October 29, 2016


  It’s been a week of fine tuning on the LAJ.   Micro Engineering currently has the market on the most prototypical looking turnouts.  They are prone to electrical dead spots though.  Tam Valley frog juicers, absolutely ingenious devices, quickly solved that problem.  I also had some gremlins in the track around one of the […]

Obstacles


Frustrated by the fact that, despite years and years of resolutions, you’ve yet to lay so much as one turnout on an actual model railroad?  Started a layout but demoralized by the woeful lack of progress?  You have a lot of company so, welcome to the club!  Feel better?  Didn’t think so. The first step […]

CF-7 re-powering


The pad printing and details on my newly acquired Athearn LAJ CF-7 are really quite nice. The issue with  Athearn RTR locos, however, is that their low cost drive trains tend to be fairly rough runners. I really needed to find a way to upgrade it since it would  be relegated to slow speed switching. […]

CF-7’s


Tracking down appropriate CF-7’s was proving to be elusive.  Thanks to David and Guenther for coming to the rescue and setting me up with a unit each.  Before getting into detailing and weathering, I want to spend some time sorting out the drive trains to see if any re-powering will be necessary, especially for the […]

Fear of the Inconsequential


Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, addresses the relationship between the amount of thought that goes into making a decision and the ultimate quality of that decision’s outcome. As the time devoted to making a decision increases, eventually things flatten out and you hit the point of diminishing returns.  More tooth gnashing, more analysis, doesn’t give you […]