For years I have suffered in silence as I've been pilloried by Brother Zieska
for having too much stuff in too little a space, too much motive power, too
many passenger cars, too many freight cars, etc, etc, etc.
Not all of us have had the luxury of a purpose-built basement and a wife who
has given him carte blanche to do what he wants downstairs. I've had 7 years
to turn a mouse-ridden, dank and dark former garage of a 110-year old cottage
into a showpiece for the Extreme Excesses of this Scale, much of it
surreptitiously while my wife is either upstairs, out of the house or out of
town - with the full urging and total support by said Brother Zieska, with
encouragement and heavy lifting by his partner-in-crime, Brother Lennon.
Always ready to break through into another room, this former Artillery Colonel
("blowing through things is what we do!") plans his devilry and then ducks and
covers and lets me take the blame - and then scourges me on the list about
tearing out more of my layout! I'm just trying to compress 25-30 years that
they've had to tweak and tear out their layouts into a relatively short period.
Seriously, Ken and Ron Kemp have helped blow through a cinder block wall into
the so-called Wine Room (because the winos in the group congregate in there) to
add a coach storage yard as well as a new steam facility with turntable and
roundhouse. I told my wife that a hole was needed in order to find the source
of the rodent infestation. Not having found it, the best way I knew to plug the
hole was with plywood and homasote - a practical solution to a bad problem. She
also gained lots of new storage above all those shelves of green, yellow and
orange boxes!
As far as tearing out a good part of the layout, it's a bit of an exaggeration,
but we've had such huge problems - given temperature and humidity variations
from the adjoining garage - with kinking and gauge problems with the first and
second phases of Custom Trax, that we're finally ripping out much of it and
re-laying Shinohara flextrack, White Oak and hand-laid turnouts. In the
meantime, I gain a double-slip switch and a another 20' passing siding. This
was, mind you, at Brothers Zieska and Lennon's prompting. I've fallen into bad
company, and
things are only getting worse. Who knows what anyone will see here during the
Convention stopover in 2010, but it ought to be interesting!
Back to the dungeon to see if I can move that 20-ton elephant off the Wataga
sub-district and start the negative progress.
Steve
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