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| Categories: Main category The Rat’s Mouth & Eastern RR has begun its eastward expansion. I’ve added a spur going to the eastern loop. The weather in South Florida has gone from too cold to too hot in a very short time. The heat index was 99 degrees by 10:30 this morning. But I get a few hours early in the morning to work on it.
The expansion area is 17′ x 8′. I’m planning to put in a large loop with a reversing track and a small 3 track yard on the front side away from the house. We did a survey of the area for ground elevation. It looks like it will take about 2 yards of fill to keep the grade to a maximum of 2.5%.
I finally got to use the trestle I won some time ago. In the picture below, you can see the progress so far.
| Categories: Main category The new plants have settled in and the miniature roses are blooming. For more information about the roses click here.
The west end of the garden has a ramp leading into the house. I started with an all wood trestle, but have replaced some of the supports with Jigstones structures. I’m still not happy with them due to the difficulty in adjusting their height. I may try to drive some pvc pipe into the ground with elbow bends to the cross piece. I spent some time today adjusting the supports to keep the slope to about 2%. Thank goodness for a GM-20 Inclinometer.
This little town has a big train station, a church and store. You can see some of the bonsai trees I planted there, still in their pots to try to keep them small. Uncontrolled ficus trees can be a real disaster down here.
| Categories: Main category The weather is great and it’s time to clean up and expand the layout. I’ve done a lot of work on the garden. Most of the pesky weeds are gone and the other plants have been trimmed back. Since the layout is on the north side of the house and partially under the overhang, it’s nearly all in shade. This limits the types of plants that will be happy here. I went to Sun Kiss Nursery in Pompano and showed them pictures of what I was trying to do. They were very helpful in selecting plants that would fit in. Since flowers were out, we selected a number of plants with colorful leaves.
Now that I had power to the tracks, it was time to add to my rolling stock. I got four Denver & Rio Grande Western passenger cars and two beer freight cars.
The passenger train is a lot longer than I had expected. I just fits on one of my sidings and barely makes it into the house.
The freight train is carrying a load of jigstones to a construction site together with enough beer for the builders.
The Southeast Large Scale Train Show was a show that I was looking forward to. I wanted to talk to members of Large Scale Online. People that have been helpfull to me on the LSOL message boards and others who have written interesting articles.
LGBoA would also be there. I didn’t expect much that hadn’t already been discussed on the internet. Their presence was appreciated. And I picked up a new 2008 Piko catalog.
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