Pictures!

OK, it's been about a week since the last update. Jessica is in Florida with her grandparents, so we've been reorganizing the house and painting the downstairs. We also took a quick 2-day trip to Newport, RI to ride the dinner (lunch) train, as well as visit the mansions of Edward Julius Berwind of Berwind-White Coal (The Elms), Alva Vanderbilt (Marble House), and Cornelius Vanderbilt II (The Breakers).

At the beginning of this post you see a new aquisition, one of two T-2-b switchers that were assigned to New Britain until around 1947. It will need a little work, but runs very well. I haven't been able to verify when the 44-tonners replaced the T-2-b's in New Britain, but I have photos of these in 1947, and the earliest photo of a 44-tonner I have is 1949. Here's another shot looking down the tracks:

And this is an overview of the Whiting Street Yard:

All of the trackwork is in. The frogs haven't been powered yet, and I have not ordered the supplies to actuate the turnouts with servos yet. Right now they can be manually switched (and there's on Blue Point I used for testing that you can see in the last picture.

It's not anywhere close to prototypical in design. I'll build a brick freight house flat for the two tracks next to the wall. The third track is storage, and the two tracks in the other direction represent team tracks. With the 44-tonner or the T-2-b you can fit two cars on the switchback. So far it's been an interesting module to operate.

Chris stopped by last week to run a train and help cut the last piece needed for the helix. It's an odd shaped piece to connect the second level to the Berlin Branch.

The turnouts have arrived at the hobby shop, so I'll be picking them up today. We still have at least two days of work around the house, but hopefully I'll get to them later in the week. The plan is to complete laying track in staging as well as the second helix.