Work session at Paul's 7-30-10

Great night tonight! Donna made brownies for treats, and Ken, Mark, Keith, and Rick showed up. Collin Daly called to ask if he could come over, and I said "Of course you may!" He showed up a little late, but got involved with our main task tonight...

I had the remnant carpet that had originally been installed in the room where we built the upper level re-installed on the raised floor earlier in the week. So we took all my boxes that had been stashed in the back aisle of Donna's back stock room, and moved them under the benchwork on the raised floor. That allowed us to segregate them them a little, into boxes with Active Roster models; regular rolling stock, parts, and supplies; stuff to sell on eBay and at train shows; and narrow gauge models. Keith expressed the opinion that they wouldn't all fit, but they do! There's some stuff that wasn't in boxes, and I have to get some non-standard boxes so I can take the eBay stuff out of some standard boxes we had used, and most of the stuff left over will fit into them. The other stuff will sit on top of the stacks, under the benchwork. Then we took a break...

We did some track spacing determination on the second turn of the helix to move the track a little farther from the edge than it is now - my concern is that the farther from the edge the sharper the radius, and since it'll have a passing siding inside the main, the siding radius will be even sharper. As we re-configured it, the outside track will have about a 44" radius, and the inside track will be about 42", which should work out pretty well. Then we ran trains for awhile, including Collin's SD-70. Of course, it lost part of its program, so Keith took it home with him to re-program it on his NCE system, after fighting with my Zephyr for half an hour, and searching on the internet for the instructions he used last week to program it originally. That only took another 20 minutes! Anyway, we made a short night of it, but it was great progress for me. Thanks, fellas!

Paul