Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Update for December 2015 / January 2016

Not a lot has been going on since November. With the Christmas holiday and the January train show, there hasn't been a lot of time to work on the layout.

I did get Katy to help build some kits.



We took a 2 week trip to Idaho and Oregon to see the family while the kids were off. I thought hard about going thru Wyoming to shoot some trains in the snow, but I was afraid my wife would have dumped my but in a snowdrift and went on without me.

I did see some snow in Idaho. This was shot at Orchard near Boise on Christmas eve.


While I was waiting for trains, the girls were frolicking in the snow like they'd never seen it before.


They may have seen snow, but I doubt any of them remember seeing one of these.


The show seems like it was a pretty good success. I won't know the numbers until I get the report from the treasurer next month, but it felt like we had a good turnout. Once again, I had a table and tried to sell off all my Union Pacific models that I needed to model the Camas Prairie, but don't need to model Montana and Wyoming. I had some pretty good success selling locomotives, but I was surprised that the freight cars didn't move. I guess people would rather spend $45 on a new Intermountain PFE reefer than $15 on a kit I put together and weathered. Actually, I tried not to sell the ones that were weathers and was a little bummed when a guy pulled out a boxcar with a pretty nice peeled paint roof and bought it. I missed putting it in the box.

I never think about taking photos when I'm at the show, so I don't have any. Here's one from a few years ago of Terry Bobe working on the On30 Texas Outlaws layout, not much has changed.


I did put on a clinic at the show, like I generally do. I did it on Easy Spline Benchwork, which I have talked about here. I need to learn to quit giving myself the last clinic of the day, because attendance was a little light. I had to go out and have my wife take some photos of me doing stuff like putting glue down and cutting the 45 degree pieces in order to complete the clinic.



I also built this example of Easy Spline to take to the clinic.