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.

New racing stripe

View of the room looking south from the window

Third coat of white paint, and the scraping has begun on the floor

Floor view

The Electroliner in service in Chicago

Amber, Mark, and the Electroliner at IRM in May of 2013

White Walls

During the past week, I cut in the room twice with white paint, and rolled it twice as well. Of course, it was later on in the process that I found that the two cans of paint I got were slightly different tints of white! That plus my relatively poor wall painting skills presented a less than perfect result. But, since I plan to cover most of the walls with various railroad art and memorabilia, I'm ok with it! At least it isn't neon green and blue anymore! Last night, I pulled most of the items out of the room to prepare for the next project, which is prepping the floor for painting. We purchased some floor paint and concrete etcher last weekend. I have to completely remove all of the black "stuff" from the floor that you see in the pictures below before I can apply the etcher. So that is what I'll hopefully be up to this weekend...

The second in this series of future passenger train talks is the "Bozeman Zephyr". This is a Chicago, Burlington and Quincy train from my own imagination, which runs from Chicago, IL to Bozeman, MT. It travels across Illinois to Burlington, IA, and then heads along the southern border of Iowa to Lincoln, NE. Then it sets course diagonally across the state for Alliance, NE, and then barely clips South Dakota on its way to Sheridan, WY. Finally, it stops in Billings, MT and heads over Bozeman Pass to its namesake city. It consists of 5 silver streamlined cars, and is pulled by matching E8 diesel locomotives. All components of this set have been purchased, so all we have to do is wait until they are all in Billings and we have an operational layout for them to ride on. The locomotives were a limited edition run available only through "K-Line Superstores" at various spots around the country. I purchased them through Chicagoland Hobby. The passenger cars were a relatively inexpensive Williams Electric Trains purchase through an online retailer. Despite this, the whole train is O-Scale and thus will run on the train layout of the future, taking passengers between Silver Falls, Red Stone, Cedar Valley, and Juniper Peak. Special runs may see it head further into the wilderness near Iron Horse National Park.

The room is now white!

A better view of the floor and the projects to come...

Bozeman, MT

These are my CB&Q E8's, which will pilot the Bozeman Zephyr.

This is a real CB&Q E8, leading the Denver Zephyr into Chicago. This neat picture was taken by Bob Krone and was retrieved from RailPictures.Net

Prime Condition

This week, the room was taped, and then I cut in all the wall corners with Kilz Primer. I proceeded to roll the rest of the walls with Kilz as well. The former wacky colors can still be seen through the primer, but that is a temporary situation. I have the white paint ready, so hopefully you will see some finished walls pretty soon! Thank you to Amber for providing some good painting advice.

Now lets have some fun and talk about some future passenger trains. These will be O-Scale sets, but you can be sure that the smaller O-27 trains will still be around. The first is called "The Northern Range", and is named after the mountainous region of Yellowstone National Park north of the Blacktail Deer Plateau. I hiked through this area in May of 2008. It is home to many buffalo, some waterfalls, and beautiful vistas. The passenger train will be a relatively small, four-car consist, pulled by matching F3 A-A diesels. I purchased the passenger cars a few years ago; they were manufactured in 2005 and are rather sought after by collectors. Before K-Line Electric Trains was purchased by Lionel, they created a series of trains based on the Santa Fe "warbonnet" paint scheme, but with the silver coloring replaced with deep black. Lionel has continued to manufacture trains with this striking paint scheme, but as of yet they haven't made any O-Scale offerings (they have all been semi-scale). This paint scheme is called "Black Bonnet" or "Midnight Chief". For the yet-to-be-purchased locomotives, I can choose between the K-Line engines originally made for this set, or the more common Williams (by Bachmann) locomotive set. If I go the Williams route, I will want to inspect the paint job first to insure a good match with my passenger set. This train would also look spiffy being pulled by any of the larger O-Scale steam locomotives in the fleet. "The Northern Range" will run between Silver Falls and Iron Horse National Park on the train layout of the future, and will soon be seen on the semi-scale layout I am in the process of building.

Primed and ready for painting

The northern range of Yellowstone National Park

Three buffalo

One of the cars of "The Northern Range" passenger train

A Different Kind of Reefer...

This week produced major changes in the Train Room. I removed the remaining floor trim, for use elsewhere in our dwelling. I also removed all of the carpet and carpet pad. I scraped the bear floor, using a bladed tool that Bill Gamsby lent me. This involved moving things multiple times, including the contents of the closets, which are to the left and right of the entryway. Several more loads of non-train items were moved to new homes in other rooms. I finished up by doing the initial taping for the upcoming painting project.

An unexpected find behind one of the baseboard trim pieces was reefer, but not the refridgerated boxcar type. This "stuff" was left by the previous occupant, and I'm not planning to incorporate it into the refreshed decor of the room...

Half of the carpet gone, getting ready to scrape under the pad

Bare floor seeing daylight

Shuffled furniture, no more carpet

Non-railroad reefer!

Bare walls, almost bare floor

This week I finished sorting and moving out the items that were on the left side of the room. I was able to remove some of the trim, which will be relocated to some upstairs room. I also started removing some carpet.

Left side getting closer

Under the blue and green paint is some odd, light pink paint

No More Misc

All of the "Misc" boxes are now re-sorted and de-ported from the Train Room! That was about all I did in the Train Room this week, but that is okay - because my wife celebrated her birthday, we received an unexpected amount of rain (which flooded parts of the city), we attended the Home Show, went to a musical downtown, built a fence/railing in front of the house, and dog-sat for our brother and sister. Also this is a big conference week at work, and I had two classes to present, so the number of hours to make advancements in the Train Room were understandably limited. Currently, I am cataloging the "N" gauge trains in the visiting collection - goodness they are tiny! Their detail is quite excellent - this might explain why Captain Picard mentions them so often: "N gauge!"

Sunlight! Gasp!

Very tiny - and very well detailed N gauge freight car

The Green Wall Emerges, and Some Small Visitors

Massive progress was made throughout the house over the Labor Day weekend. Items bound for the kitchen, craft room, and garage were sorted and sent to their rightful places from the Train Room. We now have quite the view of the rather neon-greenish west wall, which hopefully will be coated with some white primer sooner or later. While many things have exited the Train Room, I also moved in some temporary visitors, in the form of an HO train collection. I was asked to sell it on behalf of some family friends and need to prep a spot for prospective buyers to view it. So, the Train Room will be a good place for that...

Many thanks to my wife for helping with sorting, and for doing tremendous work in her new kitchen!

The green wall and window can now be seen

A selection of some of the temporary HO train collection