Motivations

I was hitting a motivation slump. I did putz around yesterday with the buildings and sidewalks in Irwin, laid the roadbed for the B&O bridge across Herminie Hill and I did manage to finish the mockup of Pittsburgh Plate Glass in west staging (Pittsburgh) but I've been somewhat blah. In fact, Jack was coming over this evening for an operating session and I had not realigned the cars from the last session.

Nothing like a friend to motivate. After dinner I quickly moved some cars around, looking for that elusive balance. I don't have the 4-sided waybills completed yet nor have I established the balance for number of cars on the layout versus the staging yards but I'm learning. I pulled four cars from the layout and managed to get things where I thought they would work before Jack showed up. And he came bearing gifts.

I'm not talking about the 6-pack. Ok. That too. But he was at the local hobby shop (Smitty's) and found a girder bridge for lettered for the Pennsy and a sweet box car that I did not own. Naturally these will look great on the layout but I have a special place for the girder bridge. The May Stern & Co. furniture factory I am modeling in the corner of East McKeesport (in reality in North Pittsburgh) had a rail line to a second story freight door that crossed a road via a girder bridge. Perfect! I'll have to blog about that building with some photos one of these days. Thanks Jack!

So ... you may be wondering how the operating session went. Even if you weren't I'm going to talk about it. The trains from east and west staging worked well as did the work in Irwin. I only have 2 throttles so I work Irwin yard with runs to the Westmoreland Coal Company Mine No. 4 in Herminie twice a day (which is one operating session). Jack runs the trains from staging, both thru (direct from one staging to the other) or locals (stops at different locations to drop or pick up cars). All of those went pretty well but the P&LE train continues to be the challenge. And we never serviced 3 of the sidings. I need to spend some time on this.

Well, a couple of things have come up for next week so I won't have as much time to work the layout but I'll have some thinking time to work out a solution. And think about starting the May Stern building ... and what other mockups I want in west staging ... and finish the Irwin stores I started ... and build the interior for the WCC mine ... and ....

Ah. motivation!