Uetliberg Hike

The team went up to Uetliberg tonight. While we intentionally chose the longer path, trying to avoid the super steep direct route, it took longer and was steeper than expected. Nevertheless, this time nobody got lost, and we had a nice dinner at the top of Zuerich.

View from the path through the forest towards Zurich

Tomorrow will be taking the train in this direction, and go visit some real mountains.

Sunset Cruise on Lake Zurich

ZSG's sunset cruise is a two hour trip on Lake Zurich to Rapperswil. ... and another two hours back, if you indeed feel like taking the boat.  

It took two hours for the sun to set, and a lot of photos...

Sunset dinner

And now we are reaching the light sensitivity boundaries of the sensor in my cell phone camera.
At the lake in Rapperswil, just below the castle. 

When there's rain, there's water ...

The Sihl, one of the two rivers flowing through Zurich, is usually only a few inches deep, and cristal clear. However, after the rains last night, it's carrying a lot more water, and one can't see the river floor anymore.

Swiss ingenuity

What do you do if there's not enough space to build a freeway into the city?
...
You put it over the river:

A3 on top of Sihl river

A little bit downriver they put a train tunnel underneath the same river. Bahnhof Selnau, the underground station in that segment, is accessed from a bridge crossing the river.



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Cutlery in corporate apartment

Cutlery drawer in the corporate apartment

This is a good selection and variety of utensils and knifes.
Contrary to Lamia and Wolfram's experience .

Sihlcity in the morning

I have this odd obsession with old brick chimneys. Thankfully Zurich is littered with them, primarily in converted industrial parcels.

This is the chimney at the Sihlcity shopping center. Today the only smokers around sit in the restaurants at the foot of the chimney.

Knabenschiessen

"Knabenschiessen" is an annual festivity in Zurich, combined with a big street fair and carnival rides. I went during the day when it was quite empty and you could easily move around. No lines either.

Street fair  and food stands on Uetlibergstrasse. I had excellent Raclette-Cheese with potatoes and a pretty good crepe with banans and chocolate for dessert.

Carnival Rides. The grounds are packed with rides. There's pretty much no flat spot that doesn't have either a ride, a food stand, or is needed for people to walk.

Awesome ride. Plastic balloons in water. Everyone can play (even adults). Maximum two people for at most 5 minutes. Reminded me of the hamster ball from school, but the children apparently really enjoyed it, and this was one of the few rides with a line!

*sigh* Too bad I'm not into Gummibaeren...

Notice something?
There are no cages or glass enclosures for the gondolas! There are apparently no seat belts either.  Not only does this look really friendly, but the view must be so much nicer without the cage bars, too.
A setup like this would be impossible in the U.S.

Oh yeah, there were also youth that apparently were shooting on targets or something (which is the whole point of this 4 day event. You could hear the shots when being close to the shooting range, though I didn't go inside. That was pretty crowded, even at 3pm.

When I walked back the apartment, lots of people were walking up to Albisguetli from the city. I was glad that I got food and took a look around before the masses arrived.

There were several very big portable carnival rides like this one:

Morning View

Today I was woken up by a friendly, but loud "Guten Morgen!" coming up to my window from the courtyard. The friendly woman's intention was certainly not to wake me up, but it was a good start into the day.

Half full

Hefeweizen at Juan Costa right next to the office.

Bye, bye Stuttgart

View from IC 187 while traveling the Gaeubahn between Nordbahnhof and Stuttgart West on its way to Zurich.

Ready to go

Let's see what the box looks like once it arrives in San Francisco...

The obligatory departure photo

Food in Terminal A at SFO

Firewood Cafe near gate A10. Good pizza, but don't order if you are in a hurry.

Operations in Emsingen

Above time-lapse video shows operations in Emsingen during a recent freight-only session.
The morning local freight (Ng 83746) arrives from Prechtal, drops cars, and the locomotive is sent to servicing.
The late morning local freight (Ng 83720) from Hausach to Freiburg, and early afternoon local freight (Ng 83721) both switch cars in Emsingen, too.
Actual elapsed time was 30 minutes.

On a technical note:
I filmed this with a Samsung Galaxy Nexus in HD and post-processed in KDEnlive. Original file was 2GB in size (yes, the phone stops recording once it reaches 2GB), upload size to Youtube is 420MB.

Wilderness & Survival Skills Class @ AdventureOut

AdventureOut is offering survival classes in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Pascal and I got to enjoy the class today. Mark and Jack are great instructors and both of us had a lot of fun.

Pascal tests our (incomplete) debris hut.

Making fire.  This is really hard work for a nine year-old.

First time I actually made fire with a bow drill. 

Yay, I have a tiny coal. Let it smolder ...

... and pack into a nest of yute twine.

Smoke ...

... and fire. Ouch! This is hot!

... and quickly throw it into the fire ring.

Background

I should really be doing something else, but it felt good to paint more of the backdrop tonight. Compare to what this looked like before. Most of the distant "hills" above the tree line on the left-hand wall will be painted over with sky.

Hinteraecker

Here's my materials list for basic ground cover at Hinteraecker.

First I added a coat of fine green flock directly on the still wet "brown dirt" paint.

The next step is messy, so we enter "cover up everything land". Some 70% alcohol as a wetting agent, followed by a generous application of scenic glue (aka matte medium), topped with static grass. I tried to create a lush, unkept appearance for the grass on the hill making room for a more dried up look between the tracks.

If you look closely, you'll notice that I also installed the south entry signal for Emsingen, completing signal installation on the layout.

Kopper sidings

I was not happy with the track arrangement around the Kopper furniture factory. Particularly the track to Gregorius Wood looked awful. You can see a good shot of the area in an earlier post.

Dremeled turnouts

I had several issues to deal with:

• Since this is a trailing point siding, I need substantial amount of track to pull cars. Ideally enough track to pull all cars from the siding with one movement.
• The curve right after the turnout is sub-optimal.
• I can't go straight out of the turnout, since I'd run off the baseboard, or get really close to the edge.

The cut turnouts put together

The solution involved shortening the stock Maerklin turnouts using a Dremel with a cut-off disk. 

This had two nice effects.

• It moved the divering legs of the turnouts closer together, and I gained just enough space to now run the Gregorius siding straight out of the turnout.
• By reducing the length of the turnouts, I gained just enough space between the switch and the end of track to fit the length of the siding, plus a Koef switching locomotive.

The overview shot below nicely shows the positive effect this small change had on the track layout in the area. You can also see the smal triangular piece of plywood I added at the very end of the pull-out track to gain a whee bit more track length all the way to the edge of the layout entryway.

The only catch is that I had to cut some of the electrical connections in the turnouts for this to work, and the joint is very fragile. I'll need to wire the siding and pullout track separately, but that was planned anyways, so nothing lost here. The pullout track will double as team track during operating sessions.

Fascia done

The fascia is completely installed and painted.

I really like the effect of the fascia in the last photo. Access to staging is a little bit more limited now, and I will have ... fun ... installing the turnout motors when the time comes, though it's all manageable and worth it.

Fascia for Talheim

Doesn't this look really unfinished? ... Yeah, I thought so, too. Last week I installed the last mainline turnout motor in Talheim, so I can finally think about making this look a bit nicer.

 Hardboard (or even better tempered hardboard) is a good material for building the fascia. It's quite sturdy, yet flexible, easy to cut and easy to work with.

I went a little bit over the top with this section of the fascia. Just had a whee bit too much fun designing the shapes.

Though, I think the result is worth the effort, and it frames the railroad a bit more. I need large openings for access to hidden staging which disturb the frame effect quite a bit. There's always a compromise in this somewhere.