Bernhards Random Ramblings BACKUP

On the living room couch tonight, with a glass of wine, reading  Le Train , a model railroad magazine from France my wife picked up for me when she was in Europe a few weeks ago. It's a lot of work to get more than the high points out of the articles. My not-even-close-to-conversational French is hardly tuned for the specialized words and phrases used in e.g. an article about the history of the rail line crossing the Pyrenees, or the last rail-based freight services in central France. Nevertheless, an interesting exercise.

We now have a nice big sign for the sidewalk. That should make it more obvious when the club is open. Since I took the conductor role for a visitor engineer at tonight's operations session, I had some time to take photos. Below is a selection. Train 370 leaving Tracy Western Pacific #728 as train 220 in Hemet Train 220 in Fryton on the way back to Bayshore

Heavy rain. Thunderstorms in the morning. Even some hail. Today was really wet. Nevertheless, when I walked back from lunch there was an opportunity for the sun to peek through the clouds, and produce this awesome double rainbow

Good.

Something is different in the lobby today.

Riding the bike to the bus stop. It's cold, but really nice outside.

The red tail lights are micro LEDs mounted in the shell. There will also be a cab light, so I need a way to route power to all these LEDs and keep the arrangement pluggable. Here's my solution: a header soldered to the decoder "breakout board" and a perf board fragment with resistors to be kept with the shell. The "pins" are wire cut offs from resistor installs in other projects. Never throw anything away .... Here's a side-view with the cab light LED installed, and tail lights wired. The cab LED reaches too far into the cab, and is visible from the outside. I'll try to pull it back a little bit and also limit light leakage into the machine room. I might have to redo the breakout board, since I did a fairly poor soldering job on that, but for now let's see how this pans out. Here's a short video of 601 001 demonstrating the light effects. I still have not closed the chassis and engine roof yet.