Even though I was good this year (I swear!) Santa still brought me coal in my stocking. Actually the coal was a 48 pack of Accurail 3 bay coal loads which was fine with me as I need all I can get. I'll end up coating them with white glue or matte medium and then covering them with either the Dollar Tree Black Decorative Sand or real crushed coal I use for the larger mine run sizes.
The Walthers Truck Dump kit represents a smaller mining operation so the potential candidates are limited to a few locations on my end of the Wheeling District. One truck dump I would like to add is just east of Adena Yard but at this point I'm not sure if there will be room. Another possibility is a spot on the AC&NA branch at the small town of Georgetown (not the Prep Plant). Either way I'd like to modify the kit a bit so it won't be quite so recognizable as a Walthers kit.
Through out the year I saved a few interesting items to my wife's Amazon watch list that were mentioned in the Model Railroad Hobbyist forums.
The first was an inexpensive Optivisor type headset magnifier. Shortly after hitting 40 I noticed my close up vision begin to degrade, sigh... I now have a pair of reading glasses to help at the workbench and this magnifying headset will really help for the even smaller stuff.
The second item of interest from the MRH forums was a tube of low temperature solder. I want to try it out for soldering specific parts of the frog when building Fast Track turnouts. I'm sure it will have other uses as well.
Lastly my son got me an Athearn RTR Pittsburgh & West Virginia caboose that I had my eye on for a while. My local hobby shop closed shortly after I had placed an order and since I don't really model the P&WV it wasn't really a priority to order elsewhere. However if I ever get a bigger basement (house) I'd like to model the same area but extend things to include Jewett and the line along the Ohio River. Expanding to Jewett would let me model the P&WV run through trains coming from Pittsburgh Junction heading to Brewster and vise versa. Brendan is all about any idea for a bigger layout and made sure I got the caboose for Christmas.
Well that was all for me, I hope everybody also had a happy holiday season and found a few train items under the tree!
Yeah I need to get me one of those head magnifiers. A pair of over-strength reading glasses works pretty well. Normal reading I would use a +1.0 pair, but for working with small parts I have a pair of +2.0 that work pretty good. I'll bet the head magnifiers are great for things like coupler springs, grab irons, etc.
ReplyDeleteForgot to mention, my next purchase is going to be a #8 Fast Tracks jig. I'll also have to get the #8 point forming tool, but the stock filing tool is universal, and I think you have one of those?
ReplyDeleteYes, the stock filing tool is universal and I do have one. Knowing someone with a #8 template will be handy in the future possibly :)
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