Southern Pacific's Jefferson Branch

[ratled]

Thanks Mike! I actually wanted more but the higher powers knew better and set me up with what I needed.... and they were right.      

Its alive ! The Jefferson branch lives (locos are lit).



The bus is in, all of the feeders are in and providing good power throughout from the yard to the far side of Jefferson.



I ran this little Atlas silver series MP15DC through every bit of track without issues and all TOs worked flawlessly. That little MP15 is great runner and performed like a champ after almost 10 years in a box and no work to it. It will get repainted at some point to SP 2695 to be the yard switcher.



This is the first time I have ran a train with a phone as a the throttle. I have to say the Digitrax LNWI WAS a great thing. Easy to install and simple to run. For less than a cost of another throttle all phones can now be throttles.  NOTE:  As of this posting on 12/20/20 I have replaced with something else as it started to fail after only a few months

Most of the TOs have over spring control (yellow pins) but I have been having some issues bending them up. My dexterity issues came into play and I wasn't expecting that. Kind of set me back for a while. I did have 2 packs of the Caboose ground throws (green pins) in the mean time to get things back on course. There are a couple of TOs that were just pinned in place for now as their operation isn't critical (blue pins).



I added a new Walther's Proto SD9E to the fleet. A nice looking model but the included ESU decoder leaves me wanting. It's twitchy and makes strange sounds when F8 is used. When I change the address to the 2 digit loco number it actually gets worse for some reason. I'll have to get into it when I get decoder Pro up and running to see what is all in there. I had high hopes for the engine.... it has been sold off!

I put an Atlas silver GP40 in service as well (next to the SD9). It needs a little love and a good PM but not bad for also being in the box for 10 years. Hopefully I can find it's mate in the consist and get the pair running for regular service on the Siskiyou turn.



Currently I'm going through several boxes of rolling stock to populate the layout. Just looking for appropriate cars to get things going for now and will worry about standards down the road as long as they are road worthy. Everything else is going into a For Sale box to hit E Bay soon.

Lastly little test video
A while back I saw a post about using a GoPro to shoot video.  I thought I would give it a try.  I also remember some years ago Lance M. flipped his camera upside down to get the lens closest to the "ground".  

I found my pair of Atlas Silver series GP40-2s (c. 2009) that are paired as my  consist so I used them   These have been sitting in the box for the last 10 years and worked very well on non cleaned track.  I got these when the production run was winding down and vendors were offering deep discounts on roads that weren't selling.  At the same time Atlas was offering complete shells of different roads and the SSWs were on sale.  I bought several of each to get a nice fleet.