Distractions

I seem to have plenty of distractions which impede my progress on the new railroad. Some could be viewed as procrastination, but most are just conflicting priorities. I also must balance my home life with my model railroad life. 

I already wrote about the weather impacting my progress on welding. Now that the weather is better, my progress is resuming. I expect to have more steel on hand in a week or so which will help me accelerate again. 

I was distracted earlier this month with modular club activities. Because apparently building a new railroad and running an existing railroad isn't enough, I'm in a modular club too. Actually, our modular club, Arizona Modular Railroaders, started about 5 years ago when five of us splintered off from another club to form our own. We really only set up 2 or 3 times a year, so it's not a huge burden. 


However, I do like to show some level of improvement to my modules each show. This time around I added asphalt roads and dirt. My buddy Kevin did some laser cut grade crossing inserts for between the rails. Those turned out really great. I just need to do some staining. I added a lemon orchard using lemon trees I had made previously. Buildings were added from a collection I purchased. They are pretty rough (way too much glue), but work as stand ins. My buddy Tim, painted one of them and it made a tremendous difference.

The modular club allows me to run very long trains with multiple locos. Much of what gets run is out of era for either layout I have at home. It also gives me a good excuse for that out of era equipment.

We were set up on grass under a 40'x40' canopy at an annual event called Rail Fair held at McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park in Scottsdale. The event is Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 5pm. We set up on Friday afternoon and had trains running before 5pm. Set up went quickly despite being on grass. We ran trains all day Saturday and Sunday. We were fortunate and had no issues with DCC, trackwork, electrical or rain! We did have a dust devil come thru (a mini cyclone) and it blew all the buildings off of my modules into the center. There was only minimal damage. It did blow over some trains and some rolling stock hit the grass. Fortunately nothing was damaged. 

It was windy on Saturday, so my stack train ran as single stacks. For those of you who saw the video of the UP stack train being blow over in Louisiana, I didn't want that to happen in HO scale. 

You may also notice that weathering is non-existent on most equipment. Some of the members want to keep their equipment pristine. Myself, I just haven't made it a priority with all the projects. 

We tore everything down quickly on Sunday at 5pm and were out of there by 6pm. I made it home to watch much of Sunday night football and part of the debate. Football was better...

We had two guest operators join us for the event. It's great to have others running. 

You can see more pix and some videos on our Facebook site: https://www.facebook.com/groups/597715570275343/

It looks like our next show is going to be in February and indoors. That means we'll be set up in about 2.5 hours. 

That was one of the distractions.