The weeks news. A new buyer, disappointment for cheerleaders , and, what else, trains.
It’s been a quiet week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.
We have an offer on the cabin, and the closing date is set for the 31st of March, with the buyers wanting to start moving in around the 20th of May. If this warm weather continues, we could be moving out sooner, but I have seen winters that have held their breath until the last weekend of February, or the first week of March, only to dump a season’s worth of snow in a couple of days. So, not holding my breath here, but it’s looking a lot like 2015, when I came back from a vacation in the Dominican Republic at the end of the first week of April, and was able to drive all the way into my driveway. Only time will tell.
The lovely wife had a three day trip this past week taking high school cheerleaders to state competitions down in the southern end of the state. Sadly, they didn’t get even halfway down when they were stopped due to a semi truck hauling propane that wrecked, closing the road. Initially, they were told that the road would be open in about ten hours, so they managed to get rooms at a nearby motel for the night, hoping that if they got an early start the next morning they could still make the tournament. The next morning, they found out that the road would be closed for at least two days, maybe five. With no way around the wreck site that could get them to the tournament on time, they headed home. A real shame since the group had worked hard all season to get to that stage.
Moving on to model railroading, it seems as if I am moving away from HO scale, the scale I really wanted to model, to that of O scale, and in particular, Lionel trains. I started with this set I picked up cheap online, hoping to gain the knowledge working on it to tackle the locomotive that had once been owned by the lovely wife’s dad. Well, I have fallen down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos and how-to sites on everything from cleaning to rewiring. I started with the tender, or coal car, as some would call it, from the set I got online. It has a whistle, as does the one from the lovely wife’s set, and I figured I would see what I could do. I rewired a few things, then dug out the old 1947 transformer and a piece of track. I set the tender on the rails, hooked up the transformer, turned on the power, and pushed the whistle button. It took a couple of tries, then the whistle came to life, something that it most likely hasn’t done in fifty or sixty years. Fresh from my victory with that tender, I tore into the one from the lovely wife. Within a couple of hours of cleaning and rewiring, I had it working as well. Now I am waiting for a parts locomotive I found for the set I picked up so I can jump into rewiring that. I have already cleaned everything I can get to, and gone over the wiring more than once to make sure I understand where they all go. Once I have that locomotive running around the tracks, I believe I can rebuild the most important one, should it need it, though I am hoping all it needs is a good cleaning.
Maybe soon I will get back to building model buildings in HO scale, though I have run out of places to put them and have quite a few already packed up awaiting our move, but for now I am enjoying repairing these old trains from yesteryear, bringing them back to life. Who knows, maybe we will have a basement big enough that I can set up not only an HO layout, but one for Lionel trains as well.
Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.
