UP SD40-2's NEW Layout

[UP SD40-2]

Wayne, ED & Mike, thank you so much guys, really, Thank you  .

Both my wife and myself had off today, decided to smoke a couple pork butts and a HUGE pork loin  , OMG they are sooo good! When I smoke its low and slow, so I always do a lot to make it worth it. The Hickory and apple wood arnt cheap, and it takes hours to do it, so ya have to make it worth doing.


While I was smoking the meats I got some more work done on the layout. Well, I also worked on it 3 nights this week too, but it doesnt seem like much got done. I worked on about 11' of it, putting in some grass, ballasting the last section of the mainline, and started putting some cinders on a bit of the yard tracks. 

Like usual, I get an idea in my head and just start working on it, then after I have got a ways into it I realize I haven't taken any pics of what I have done  ...thus, I dont have much for before and after shots.  

I started to vacuum the top of the layout before I started to grass it, but ended up vacuuming up a couple police officers and a motorcycle, CRAP, well, I emptied the vacuum out onto a piece of cardboard to retrieve the stuff I had vacuumed up, as I did that I noticed I have a lot of grass in the vacuum, with some dirt and other small stuff, WOW, this looks like grass with trash in it....hey, I could use this around the downtown area! It worked out ok I think, we'll see how it ends up finished, at the least it saved me money on ground cover. 
 
As I was doing the residential house area across the street from the Court house, I decided I was going to totally redue the ground cover all around the GERN area, it just doesnt match the rest of the layout so I think I am going to add a little more green to that area, not a lot, but some, since the time the layout is modeled in is very early summer. Havent started the GERN "redue" yet, but it will be very soon. 

A couple ramdon pics of SOME of this weeks work, I am a bit further along then the pics shown, but everything has glue soup on it now so I didnt take a final shot of it.






NO train running this week, so I was looking through some of my old rail fanning pics I took and decided to post a couple, the first one I took in Rochelle, I think it was around 2012, or perhaps 2009? , cripes, not sure, but its an SD40T-2 snoot nose, the snoot nose SD40-2's are my all time favorite SD40-2's, and the UP had TONS of them. The second shot I took in S. Beloit, its a GP40-2, pretty darn sure it was in 2012...




Till next time....