Tonight I soldered all the feeders to the bus wires. The frog feeders are still hanging loose, but all those stock rails are fed now. It is singularly uninteresting from a visual standpoint, and the photo came out blurry; so the photo below shows something else.

Working from above, it has been easy to forget that the first two switches will actually be on the wide window sill. I think when I designed this, I considered those two switches almost as part of the staging yard, and thus it made sense to use ground throws as I will most likely do in the staging yard.

Tonight I dropped the last section of rail onto the Lee Manufacturing siding and declared the track laying done, except the points on the south section. Interestingly, this was the first time I used one of the Proto:87 Stores rail joiners, all the other rails on this section being only one length long for now. The rail joiner worked great.

I worked from home today (it was our annual pretend earthquake), and so, we finished homework long before bed time. "Would you like to play on the iPad or come and help me do some soldering?" I asked the boy.

"Hmmm..." (weighs the options carefully) "Help with soldering!"

It's September 32nd, by my reckoning. So how am I doing against the Big Hairy Audacious Goal? One month in, and I think I'm about a week behind schedule. For those of you who are no better at math than I am at reading a calendar, that's 25% behind schedule. At this rate, I'll have trains running in February or March, and I'll be ready for VanRail 2015 some time late in 2016.

As they say in another hobby, it's time to fish or cut bait. So, this week I put away the test track and went for broke on the south module. I also happily discovered that October is still more than a week away, and I may still accomplish my goal for the month.

My friend, Mark Dance, is someone I admire. He is an amazingly productive model railroader: in less than eight years, he took his quadruple deck Columbia and Western from paper to the cover of Railroad Model Craftsman, and a regular feature on the local operating scene. When I asked him at this weekend's VanRail operating event how he does it, he responded that he basically makes a commitment with himself to finish something before an event, and then does it.

The Proto:87 Posse rode to my place last night in the form of a visit from Andrew. As I mentioned, I'm eager to get back to the layout now that I know what I'm doing with track construction. So, we cleared off the door that is still awaiting installation in the laundry room, and plunked the south module down.

The Canada Atlantic was ballasted with gravel quarried from various pits along the line, as were most railways of that period.  So, it should be a simple matter to simply dig up some dirt from the right of way or from one of the quarries, sift out the big chunks and glue it down.

Now we come to one of those great challenges with modelling the turn of the century: colour. In particular, since we've been talking about track, what colour should the ties be? The ties on the Canada Atlantic were almost certainly untreated, as preservatives for ties were something of a research topic, and the CA enjoyed cheap timber. So, we can't just go down to the local tracks and check them out. We can't even look at quite old tracks and think they're going to match (can we?). So, this week, I made up some more test track and experimented with colour.

There is a reason why William Cornelius Van Horne paid thousands of navvies to lay the CPR: it is remarkably tedious work!  I mean, really, four spikes for every tie!  Is it really necessary?

Tonight I shook the frets out of the Proto:87 Stores packaging and tried out some of their joint bars and spikes.  The joint bars work fine, if a little subtle.  The spikes will drive me crazy!