Broke away from the sun in Tucson to fly to the left coast for a long weekend with some model railroad freinds. For the past few years, the guys have been visiting me in Northern California, however, now that I no longer have my model railroad layout, we all decided to head to Southern California for some sun. Just in time since it snowed a foot in Portland which made flying both ways real fun. I had a smooth flight from Tucson.
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| Me in the hole dispatching the railroad |
Click on any of the photos to expand.
We flew in early Friday to LAX where our mutual friend, Frank Kenny, who is building a wonderful modern era railroad called the CPRX which runs from southern California through the Tehachapi loop to Fresno. I didn't take a lot of photos. Others shot more.
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| Randy running the Amtrak (behind him) |
We worked on Frank's layout all day. Made some good progress on a number of things and a couple steps back in a couple thanks to my booboo. Won't go into it here but it's easily fixable. Whew. I owe you one, Frank.
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| Joel, Yardmaster and Dave in background |
We visited the Belmont Shores Model Railroad club Saturday morning (see video below) then toured some of the 1:1 size big railroad yards in Long Beach and ate our lunch while watching the big trains drive by.
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| GP-60 Engines switching out the yard in Long beach. Ya don't see Santa Fe markings much anymore |
Back in the afternoon to Frank's place to operate his railroad. First time he has fully operated the railroad with a dispatcher. Dave and I shared the duties, well, mainly Dave. We worked out a few bugs in the operating plan.
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| Some of our "crack" crew membes looking for trouble |
Overall the layout runs great with few mechanical or electrical issues. Afterwards, we debriefed with Frank over our suggestions for improvement.
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| he thinks he knows what he is doing. He doesn't |
As a former layout owner, I can attest to the amount of effort Frank has put into building this layout and the effort still needed to make it shine. He will get there and we look forward to returning next year.
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| Kent, Phil (very shy) and Frank Kenny, our Host |
And what did Sraddha do while I was galavanting around the country? She had a quiet weekend home.
Sunday we operated on Joel Morse' "New York, Ontario & Western" RR which was real fun.
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| Yours Truly running a local |
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| Yard work |
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| Now what was I doing? |
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| Mark Lestico adding his bridge over door |
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| New way of doing signals |
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| Staging and yard areas. |
We also visited two other layouts, Bob Grech' HO Western Pacific and Mark Lestico's N Scale Cascade Subdivision. See video's below.
Some videos I shot during layout tours:
