A bit more done.

Rail and Tie painting

     As Helen and are still sorting out our garden in our new digs with more to do I found some time to relax and restart painting some of the track, turnouts and ties oh and finish off the fascia.
    Last Monday afternoon I made a start to cut and fit the remaining pieces of fascia around the duck-under at the entry to the garage from the house. That went much better and faster than expected so once completed I gave that area a coat of paint after first sanding down the surface filler covering any gaps and screw heads. I then set to and gave the rest of the fascia its second coat and made sure I covered the inside areas where the scenery will go so you will not see any bare MDF. Now that it is dry it has turned out better than I had expected as I had to sand the MDF after the first coat due to it getting a bit fluffy.

There is 4 steps down from the house into the garage (train Room)

     Now that was completed I felt in the mood to attack the remaining track and tie painting in Gunnison. I could only purchase non-weathered ME code 70 track at the time so that needed to be finished. I chose Tamiya Dark Iron for the track and for the hand made turnout rail and three shades of grey for the ties. Tamiya Light Grey, Medium Grey and MR Hobby Light Grey. I am surprised at how close a match the Dark Iron is to pre weathered ME track, it looks very good. So still motivated I finished all of the L/H/Side of the yard ties and all of the main line and siding ties. Still a few tracks to paint in Gunnison.

The start of the mainline into Cimarron

     Well that's it for this update thanks for stopping by.
Rod.

Good progress this year.

Lots more done this past two weeks.

     Had the two lads, Big John and Little John come over to help complete the wiring of the last few MP1's and 5's in Poncha Junction. The control panel switches were then wired in, along with the track feeders to the turnout motors. Prior to the lads coming over I added all of the new turnout track feeder droppers and soldered some small track sections to ensue we had good track pickup.
    Whilst all this was going on Barry came over on his last day off on holidays to help me with all the fascia. I had the local hardware store cut 3mm MDF into strips 240mm wide to save us having to do all that. These sheets are 2420mm long and can be tricky to handle given its flexibility. One of the other issues was to mark out where my control panels were to be. Anyway things went very smoothly as we got almost all the fascia up and control panel holes cut.
    Next step was to patch all the holes (I wanted a very clean look to the fascia) which took not too long at all. Barry brought over his orbital sander which attaches to a vacuum cleaner to keep dust levels down. This worked very well and made the sanding job go real fast.
     I did more work to the fascia around the two duck-unders to finish these areas off leaving a small section to complete near the stairs into the house.
     Then came painting. I chose a different colour than the flat black I had used on my SFRSD as I wanted something different. I finally came across Dulux Klavier which is a black / purple colour depending from which angle you look at it.
    Here are a few shots of the progress to date.

Barry working hard at the town of Cimarron.

  

Track work completed at Poncha Junction

   Very happy to see so much progress so now I can start to arrange my operating timetable, car cards and way bills ready for an ops session.
   A big thank you to the two Johns and Barry for their invaluable assistance.
Thanks for stopping by on the Monarch Branch.
Rod.