Since some have expressed interest in how the Wanapitei River scene was going to be done, I thought I would make a new entry for it.  You may remember it looked like this a couple weeks ago:

Summer is work season at the Sudbury Division. We operate the layout from September to April each year and then shut down in the spring. After that we use the second Saturday of each month as an all day work session instead of our operating day. This past Saturday was one of those work sessions.

The Canadian arrived in Sudbury for the first time yesterday (in a big box carried by Jason Shron of Rapido Trains.)  He actually came out to see our NCE setup, theoretically, but once the train came out of its box, all eyes were on it, and not the DCC system. 

There hasn't been much Monday Movie action lately, so I thought I would submit these clips from our Saturday session on the Sudbury Division:

The Sudbury Division has been fired up for another season of operations, and I decided to try documenting the first session with my camcorder.  This is what I came up with:

It's been a while since we had anything worth saying about the Sudbury Division, but we can report we are still chugging away, though not with steam locos.  You may recall we were having issues with electrical pickup in our last installment (Tales from the Basin Part 2), and we had to work long and hard to get that under control.  Last summer we took every car off the layout and cleaned each of their wheels individually with cotton swabs and alcohol, cleaned all the locomotives and all the track from top to bottom.

The Sudbury Division recently woke from a long sleep. Maybe it’s more like it came out from under anaesthetic, since it was undergoing surgery for the past two years. It had been that long since the layout was being operated regularly and in the meantime we had been making a brave attempt to extend its mainlines up to the second floor.

A little history

Geologists believe that 1.8 billion years ago an asteroid about 6 miles across slammed into what would someday become Northern Ontario, striking with the force of thousands of nuclear bombs.  All that's left of that impact today is an oval depression rimmed by rocky hills and an abundance of nickel and copper ore, among other minerals, known as the Sudbury Basin.