Good morning. We are a bit warmer (?) at
31 degrees this morning with a high expected near 40.
Curt - Some of those drivers in Florida are a joke. I can remember so many incidents when I was a state trooper down there. I thing the eye test was being able to find the drivers license building. I will admit that I did get a lot of laughs from some of them.
Trigster -
Welcome to the coffee shop. Plenty of pastries besides bear claws. Flo or Francine can let you know what's available. I too am into HO scale. No nit picker or river counters here. We have people of many skill levels on the forum and we just can't find any nits around to pick. We all help each other out. There's a video tour of my layout in my signature below. I model the transition era set in late summer of 1957. I model the area where I live in southwestern Montana.
Justin - Not a good start to the day. Did
Terry send that black cloud down your way? Garry has a point when he mentioned working in steps. When I started my layout, track laying was slow as I was hand laying my track and turnouts. I was running trains on about 10 feet of track, back and forth to make sure that there were no problems. I was as happy as a pig in a mud hole when another 15 feet were added. Again, everything was tested for any track problems before I moved on to the next section of the layout. For 0ver 20 years this was the end of the line, wit the exception of the tracks dropping down into the hidden staging tracks.
To the right of this was 12 feet of plywood on which I had all sorts of model railroad crap piled on it. I had worked on scenery over the years on other parts of the layout and then finally got off my butt and put in the last town which included a yard and engine servicing facility. I can count how many times I shifted tracks around before a final plan was decided on.
I started assembling structures so I knew what the footprint of them would be. When the tracks were finally spiked down, I backed a train of 20+ cars through every possible series of turnouts to make sure that there weren't going to be any derailment problems. Like
Garry mentioned, running a train in reverse will be the easiest way to fins any track problems. The time spent being careful when putting the track and turnouts down was well worth it as I haven't had any problems in the yard at all. If you decide to try to repair your current layout or start all over, take your time with the track work. Nothing can be more frustrating than constantly having derailments.
Willie - I can relate to you shuffling buildings around. Did the same thing in that last town. Took forever to finally decide on which build would go where. In the end, it is what it is.
Here's a rail picture for today.
Later