Running Bear's LXXIII Coffee Shop


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Good morning everyone. Happy Pi-Day, sometimes known as 3.14 Day. (I can't get the Greek letter "pi" to copy right in this typing box. Oh well.) Yes, it's March 14, or 3/14, the one day of the year most appreciated by mathematicians (and Greek scholars, I presume). In honor of this day several restaurants are giving away free pie or selling slices of pie for $3.14. Wear something pi-ish today - Archimedes would appreciate it!:p

22 (BRRRR) and partly cloudy here in SW MO, heading for 60. Supposed to be the last night below freezing, and it will his 70 tomorrow afternoon. So I'm hoping this is winter's last gasp, even though it's only mid-March.

Willie - Regarding rearranging - I hear you! As I'm rearranging my relatively small layout (12 x 20) I'm excited about the new possibilities. Just didn't see it until I started moving things around. Now I have room for more industries and stores and a greater variety of industries than before. I don't think I'll keep doing this for 4 years, though:rolleyes:

Still working on a house structure build and considering different arrangements of the stores and industries around the layout.

Have a good day everyone.
 
Hi WILLIE ! I never saw JEFF's "RAILS OF THE WORLD". Did he mention getting a time table of the KCS ? I remember him talking about a WOLF SPIDER in one of his tunnels.

Phil

p.s.-only flurries we have are oak leaves falling.
 
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Johnny - (alt)227 π Not exactly the best representation though.

Willie

Willie - Weird, but my keyboard won't do that. I have a Greek font I use frequently, but it doesn't work on the forum, and I can't get pi to come up with the alt227 combination. Don't know why. Oh, well - gotta go - there's a cup of coffee calling my name ;)
 
Good morning, everybody .

I've been busy for a couple of days, but I did find some time to work on trains. I had some locomotives that were not running or lights were not working right. I reset deciders ti factory default which helped. One of them would not rest on the first try, but did after several attempts. I still had two locomotives that would not operate, and I replaced the decoders. I'll take those decoders to a friend who has a decoder tester to see if they are savable.

I ran some trains including the Empire Builder. It was in motion in this picture, and looks blurry because of that.

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Good morning. 31 degrees to start the day off and we should be close to 50 degrees again this afternoon. The snow is slowly melting away.Was greeted to this sunrise when I walked into the kitchen this morning.

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Today is the wife's last day of training. She can't wait to get out of San Antonio. Heads back tomorrow. Willie - I am sure that she will agree with the traffic situation down there.

Was not on the forum yesterday. A good friend who lets me use his airplanes kept me busy yesterday. His wife just had to have new Lexus, but there are no Lexus dealers in Montana. He had done some shopping around and found what he wanted in Salt Lake city, so we flew down yesterday to pick up the car. Had a really nice lunch and I flew the plane back home. A fantastic day for being in the air.

Garry - Love the photo. Keep them coming. I will agree with you on the subject od E-Commerce. If it wasn't for internet retailers, I may have lost interest in the hobby because of having no hobby shops in our area. Living near a small town, many of the large retailers don't have stores in our area. We buy quite a lot from Amazon and other internet retailers because there are so many items that are not available locally.

Justin
- Nice score on ebay. Should be a good addition to the layout.

Willie - Nice Bar Mills kit. I picked up a couple of their garage kits. Not expensive at all. They're sitting on the pile of projects on my work bench now.

Joe - Dental cost have been steadily rising. We have no dental plan, but have found a great dentist in Butte who gives quite a discount for paying cash. We have a plan with Care Credit. If you pay off the balance within 2 years there are no interest charges. It also happens to work at out Vet and can also be used as a Master Card. When I got my lower denture and had the posts implanted, we save big time. Saved us around 40%.

Steelwheels -
If the guy Terry mentioned isn't interested, you might try the classifieds in MR magazine., There are people offering to buy entire layouts. Probably won't get anywhere what it's worth though. I had an N scale layout with over 11 scale miles of mainline back in the late 70's, but tore it out because of the crappy locomotives at the time an switched to HO scale. Now that I am older, I sure am glad that I did. The old peepers aren't as good as they used to be.

Having the week off has given me the chance to take care of many little honeydos. Almost caught up with them all. Hoping to get down to the train room later today.

Here's a rail photo for the day.

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Later
 
Hi WILLIE ! I never saw JEFF's "RAILS OF THE WORLD". Did he mention getting a time table of the KCS ? I remember him talking about a WOLF SPIDER in one of his tunnels.

Phil

p.s.-only flurries we have are oak leaves falling.


Phil - I do remember the wolf spider in the tunnel episode, but I don't know whether or not it was on his forum or another one; he was on many of them if I recall correctly. I first got to know him over on the original "Gauge" or maybe "Trainboard". Regarding the KCS timetable, that would have been insignificant to me and I wouldn't remember. "Rails of the World" was not up and running for real long, and there were actually very few participants. I always liked his approach to modeling, as he could always make something out of nothing.

Willie
 
Good Morning everyone....sunny and cold here in Wisconsin.

Getting ready to meet a bunch of guys from high school for lunch in a town called Slinger, Wisconsin. A great track viewing town with the CN and Wisconsin Southern sharing some trackage. Giving the MRS. a break from me.

Garry: Great photograph of your layout...really like the coal train and the consist pulling it. The junk yard, in addition, is well done. I have plan for another junk yard on the layout, but it's on the back burner for now.

Speaking of coal unit trains. At a local hobby shop I purchased eight, nicely weathered Milwaukee Road coal cars with metal wheels and KD couplers for about $7.00 a piece. Never realized the cars were all the same number since the weathering covered up some, but not all the numbers in a very professional manner. Turns out there were cars for the Milwaukee Road Historical society and I purchased more new at Walthers at a discount.

EBay: I have had some luck finding bargains on EBay and had some disappointments as well. Don't shop EBay like I used. Now I go to swap meets and shows and like to look for estate rolling stock to give them a "second Life" on my layout. At meets, I have found "lots" of Blue Box cars which were weathered, KD couplers and metal wheels for $35.00 or so for seven cars.

New (almost new) camera:
Finally, found out how to do close up shots with my Cannon camera. Read the manual dummy.

Thursday is a train day.

That's all for now.

Greg

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CHET-Spent 15 or 20 minutes looking for the FEC car but got to chilled to stay longer. Only 65* but can't take it. How the hell did I get so old?
I did find a 50 ft. R.E.A. built 1-42 if you're interested. Also a 40 ft without any info.


Phil
 
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Afternoon All,

Started out cool again here, but I think it's supposed to start warming up now. Went to lunch with Mom and Dad. After coming home I did some redesigning of the ends of the freight house to something smaller than what I had originally planned. I did a mock up and I like the new size better. It dawned on me last night that you wouldn't use rivets with wood beams so I need to order some NBW's (nuts, bolts, and washers) from Tichy.

Willie- Look on the bright side, at least they are cutting the limbs for you.

Johnny- Does a Guinness shirt count?

Terry- Sorry to hear about your heat issues and I hope your wife feels better soon.

Garry- Very nice photo. Didn't that train have a nickname about a pumpkin?

I hope everyone has a good night.
 
Curt - Guiness shirt and a slice of pie. Odd combination but, hey, whatever floats your boat. Just noticed (must be getting old??) you're in Winter Haven - - we lived in Lakeland for 5 years, early 2000's. People still ask me why I moved from Florida to Missouri - sometimes I wonder that myself!:rolleyes:
 
Curt - my bad - you're in Winter Garden not Winter Haven - a little farther away from Lakeland than Winter Haven, but still FLORIDA!!!
 
JOHNNEY- i know I'd rather have a BROWN lawn than a WHITE one. I think CURT will agree.

Phil
 
Good afternoon. Finally got down to the train room and did some running and cleaning. Emptied out the staging tracks and had three trains running with the track cleaning cars and the dust monkeys. The longest siding can hold a 60+ car train and 55+ in the second longest track. I really don't have much of a dust problem on these tracks, but I figured that a bit of cleaning wouldn't hurt plus some of the locomotives hadn't been run for a while. They all performed qithout any problems at all. It was interesting seeing all of that movement around the layout. Thankfully almost all of the locomotives run at almost the same exact speed.

Phil -
No hurry on the FEC car. After getting a better idea of how much room I have left, there isn't much more room left in the hidden staging tracks. The Pennsy box car is at the post office. Others that I think I should get is probably a Western Maryland, New Haven, Norfolk and Western and an Erie box car. I really like the NYC Pacemaker cars, but I believe that they were probably kept pretty close to the NCY system. NYC George could probably answer that one.
 
Didn't get the bike loaded using the motorized loading ramp. There is a technique to it that I just wasn't able to get, plus the temps were in the upper 30s. After about an hour of messing with it, I gave up for the day. I'll give it another shot tomorrow afternoon when its a bit warmer.
I received a HO scale 66' 4 truck heavy duty flat car today. It's made by Walthers Gold line. I'll put the detail on it this evening then decide what kind of load I'll apply to it.
 
aww shucks, Ken D&J Just plop down a 2x12 Andre
Ride the bike on the back.
I've seen Uribe of guys doing that! Right over the top of the truck someti.rd.
Puter broke .. Hate phone.
 
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