Mark's MT Railroads: Bonus Coat

My lovely and generous wife volunteered to paint one more additional coat of white on the Train Room walls! The third picture below shows the results of the nice, even paint job she provided - thank you Amber!
This week I gave the bottoms of the walls a nice blue racing stripe - seems like the room is going faster now, doesn't it? I also started the process of scraping the black tar-like glue from the concrete floor. I purchased a few tools from Harbor Freight to help assist with the effort, but it will still take quite a while. Thank you to Bill for letting me borrow the shop vac! Thus far, I've managed to about a quarter of the floor, which requires scraping every inch of material. Some of it comes up easily, but most of it doesn't. This will push back the project a bit, but it is a necessary step. It is dirty work, but it is worth it!
Some good news is that the floor passed the first "moisture test". Before painting a concrete floor, a thin piece of transparent plastic (a Ziploc bag will do) is taped to the floor. After about 18 hours, the bag is removed and checked for moisture on the bottom and top surfaces. If moisture is present, then there are problems that have to be resolved before painting the floor. My test results were completely dry. I will do the test once more before the painting begins, but first the surface must be fully prepped.

The third in this series of future passenger train talks is the Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee "Electroliner". It is an articulated unit train that was designed to navigate the sharp curves of the Chicago Loop, and also travel at 90mph between Chicago and Milwaukee. One of the two Electroliners was restored and is now available for viewing at the Illinois Railway Museum. I was fortunate enough to be able to ride on it a few times at the museum before it was taken out of service for repairs. Hopefully it will be operational one day again. My Electroliner is a brass model built by Third Rail (a division of Sunset Models). I ran it a few times before it developed some electrical problems. So, this one will require some time on the work bench before I can put it back into service (kind of like the real one I suppose.) Once it has a clean bill of health, it will operate on the current semi-scale layout, and later on the train layout of the future, it will handle interurban routes between Silver Falls and Red Stone, and between downtown and the industrial district. The "Electroliner" is the only brass unit in the fleet at the moment.