Author: Lmind1

A Little Bit of History

  I have to laugh when you watch those crime shows and they have somebody in the hot seat asking them where they were/what they were doing at 1pm six years ago.  I couldn’t tell you what I was doing at 1 pm last Wednesday!  From time to time people ask me about previous layouts, […]

Palms

My venture into making the palms entirely on my own from scratch seems to have worked.  I wasn’t sure going in if it would.  The trunks were made by taking a 1/4″ styrene rod, chucking it in a drill, and spinning it slowly while holding the sharp edge of a jeweler’s file against it as […]

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. […]