WOOHOO! Good weather = time to build

[Gary S]

It is good to see you are not packing all the space full with tracks, buildings and action but use space to model space as it is, open. Even at this early stage the imagination works already.

Thanks Reinhard. I have enough room so that I did not feel the pressure to cram tracks into every square inch available. I think that will add to the feel of a real railroad... especially down here in the South. Plenty of open space, even in the city. Our urban areas are not jammed full of buildings as they sometimes are in the Northeast United States.

It is always a good choice to run a train with a CF-7!

You got that right! That CF-7 is a good puller. I added extra lead in the body, and also put in a sound decoder. Great thing about a CF-7 is that the cab is big enough to put a 1" speaker in. The cab actually makes a great speaker box. I took a piece of plastic sheet, cut it to fit up in the cab horizontally, cut a hole in the plastic to fit the speaker, and glued the assembly into the cab. I used a digitrax sound decoder and downloaded the sound file into it off the net - they didn't have a CF-7 sound file, but they have several switchers and E8s and stuff to chose from. Now the bad news... the sound files are really not that good. I am planning on replacing the sound decoder with a different and better brand... something with an F7 sound file.