July Progress

July was a very busy month. After the open house in June the layout room was clean and ready to be torn up again. Of course, the bad thing is that when the room is clean I can never find my tools, so I spend most of my time hunting.

After the convention, this is what the Billings yard looked like. I needed to figure out a way to get the turntable pit installed close to the backdrop.

Yard looked like a stub yard at the beginning of July.

I decided to cut a template with a big plunge router and then use a trim router to cut the actual hole. 

Here is the crappy trim router from Harbor Freight. It died about 3/4 of the way through and I had to finish with a rotozip.

This is what the hole looked like before I removed the template.

And with the pit dropped in. I still need to get the correct screws to hold it firmly in place.

It didn't take long to lay the rest of the yard tracks.

A closer view of the west end of the yard ladder.

I had to insert ties in the gaps where the flex track comes together.

At the end of July I went to Durango, Colorado with Speed to take the Soundtraxx Academy. It was a lot of fun and one of the highlights was seeing their surface mount assembly floor. Here is a production worker testing decoders using a functional tester that they have special built to emulate a locomotive.  

We rode the Durango and Silverton on Saturday with the Soundtraxx group.

On Sunday we went over to Chama and rode the Cumbres and Toltec. It was a spectacular weekend and I highly recommend it to anyone.