Day 4.... time keeps slipping away, and in this case, tomorrow will be the start of National Train Show prep. It seems the week has hardly started, and yet it's already showing signs of drawing to a close.

No Celebration Room photos today - it was closed for judging.

Day 3 - I woke up to a bleeping (in both senses of the word) alarm clock at 7:30am, got through my morning routine and climbed on my computer. You saw the results in the second part of my Day 2 post. Heading downstairs, I realized that I had missed the one clinic I had planned to attend this morning. Instead I spent it going over the Op Session photos with Bruce Notman and Bruce Metcalf, as we tried to figure out the names of some of the people in them.

Okay, it's 10:45pm local here in Orlando and I just got back to the hotel - as you will see later, I went to the Orlando N-Trak (not that they have any N-Trak anymore) Railroad Club for an op session. Even though we were running for about two hours, it felt a lot longer - not because of boredom, but because so many people where there and so much was happening! I have never operated on as busy a layout as that one was.

But before that was clinics, and the Celebration (fmly Contest) room opening up, and the Silent Auction opening...

So I finally made it to a convention on Sunday - I think that may be a first. 

First, a word about the facilities - the Rosen Plaza Hotel is a seriously nice place, with very nice people. I got here around 7:30am local (which is about 4:30am at home) and was expecting to perhaps be able to store my bags and crash on a couch. 

Nope.  They looked through their no-show list from the night before and got me right into a room. I desperately needed the 2 hours of sleep that gained me. 

I've spent the last couple of months doing some reconfiguring here. I've swapped out several decoders for LokSound Select Direct's, done a fair amount of re-decaling of most of my locomotive fleet into WW logos, built a staging yard for the south end of the layout (eliminating a duckunder on the main aisle and creating a liftout across a doorway that may never be opened again), and then over the past 3 days, painted all of my fascia black with "Blackboard Paint" and redid the labels on all of my locations.

Or.... How to potentially thoroughly mess up an operating session. 

I've always had mixed feelings about the traditional 4-cycle waybill system. It does seem to work, normally, but it also seems fairly maintenance intensive - all the waybills have to be flipped between operating sessions and the like. I did not become a model railroader in order to do paperwork (which is also why I'm figuring on a TWC system instead of TT&TO). It also seemed like it had a certain lack of randomness.

Back around 2008 I bought one of the first Atlas MP15DC models off the line - it was the Master Gold version with QSI sound. A custom board in fact, because the space in the locomotive is really tight. I loved that model... I think it is still my most expensive single unit at retail. 

Okay, so I got my new decals from Bill B. a few days ago, and I've been slowly working on the first locomotive to wear the new name.

It's an Atlas Trainman GP39-2, and it was selected because, well... it was closest at hand. It was the unit that I just put the LokSound Select Direct into. It (#2309, "Philomath") and it's brother #2307 "Independence" are also much less detailed (less to break) than their Athearn Genesis brethren... and thus less nerve wracking to work on.

I spent a pleasant evening last week installing a LokSound Direct in one of my Atlas Trainman GP39-2 locomotives, using, for the first time, an iPhone 4 speaker that I bought from Precision Design (aka Bill Brillinger) awhile back. I actually had to go out and hunt down the weight that I had removed from the locomotive to put a "normal" sized speaker in it when I'd installed the now dead QSI Titan in it - I think it's the first hood width locomotive I've been able to leave (or restore) all the weight in after a sound install.

A couple of weeks ago my father-in-law asked if I wanted to drive up to Puyallup, WA (a little over 3 hours away) for the WGH show. It had been talked up a bit in the latest email blast from the NMRA's Pacific NW Region, and he thought that Digitrax was going to be there, and he had a question for them. Unfortunately, Digitrax was not there (I imagine they were prepping for the Railroad Hobby Show in Springfield, MA) so he is going to have to contact them separately (if anyone knows if there are any issues with using LiON 9V batterys in UT4R throttles, please mention it...).