I have decided to help out Rick Mills at the South Dakota State Railraod Museum in Hill City with a diorama he wanted built, to represent Spearfish canyons Sandstone cliffs the dual gauge Ralroads and the Pondarosa, Spruce, paper birch and the scenery of the Black Hills of South Dakota. So this is my begining of the concept all the way to finish. So we have decided to use some models built by past modeler from the area.

The model railroad I’ve been building in my middle school classroom has been more or less frozen in time since students went home due to Covid last March. Teaching remotely was and remains a tremendous challenge for all parties involved, and when most students started returning to campus a few months ago the transitions and complications were even more challenging, taking a big toll on my outlook for my unique circumstances of being able to leverage my hobby interests in my professional life. 

I have an F& set of Athern Genesis locos both with Tsunami sound decoders. They were, sometime in the past working well as a consist. After a longish period of inactivity I started to run the again. They aren't close to running together. The A unit starts moving quickly at speed step 1 on my NCE system with the SB5 booster. The B unit doesn't budge until speed step 5 and has a slower acceleration rate.  Obviously i did something wrong so I used CV 30 to clear and reprogram the the decoders. Everything relating to speed is the same and yet the problem persists.

So as I begin my planning and construction of my layout, I'm beginning to think about the future ops sessions that I plan to have.