Snow Day = Big Time Train Day!

Arnold D. Cribari posted:

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I only have one concern: what are we going to do if we lose electricity?

LOL, Arnold

 

 

You mean you don't have a few car batteries and a power inverter to keep the trains running?

So the weather girl really hit a foul ball today.  We were supposed to get a little bit of snow and it was supposed to change to rain, way earlier in the day than it did.  I was surprised how the roads became as slippery as they did, at this point in the season.  We had gone to Jersey in the morning and by the time we were near home, I felt us slip slidin' away.  

Hello, I had a back-up generator added to the rear of the house about six or seven years ago and made sure that the electrician added the model railroad to the protected circuits.

 

Ran this guy with pennsy  manifest today I was snowed in this morning 

Hello Arnold, Not too bad right now here in coastal Maine, but starting tonight around midnight I will be asleep while it gets a bit heavy and wet. So tomorrow when the snow disrupts most commuters I will only have to bring my grand daughter to preschool ten minutes away. Since I am not scheduled to work,  down to the basement I will go to check out a placement for table #4 on the former now new layout.  I will run a freight train on three tables that are up. By noon, I will pick up my grand daughter and we will place some Plasticville on the tables. Then run some Postwar temperature permitting. If too cold there is always a quick fast tracks oval layout up stairs with loyal dinosaur ridership.

Btw, I have done  without a generator for 23 years. When the power is out, scratch  build train or rail marine  related stuff or read train mags by flashlight. Winter months bring out the builder, operator, and potential for thinking out of the box, like  a couple of car batteries, an inverter? That is at a constant speed, not variable?

leroof.

 

 

Leroof posted:

Hello Arnold, Not too bad right now here in coastal Maine, but starting tonight around midnight I will be asleep while it gets a bit heavy and wet. So tomorrow when the snow disrupts most commuters I will only have to bring my grand daughter to preschool ten minutes away. Since I am not scheduled to work,  down to the basement I will go to check out a placement for table #4 on the former now new layout.  I will run a freight train on three tables that are up. By noon, I will pick up my grand daughter and we will place some Plasticville on the tables. Then run some Postwar temperature permitting. If too cold there is always a quick fast tracks oval layout up stairs with loyal dinosaur ridership.

Btw, I have done  without a generator for 23 years. When the power is out, scratch  build train or rail marine  related stuff or read train mags by flashlight. Winter months bring out the builder, operator, and potential for thinking out of the box, like  a couple of car batteries, an inverter? That is at a constant speed, not variable?

leroof.

 

 

Leroof, what a wonderful day you will have tomorrow with your grandaughter. How old is she? Does she have favorite things to do with the trains?

Many think trains are a boy only thing. They are so wrong. When my currently 32 year old daughter was little, she loved playing with the trains, I told her stories about the "little people" on the layout, we gave them train rides on gondolas, and she helped me glue together and paint our Popsicle Stick bleachers now on the baseball field.

She helped paint some of the little people.

Below is a recent video of her 6 year old daughter, my grandaughter, running trains in m th basement, including  a LionChief+ locomotive using the remote unit, and a Postwar FM Trainmaster, and playing with the"little critters" on the farm:

Arnold

If it snows that bad, you likely won't be driving.. You'll only need one battery ..and maybe enough load to regulate speed. Oh yea...the whistless tender too. Inverters! We don't need no stinking inverters!

Our new house came with one of these... 

While it snows in NY outside, this Postwar 646 puffs circles of smoke inside:

Arnold D. Cribari posted:

 

I only have one concern: what are we going to do if we lose electricity?

 

 

I know what I do...start viewing my View-Master collection. I keep spare D batteries for my viewer.

Yorktown Heights, NY got 6 + inches of snow  and its still coming down heavily. A friend of mine just told me Orange County in NY got 18 inches.

I may run ALL of my locomotives today!

Snow and Ice story: Arnold, my daughter's 6. '0 clock flight from Portland  to la Guardia  yesterday evening  was cancelled, she was down there from 3 pm. She had a special course to attend in Brooklyn and was going to spend the weekend with my son that lives in Queens. She was trying to get the train down and Amtrak was Sold Out! There were no available hotels as so many were stranded. So her plan was to stay with my sons best friend in Cambridge and drive down in the morning and take public transportation to her course. Not so fast,  The roads were so slippery that her brakes were useless several times! Trip cancelled, she gave it her best shot. She safely arrived back  home @ 01:30 this morning. I saw her briefly and said oh well, we can run some trains later with Lauralie ( who's is 4). She still loves operating Lionel. Now my daughter was my train buddy when she was little. I will try and scan some photos of Katie at the ZW in our  first big house layout. Now my grand daughter loves to run gondolas full of dinosaurs upstairs on the living room floor  (multiple stories of each trip) in a big oval. Current Layout downstairs (basement) is still being built but we can operate one train in multiple return loop configurations. Both girls, big and little have their own trains, some of which are pastel color girls rolling stock. Thank you for sharing the video of your grand daughter, she sure is cute. With that footage, I see just how expansive and entertaining your layout.

I  must put down the I pad now and go to the basement to scope out another table arrangement. Have a great day running ALL of your trains! Lol. 

It's still coming down here heavy.

leroof.

 

Love that 646 puffing!

Also, Those blue bleacher seats sure are special then! 

 

Lee, great snowy day for a  Harbobelt switcher with Pennsylvania load excursion. 

Enjoy the day home trackside.

leroof.

Leroof, both of our granddaughters love gondolas. Mine loads them with Shopkins and farm animals.

Another thing they have in common are playing with dinosaurs:

Which of them do you think are O Scale? I say the green Brontosaurus.

There's also a Tyrannosaurus Rex buried in my house somewhere that I could not find this morning.

Maybe our granddaughters will become paleontologists someday. Arnold

Last night, while the snow was still falling, I had time to work on trains.  This morning, with a foot of soggy crud on the ground and everything in town closed, a large part of my day will be devoted to clearing our driveway and our neighbors'.

Not where I live........rain, snow or light wind and our power goes out. Mon Power has a single power supply running 50+ miles to our town.....even a squirrel brings down the entire town. 

I'm sitting here now on generator because it got cold last night......no trains today.

Balshis posted:

Last night, while the snow was still falling, I had time to work on trains.  This morning, with a foot of soggy crud on the ground and everything in town closed, a large part of my day will be devoted to clearing our driveway and our neighbors'.

I just did my driveway. Please take your time when shoveling snow, and do a little at a time.

Hang in there, Dave. Hoping you will be able to run your trains soon.

EVERYDAY at the Poole Bahn model eisenbahn (LGB) is a train day! My display style layout is operating 365 days a year excluding some hospital visits (I am a 76 year old dialysis patient going on 14 years!). I also run standard gauge, which, sizewise, mates well with LGB! It's all good! (SMILE!)

BTW, I vigorously applaud those of you who have encouraged your children and/or grandchildren to participate in our hobby! LOVE those baseball players and dinosaurs! Waeshal! (Anglo Saxon holiday greeting).

Arnold D. Cribari posted:

Leroof, both of our granddaughters love gondolas. Mine loads them with Shopkins and farm animals.

Another thing they have in common are playing with dinosaurs:

Which of them do you think are O Scale? I say the green Brontosaurus.

..................

If we can believe the representations of size in the JP movies(I'm not about to go looking at dino sites for the real answer), I'd vote for the Triceratops being closer to the right scale for the people(though maybe too large by a factor of 2).   Or maybe the one behind the green bronto's tail.  The green Brontosaurus seems too small.  They look to be truly towering in the movies, like a 4 or more story building at the level of its head.

Off to shovel.  They lied about the rain here too, so this stuff isn't going to go away by itself as I'd hoped.   At least I didn't have to deal with heading into work today.

-Dave

Arnold D. Cribari posted:

Balshis posted:

Last night, while the snow was still falling, I had time to work on trains.  This morning, with a foot of soggy crud on the ground and everything in town closed, a large part of my day will be devoted to clearing our driveway and our neighbors'.

I just did my driveway. Please take your time when shoveling snow, and do a little at a time.

Thank you, Arnold.  Fortunately, I have a snow blower, and I don't have to do much shoveling.  But this particular snow was among the worst I've seen -- around a foot of it, heavy, wet, sticky and very difficult to handle.  Even my 10hp blower kept getting bogged down in the mucky stuff.

My neighbor is disabled, and I always do his driveway, too.  And just to make things more fun, the blower ran out of gas before I was half done, necessitating a walk back to my garage for the gas can so I could fuel up again.  And restarting a 10hp engine with a pull-rope is no fun.

Anyway, I began at around 11:00, and it was 1:30 till it was all finished.  Say, d'you think maybe I should have gotten my #53 D&RG snowplow out there to speed things up?  I always think of these things too late!

--John

VERY GLAD I live in sunny Nashville, TN! Even when we have snow it is not much, and the Sun clears it up quickly in a couple of days! My sincere sympathies to those in the northern states!  ☺

A foot? 18" ? That ain't a storm. Around here that is a dusting. This is a storm. Heading there tomorrow for a train show.

Pete

If they don't beef up the roof framing up there, they certainly should...That's some serious accumulation! 

An inch or less is plenty for me these days!  

Well, here are some of the players on the being built layout. There are many playmobile legos and other assorted creatures that take train rides. As 90% of my trains are packed since the mold remediation (all cardboard left the cellar and trains cleaned and stored)when I get the gondolas out I will make a dinosaur train video with grand daughter. Btw, a couple of these plastic prehistoric creatures belong to my kids when they were little. Now the dollar store is visited for newer ones. There are actually more dinosaurs! These are the only ones allowed for a portrait!

We only got a foot here today... so that slowed me down to 50 on the Interstate.  Worked a 8 hour day, set up a remote broadcast for tomorrow, went to the hardware store, and did some maintenance down at the yacht club. 

If it snowed two feet, it might've slowed me down...

Jon

Leroof posted:

Lee, great snowy day for a  Harbobelt switcher with Pennsylvania load excursion. 

Enjoy the day home trackside.

leroof.

Thanks it was fun I finally got to run a train it’s been at least 2weeks 

Many of us in the Northeast are having a snow day or ice day. Most schools in Northern Westchester Couty, NY, where I live, are closed.

What a great opportunity to spend the day with the trains and layout: building benchwork, laying track, installing bridges and structures, creating scenes, running trains, and otherwise working on the railroad and/or layout.

I am making the farm more of a layout center piece, which is consistent with my master plan of adding features of The Old Put, which had dairy farms along points north. I can't wait for my 7 year old grandaughter to see this because the farm, with it's people and animals, is her favorite section of the layout:

The brown cow with the large white spot on its side is standing because last night I fixed 2 of its broken legs using bits of wooden tooth pick, glue and brown paint. LOL

I did the same thing to fix the broken leg of one of the tan colored horses, using a bit of tooth pick, glue and tan colored paint, enabling it to stand:

Show the progress you are making with your trains and layout, taking advantage of this snow and ice day. Arnold

No snow on Long Island yet...... the view from my office window....

Just bought a nice D&H box car on Trainz though

Bob

Leroof posted:

Well, here are some of the players on the being built layout. There are many playmobile legos and other assorted creatures that take train rides. As 90% of my trains are packed since the mold remediation (all cardboard left the cellar and trains cleaned and stored)when I get the gondolas out I will make a dinosaur train video with grand daughter. Btw, a couple of these plastic prehistoric creatures belong to my kids when they were little. Now the dollar store is visited for newer ones. There are actually more dinosaurs! These are the only ones allowed for a portrait!

I hope the rampaging dinos don't damage that beautiful Seabord switcher you've got there.

Made a few minor changes to the table layout this morning.  We have less than an inch of snow on the ground in CT but, that will change later today.   A wonderful thing about retirement is, EVERYDAY is like a snow day!  Much better when it's 80 degrees and sunny but, cold weather means it's time for trains instead of golf.

Here are two amateurish videos taken with my phone.  It's just about the trolley's today, but you maybe able to make out the oil tank, my recently replaced central vacuum unit, and the long water pipe that runs to the basement bathroom.   Those things were a hassle to work around, and restrict straight track runs on the first two levels.

This one is from the Stadium side and shows where the dogs and beers come from for the ballpark and Humble Hot Dog stand.

Bob and Arnold, the weather report doesn't sound too good for the rest of the day.   Also, fixing stuff on the layout somehow seems more satisfying than adding new stuff.  Especially if you've been thinking about it for awhile.

Jerry

About an inch of snow and ice in Connecticut this morning. More forecast for later today. Returned from my errands and am heading downstairs to work on my craftsman kit construction.

MELGAR

 

JerryG posted:

Made a few minor changes to the table layout this morning.  We have less than an inch of snow on the ground in CT but, that will change later today.   A wonderful thing about retirement is, EVERYDAY is like a snow day!  Much better when it's 80 degrees and sunny but, cold weather means it's time for trains instead of golf.

Here are two amateurish videos taken with my phone.  It's just about the trolley's today, but you maybe able to make out the oil tank, my recently replaced central vacuum unit, and the long water pipe that runs to the basement bathroom.   Those things were a hassle to work around, and restrict straight track runs on the first two levels.

This one is from the Stadium side and shows where the dogs and beers come from for the ballpark and Humble Hot Dog stand.

Bob and Arnold, the weather report doesn't sound too good for the rest of the day.   Also, fixing stuff on the layout somehow seems more satisfying than adding new stuff.  Especially if you've been thinking about it for awhile.

Jerry

Lookin' real good, Jerry. Those trolleys are having a ball on your layout. Arnold

MELGAR posted:

About an inch of snow and ice in Connecticut this morning. More forecast for later today. Returned from my errands and am heading downstairs to work on my craftsman kit construction.

MELGAR

 

Great start, Melgar, it's going to be gorgrous. Arnold 

That will be a NICE structure when finished. ☺