I no longer get new post notifications through email. I checked all my settings and it appears fine of Blue and no blocks on gmail. Spam is clear too.
Any suggestions that I haven't tried?
Charlie

Suddenly having track problems on my layout which might be a short circuit. 

The layout and its wiring it ultra simple. Basically, I have two loops. My outer loop is divided into two halves. Power has suddenly stopped getting to the left-hand half. The layout was working perfectly when a train I was running suddenly stopped on this left half. Basically, the transformer lights up as it normally does when power is going to the R/H part of the layout. But, if I turn on (i.e. have power going to) the L/H side, the transformer light goes out. The transformer also gets very hot.

Again, I had not made any changes to the track, etc. The layout was working fine until this suddenly happened.

I have my wires going to an Atlas switch (terminal #205). Is it possible that switch is failing? I've had it for about 15 years.

Thanks in advance!

Rob

My Friend bought this kit a number of years back:
   

And after hanging on to it for this long he decided that he wanted me to build it for him. It's a pretty complicated kit, about 30 scale feet long with a complete interior.

   

There are three sheets of laser cut wood, one small sheet of laser resin board, and one sheet of thicker laser cut basswood. as well as windows, material for the slide, and some printed lettering. The instructions are in color as well.

   

I started by painting the three sheets with flat white, seeing as most of the model will be white.

     

Then I masked and painted the three interior floor parts with gray and tan. I then scribed tile lines into then to simulate flooring.
I'm waiting for some paint to dry before I continure.

Lots of action as usual at the Leetown Mary St. locomotive facility.

   

Caught up with WPMA-19 as it was pulling a car from Sea Side Foods.

Bruce

   

We seem to have an unknown issue with our server or software. We will occasionally go down with a "44" error for no reason. Sometimes it's just for a few minutes, today it went on for a few hours. Pat checks for issues and cannot find anything wrong and by golly, Big Blue springs to life once again. If we ignore the error, it doesn't seem to matter, Big Blue still comes back up on it's own. We suspect it could be that since we are on a shared server, someone else is hogging all the bandwidth. If we do that, GoDaddy will slap our wrists and tell us what bad people we are, so it's a mystery why we go down in the first place, and why we come back up without doing anything.

The point is, if you encounter a 44 error and can't access Big Blue, don't panic, just wait a few minutes and try again. It will eventually come back on it's own.

I picked this up at a hoby shop a few months back:

   

I'ts missing a number of parts. Grabs, couplers and covers, bottom doors, brake gear. I'd like to know it's origins so I can track down the missing pieces. It looks sort of Tichy but they didn't make a composite  hopper.

It's 4AM down at the James St. roundhouse as the hostler has moved U2G Northern #6213 onto the turntable preparing for the first morning commuter train.The yard spotlight illuminates the scene. 

   

Continuing to finish up some projects. I found a Branchline Blueprint 40' AAr boxcar awhile ago and painted it for Denver and Rio Grande Western:

   

Why this roadname after painting so many CN and CP cars? Well I've alway liked the D&RGW and if I wasn't modeling Canadian, I'd probably be modeling this.
I had the decals in my collection for a number of years and this was the perfect candidate for them. However I had two sets of decals so I wanted a second car. Finding another indentical boxcar kit was easy but expensive (especially shipping) So I waited until I found another build boxcar at a swap meet.

   

It needed to be stripped of paint and ecals and a few repairs but at 3$ I couldn't go wrong.

   

This afternoon I sprayed it in primer along with an Athearn hopper that I also had in the projects pile. 

     

Up until now I've been using light gray paint from a rattle can to primer my painting projects. A couple months ago another modeller gave me a lot of Vallejo products including paints, thinners, airbrush cleaning fluid and two bottles of Acrylic-Polyurethane primer. I had never used it before but it airbrushes well right out of the bottle and cleans up with water. The finish was quite acceptable with any flaws being my fault. I think I'll be using this from now on as long as the paint goes on well overtop of it.

Working my ay through a number of projects that I've left unfinished for the past year or so. I bought a Walthers Work flat kit at a swap meet last year. I already had one that was built stock:
   

But I wanted to up the new ones game a bit.

   

I replaced the cat-in corner grabs with wire, then I weathered the deck with a series of grays, tans and washes. 

   

I painted the rest on the car in boxcar red and gave it a single number since it's for my logging line. I still used the original gondola sides but I weathered and painted them.
I found the car was a bit on the light side so I used some stick-on weights and hid them under a stack on ties.

   

After that I replaced the cast coal/ gravel pile with woodland scenics ballast, The plastic barrels with some wood kegs of spikes, and some hand tools.

   

It needs it's final weathering yet.