The New York, Vermont & Northern Rwy. Co. maintenance department wasn't to happy with the first two turret drives of the 200 ton wreck cranes it had ordered. So the shop guys decided to call in the shop guys of the Kingstone Locomotive Works to see if they had a better idea. The NY,V,& N Rwy had a criteria that the drive fit inside the turret well and that the motor be the same as for the boom and hook. Here's what they came up with.

With Beisser Lumber complete I'm turning my attention to a long overdue upgrade of my rolling stock fleet. The attached photo shows two of the exact same model boxcar, the Athearn FMC 50 foot S&NC. They're on their way to becoming IATR 4301 and IATR 4348.

While car weathering is not something I enjoy, it's a definite improvement over the out of the box version.

James

What a benchmark (get it?) day for me as yesterday I constructed my first piece of benchwork.  It's been over 6 months since we moved into our Florida home.  Now I feel like I'm finally making some progress on the railroad!  It took me several hours to complete because I'm a slow worker in the first place and I purposely slow down even more when working with saws.

You can find the rest of the story in the first comment, below.

After too many years of not even having room to store a module, I'm finally going to be able to build a real layout. My wife and I are moving into a new house where I'll have an entire spare bedroom to use as a combined office and layout room. Okay, so I won't have room to model the entire BNSF Southern Transcon, but I'm still excited. The new place also has plenty of space for a workshop in the garage, and a big enough yard that we can have a dog.

Maybe I'm over thinking this relatively simple track plan for a switching module, but I'll put this up for discussion anyway:

Based on my fondness of a) covered hoppers and b) modern box cars I planned this module as a ca. 1980 injection molding facility. Previous incarnations of this plan had separate tracks for the platics pellets hoppers and the box cars. Those incarnations also ate way more space than I actually have available so I decided to keep things simple and have everything on one spur track.

I recently found myself in eastern Colorado.  I was able to get a few hours to wander around looking for industries to photograph, and found remnants of an older fuel dealer adjacent to the BNSF in Lamar.  The location suggested it used to have rail service.

to all....

more progress on my layout a little money saving tip & a test run around Mobest yard.

i am also testing one of my new dc locos, a kato sd70mac.

none of the track is secured yet, i see a change i want to do, change one of my cross-overs from a left to a right.
my bad on the last move, i was going to the right track to begin with. i also didn't show the moves to the industries to the south of the yard.

thanks for watching

A night view of my tire dealer (N-scale) - also a HDR-photo.

The lamp is a SMD-LED glued to a small styrene tube. The LED is heavily dimmed with a much bigger resistor then required as a minimum. It's unbelievable how bright those tiny SMD-LEDs are.