Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Welcome to Denver ...


... this airport rest room is a tornado shelter.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Welztalbahn News


Two weekends ago I cleaned up the work mess on the layout and got it ready to run trains again. Thanks to Stefan for his help dealing with cleaning track and finicky locomotives. Here's the VT98 on the bridge just north of Emsingen. I need to come up with a name for it. "Steinlebruecke", maybe? The entry signal to Emsingen from the north is just barely visible in the background.


Both the previous view and this one are only possible with a camera. I put an old station building where the Emsingen station is going to be. The old building is nice, but with its brick architecture doesn't fit into a Black Forest setting at all. It would work great, if I were building a layout set in northern Germany.


Pascal and I started work in Talheim station adding a base for the road and raising the area around  the station building. 

When I built the tracks in Talheim station years ago, I installed cork roadbed. I later learned (and realized from photos) that station tracks typically have drainage pipes under the roadbed, so water is drained away from both the track and the station area. The shape of the ballast is different as well. It would have been better had I used cork sheets in the station area, so that tracks are basically level with the ground around them. 

I fixed this in Emsingen over the last year, and now we're doing the same in Talheim. We started by removing the angled edges from the existing cork roadbed. I don't want to pull up the track, so this ended up being a bit surgical in places. Talheim is much easier to access, so a 10 year old boy can help in meaningful ways. He seemed to enjoy it, too.

Friday, May 10, 2013

My Cappucino Today


The barista at the cafe surprised me this morning. What a nice start of the day.