the bolsters for Kadee 1561 arch bar trucks. At the same time I tapped the log bunks so they are held on with the truck screws. Kadee 158 couplers all the way around and now it's make some log loads for the cars. The willow tree has shed some new log making material so now I've got some scale 5-6 ft logs to put on the cars. These are an all metal car weighing 1.5 oz. a log load adds another oz, and there just isn't much room to add any other weight, so for now they'll be 2.5 oz.
View attachment 62977
Here's the Shasta Water car and one of the Rivarossi's with a log load.
View attachment 62978
Making another log load for the 2nd Riv. and adding weight to the flat cars.
Have a good day, get out to the train room, behave yourselves................
Click to expand...

I have that Riv set of loggers and MAN they ROLL!
 
Chet, the new truck has an 8 (!) speed automatic. 24mpg with a 328hp engine, though, isn't bad.

As for hurrying up to not block oncoming traffic, that should be part of the game, unless it was an open house.
 
People just don't pay attention. The folks who refused to evacuate out of the path of hurricane Harvey are paying for their poor judgement and putting others at risk.
I've been messing with this old Toshiba Satellite laptop for a few days now, trying to swap out the hard drive. I actually believed that the imaging software actually copies the whole disc, but after reading up on it, it only copies the files, not the operating system.
This laptop is about 15 years old and had served me as my primary online machine until about 6 years ago when I cleared it of all programs and set it up to just run JMRI software to program my locos. A couple months ago, I got a message pop on it that said my hard drive was about to fail, permanently. I saved all my JMRI data and began looking for a means of replacing the hard drive or buying a new laptop. A couple weeks ago I found a replacement hard drive online and received it just a few days ago.
I was at this desk all day yesterday trying to make a image writing hardware piece work with this. Last night, I determined that it just doesn't work.
Today, I decided enough is enough. I'm going down to Best Buy to buy a new laptop with Windows 10.
 
Terry - They have an open house every Saturday night. Quite a few people show up and that's why they want to keep trains running at the club. One problem that can happen is when you are trying to follow your train and watch the signals is trying to get through the number of visitors that are in the room. The isles are a bit narrow. I have wider isles on my home layout. In one part of the layout, hidden tracks do cross each other, but the signals they have will warn an operator to stop because there is a train coming across the track you are on. So far I haven't seen any wrecks in these locations.

A walkie-talkie system would be a big help as the layout does occupy three rooms in the basement of the old depot.

I had looked at the specs on the Colorado truck a while back in it is an impressive little truck. Somewhat better fuel mileage compared to a full size truck. My half ton Sivlerado is lucky to get into the low 20's. I do have someone interested in buying it. It is a bit light to pull the trailers that I haul cars around in. The old '72 does a better job, but also suffers in the fuel mileage category.
 
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I just got tired of having to mess around and do work arounds to get things to work. I also wanted to be able to run the latest JMRI software. With the old lap top I could only run an old version of JMRI which limited what I could do.
I picked up a Lenova for $229. If I only run JMRI on it, shouldn't be much of a problem. It has Wi-Fi capability, a couple of USB plugs, touch pad and a screen with keyboard. I'm setting it up now. Once that's done, I can download the Java and JMRI then connect it to the programming track.
 
Hiya gang!

Flo, can I get a tall cold Diet Mountain Dew please? In fact, make it a double!

Got SWMBOs new (slightly used) car yesterday. Took an hour and 45 minutes to get there from here (more on that later) Saw the damndest thing on the way. Coming back through Lancaster County on a quaint country road we came upon a team of horses. Young man driving the horses appeared Amish. The rig they were driving appeared to be a small cart, with a running 4 Cylinder industrial type motor. On the back of the cart trailed a "bushhog" type of mower! :confused::confused::confused:

Busy busy day today. While SWMBO got groceries I installed a new carburetor on my 4 cycle weed eater. It wasn't a direct fit, as I had to modify the existing throttle cable end to fit a different bell crank. but after I installed it the beast came to life on the 2nd pull of the starter cord! Then I used it to trim the lawn ahead of the mowing. Then some weed pulling, painted the seat bucket for the Cub Cadet prior to re-upholstering. Swept out the garage, moved a 1/4 cord of wood, relocated a small concrete base for our old HVAC unit, washed the black Impala while SWMBO cut the grass then washed her new one. Thank goodness the truck was already clean!

Day 1 with Red.jpg 2014 Impala LTZ, 32000 miles, 315hp, 6 speed rocket!

Evidently the dealer did not do a satisfactory job of cleanup. But in their defense, could it ever be clean enough for SWMBO? (married members need not answer, just nod your head).:rolleyes:

Chet Sorry bud but your video is unavailable? :(

Jerry Nice work on those cars!

Terry The fuel mileage on your truck in hard to beat. It may not get the rated economy yet, give her a few thousand miles though. She'll get there! :D My little S10 4x4 gets 16 on a good day cruisin. Towing or running in 4wd in the snow, it's closer to 10. One of the reasons we're keeping the black 02 Impala. I can get 24 m.p.g. commuting, and 29-30 on a long highway run!

Oooops, my Dew is empty,,,,gotta go to the little engineers room!
L8ter!
 
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