Running Bear's December 2018 Coffee Shop


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Boris said:
Louis: Politics has nothing to do with the stock market...the volatility is motivated by greed of the big players.



Louis: Wine and liquor sales in Pennsylvania were a tightly regulated state monopoly. You paid full price, plus tax, at a state owned liquor store, from a state employee. You had to tell the counter person what you wanted, and they went into the back to retrieve your purchase. In Maryland, Delaware, NJ and DC, you could go to a privately owned liquor store, that offered volume discounts and generally lower mark ups, and you could shop around for your purchase among displays. Naturally, the lower prices and customer friendly stores were more attractive than dealing with sometimes grumpy state employees. However, if you shopped out of state, you were cheating the Commonwealth of badly needed revenue. :rolleyes:

Pennsylvania also regulated and fixed prices of milk and dairy products, and charged sales tax on tobacco. Delaware didn't, so again the Commonwealth was unhappy with residents that took their business across the state line.

Boris
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Thanks Boris, I thought the liquor stores in PA were state owned. That sucks you can't browse, I always find something I forgot to put on my list or something new I want to try.
 
Good Morning All. 34° and partly cloudy. Only managed to get to 59° yesterday, but with bright sunshine and no wind, it was tee-shirt weather from noon til dusk. Expecting this same weather pattern with slightly warmer temperatures for the next ten days, with a little rain added in Thursday. The new vanity for our bathroom remodel arrived yesterday. Weighed in at 170 lbs., at least the delivery guy put it on the porch for me. His dispatcher told my wife that he wasn't allowed to do that, but Alexander Hamilton came to the rescue. He was a little shocked when I spoke to him in Spanish, but a surprisingly large number of us old white guys in Texas are somewhat bi-lingual. El pórtico por favor.
Today I plan on resuming preparation of the garden for spring planting. Will probably have to fire up the mower and weedeater over the weekend as some of the growth in parts of the yard is beginning to look a little scraggy. Nothing on the remodel yet as I wait for the wife to do the background wall painting before I apply the last eight rows of shiplap boards. Then I wait again until the actual wall gets painted before I install the vanity.
Another short day of running trains yesterday in the train shed. Same on tap today since I will be doing lots of outdoor chores while the sun shines.

Terry - Be careful out on the roads this morning.
Johnny - We will eventually get more of a winter than we've had so far. Some years it snows, some years it does not. Some years we reach single digits, some years we barely reach freezing more than a dozen times. Ice storms about once every five years when the whole area of the state goes nuts! Nobody around here uses winter tires and pick up trucks are notoriously ill suited for winter driving, unless you load the bed with 750 lbs of animal feed. Folks get over-confident and drive their 4WD SUV's into drifts that they have no business driving into and wonder how they got stuck?
Glad that I can now just sit at home and play with trains.
Greg - Yeah! The stock market is giving us all fits right now. My wife is a pessimist and all that I hear from her is "we should be selling". I refuse to budge because that locks in my losses. I blame computerized trading for most of the recent sell-off. It did eventually close only down by a few points yesterday, give it time.
Curt -
PRR Modeler said:
then did some staring at the siding I'm changing and moved buildings around to see how they looked in different spots and visualizing how traffic flow (rail cars) would work.
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Been there, done that!
Mark - No posting race here, as Ray (Toot) over in the downunder has us all beat by over half a day! Now you do generally take the prize for the crappiest weather most days. I am up and read the forum at least 2-3 hours before my eyes/brain focus enough to post anything.

Everybody have a great day.
 
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From the Land of Pleasant Living, the Free State, Maryland :)

It's time for me to run some errands, including the post office, this should be fun.

Have a great day Everybody!
 
Good morning

We are back in Destin FL for a couple of days as we travel back home from Tampa.

Apparently, there are many interesting posts for me to catch up on.

I hope all of you are doing well.

Cheers
 
Good Afternoon everyone.............Sunny and nice here in Wisconsin.

Willie: To solve my coal hopper coupler problems....I'll just run them in sets of four cars and hopefully have good, operating couplers at either end of the four cars. I did find the eight car of the eight hopper car set and its original couplers work great, I'll just leave the car alone.

Chet: After trying the Kadee #158 couplers, I'll never be changing from using the #158 Whisker couplers even with maybe 50 pairs of the old #5's left in inventory. So easy to install and they look great!!!

Yesterday, I took a close look at some of my background buildings in the Saxeville Interchange area of the layout and I lplan to make some changes to the buildings which would be mainly replacing the brick work that I installed when building the kits and but this time around I'll not do a lot of weathering to the bricks, but add more signage to the brick sheets. I would like to add some more exterior building lighting and maybe an illuminated Miller Engineering sign or two.

Boris: Dealing with the PA tax agents almost sounds like when in the 1960's the sale of margarine (a butter substitute) was banned in Wisconsin and people would drive to Illinois to get their margarine. Margarine was cheaper than butter.

Going to have our homes HVAC ducts cleaned after X-mas. We'll are having a lot of dust issues and our neighbors had their ducts cleaned and they noticed a marked improvement.

First order of business this afternoon is cleaning the back bar for our Christmas company coming Saturday. I removed all the bottles yesterday and now will dust each one as I put away the bottles and wipe down the bar. There's a unopened bottle of Scotch that been on the back bar for 37 years. I don't drink scotch!!!

Better get to work.

Later.

Greg

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Bruette said:
Red Star National Currency FIVE DOLLAR BILL from "The First National Bank of Baltimore" 1929
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Louis: Since this is a railroad oriented forum, I might mention that currency was also issued by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineer's Bank of Cleveland OH. The bank of course owned b the Brotherhood. This of course was before the current Federal Reserve system was placed into effect.
The BLE was also in the Florida Real Estate business during the 1920s, and in the Insurance business through the 1970s. Now, they are a part of the Teamsters...

$ 5.00 notes, with red seals were also issued as US Notes in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and perhaps later. I used to have one set aside, it's probably still with my valuable papers.

migalyto said:
I read an article yesterday that Harold Baines induction caused a controversy. Some didn’t think he should of gotten in.
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Mike: I don't remember him either, and I have followed the Orioles since the early 60s. Maybe, that's why the induction is controversial? :rolleyes:

Greg@mnrr said:
There's a unopened bottle of Scotch that been on the back b,ar for 37 years. I don't drink scotch!!!
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Greg: That's one well aged bottle of Scotch. ;) I always used to treat myself to a bottle of Single Malt Scotch each Christmas. Haven't done that since we spend Christmas with my son's family in Northern New York State. Maybe I'll splurge this year :rolleyes:.

Boris
 
Afternoon All,

Haven't done much of anything today. Tomorrow I have a hair cut scheduled. I think our Christmas Shopping is complete and wrapped which is early for us.

Willie- I have a crappy Bachman Bobber so I made a display of it surrounded by a fence next to the passenger station.

Louis- Great pictures. It took me a minute to understand what the RV photo was. Great movie. Nice looking tree and train set.

Garry- Safe travels.

I hope everyone has a good night.
 
Good afternoon. Checking in late. We got a few inches of snow last night and I plaowd a quarter mile of our lane and my driveway. Took a while. The sun is out and it is above freezing for a change.

Louis - Really like the photo of Washington Blve. Wouldn't mind having that '39 Ford. Nice looking Christmas tree. Gotta have a train at the base.

Greg - Those 158 coupler are sweet. I am feel the same way about them. I stiull have a large number of #5's on hand that perhaps someone on the forum can use. I'm sold on them and don't plan on changing out any number 5's unless a car need having some work done to it. Many on my freight cars are the old blue box cars and from time to time a coupler may part company withthe car and then a 158 will be installed. I have just about gone through a bulk pack of them and will have to get some more.

Garry - Have a good trip.

After Louis' photo of the CSX units, I don't know if I can compete with it for a rail photo, but here goes.

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Later4
 
Good afternoon.
After an interesting trip to work, I just spent the entire day plowing the parking lot.
14 inches of snow and ice is not fun to move with a 46 year old farm tractor.
 
Terry, I can't give you any sympathy. All I have is my little garden tractor to plow with. I just did a quarter mile of private lane plus my driveway. I'm 72.

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I have to plow extra wide toi leave room for future snowfalls or the drive starts getting too narrow to drive through.
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This goes on all winter long too.
 
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Boris said:
Louis: Politics has nothing to do with the stock market...the volatility is motivated by greed of the big players.



Louis: Wine and liquor sales in Pennsylvania were a tightly regulated state monopoly. You paid full price, plus tax, at a state owned liquor store, from a state employee. You had to tell the counter person what you wanted, and they went into the back to retrieve your purchase. In Maryland, Delaware, NJ and DC, you could go to a privately owned liquor store, that offered volume discounts and generally lower mark ups, and you could shop around for your purchase among displays. Naturally, the lower prices and customer friendly stores were more attractive than dealing with sometimes grumpy state employees. However, if you shopped out of state, you were cheating the Commonwealth of badly needed revenue. :rolleyes:

Pennsylvania also regulated and fixed prices of milk and dairy products, and charged sales tax on tobacco. Delaware didn't, so again the Commonwealth was unhappy with residents that took their business across the state line.

Boris
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So Louis comparing the PA revenooers to drug dealers feuding over customers is actually pretty spot-on!
 
Greg@mnrr said:
Good Morning Everyone.............again overcast and seasonal temperatures in Wisconsin.

Yesterday, I finished adding ground foam to two of the three non-scenic sections of the landscape behind the where the mine building will be located. The last area will be the most difficult to reach and I'll need to stand on a step stool to reach this area. There's a huge difference in the other two areas once they were covered with ground foam. I used $1.00 tubes of contact cement from the Dollar Store to attach the ground foam to steep slopes behind the mine.

Then I turned my attention to seven Athearn coal hoppers that I purchased "used" maybe 10 or 12 years ago at a LHS. The cars were weathered, had coal loads with Woodland Scenic coal and Kadee couplers. I originally thought they had metal wheels, but found out earlier this week that they still had the original plastic wheel sets. I was in a hurray the day I purchased the hoppers and just checked three or four couplers to make sure that they were loose and operated correctly.

Yesterday, I planned to replace the plastic wheel sets and I then decided to disassemble the coal cars and lube the couplers and check all of them with a Kadee coupler height gauge. The original owner installed the red Kadee adjustment washers on all the trucks. Then came the surprise.

Apparently the original owner did want the Athearn metal coupler covers to fall off and he used large amounts of AC to secure the coupler covers. The AC worked it way into the coupler pockets and some couplers were frozen in position and other had the metal covers were found to be completely glued in place and I was unable to free the metal covers on several cars. (I've use AC sparsely to keep plastic coupler covers in place and a little pressure from a #11 Exacto blade releases the coupler cover undamaged.)

After some time spent removing the the metal coupler covers, I found dried AC residue inside the coupler pockets and no amount of work work could clean the pockets to insure properly Kadee coupler operation. Out of the seven cars, only one car was received a pair of #158 couplers.

These cars may find themselves parked on a spur some where on the layout and not used for any operation. Lucky for me I have another eight or so coal hoppers kits that will be weathered and #158 couplers installed and then placed into service. Six of these new cars are lettered and individually numbered for the Western Maryland and they came from Walther's and each had a price tag of only $6.00. They problem was the original box was damaged, but the kits unharmed. An eastern railroad in Wisconsin, makes sense since the hoppers were purchased used by the CM&N. The other coal hoppers I have are from Atlas and are Milwaukee Road cars with metal wheel sets.

I've purchased estate rolling stock and found only one damaged car that was included in the many lots of rolling stock that I obtained at swap meets. Next time I'll do a closer inspection of any used piece of rolling stock that I purchase. I did purchase a used locomotive from this same hobby shop. The locomotive looked like it was professionally weathered, but once I got it home, it ran terribly. I returned the locomotive the same day for an exchange. I guess "Buyer Beware".

I sure like Kadee's #158 Whisker couplers!!! So easy to install and no square bronze springs to worry about.

Tomorrow, I'll finish the scenic tasks and start ballasting the lead tracks behind the mine coming up to Saxeville and the mine spur tracks. I'll dedicate the entire day to model railroading since today at Noon I want to watch the "New" GB Packers and their interim coach.

Later.....

Greg

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Greg: It seems to me that I saw where ACC solvent is available. I'm unsure if it would attack the coupler pockets on the coal hoppers or not? Might be worth a try?
 
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