Week 47

Another Weekly Update

Making progress - slow but sure

Safety First

Saturday, June 6, 2015
We had some guests run the trains this afternoon. See next two pictures

Here's Engineer Josh (left) and Engineer Elijah (right) under the watchful care of their Dad (background).

Here they are again with their eyes on the track. Good work, men!

Friday, June 5, 2015 

I tried to figure out a work-around with the problem with spur line switch in the South Power District.

Total and complete failure.

I tried to manually fill the gap by the frog.
Since this is a WB Mainline, it may not even be an issue because the trains will be running right to left. Let's hope so. Otherwise I'll figure out a fill and just remove it when we're switching to the siding.

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Train Crew Session

At the end of our session, we started running trains.

When we unexpectedly ran into, as Jordan would say, an "uh-oh".

At the spur line switch, both CNW SD38-2s derailed. 

Here are Dean Hatzis (with light) and Ed Nelson diagnosing the possible cause.

It was late in the day, so we did not find the cause of the derailment.

More to come...

 Ed Nelson's assignment this afternoon was to install three ground switches.

One here at the spur line to the grain elevator.

The other ground throw installation was at the spur line to another industry (yet to be determined) in the East Power District.

The final install was at the spur line in the South Power District - where the engines derailed. 

Could there be a possible link to the ground throw installation?

 Jordan Osborn's assignment was to convert the plastic wheel sets on the well cars to metal wheel sets.

As we proceded with the project, we decided to keep the plastic wheel sets and make available the metal wheel sets for other car conversions.

 That leaves us with Carlos Baez and Dean Hatzis.

They worked on moving the EB main a few inches over to make way for a station platform.

And why this happened? I'll let Carlos explain in the next video...

Carlos Baez explaining why we had to rip up the Cork for the EB main in this section only.

Not sure who the "Chief Engineer" is, but his job may be in jeopardy.

We had a minor interruption in our train operations this afternoon.

My wife, Jan Berg, came down to get witness signatures for our Five Wishes document.

Little do the guys know, they just signed their intent to take care of Jan and me for the rest of our living days.

I'm just kidding. 

Oh you knew that? 

You're so smart!

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Just in case we need a picture of the switches on this part of the layout, here's a layout schematic for easy reference.