ProRail East 2016

Paul and John busy operating the layout

While many of our model railroad friends are partaking in ProRail 2016 in San Diego, Paul Dolkos and I decided to have a mini-ProRail East. So this afternoon, John King and Paul Dolkos came by the house to operate the PoLA Layout. John took the throttle while Paul was the conductor. I gave them a brief run down and set them loose. Things appeared to go smoothly. It took Paul a few moments to get accustomed to my switch list. Then they got busy. They reported no major problems, though John suspects that the coupler on the PHL 66 SD-40 is a bit low.  John enjoyed the session and said in his normal deliberate manner, "Well, I made it to LA without having to take an airline flight."

Cutting at the waterline

While they switched the layout, I continued to work on the ship.
Previously, on Friday night in the waning light of the evening I cut off the ship at the water line.

Then I added the hawser reinforcements. I tried adding the bulwark frames, but found that gluing the small pieces of styrene to the fiberglass hull was difficult to do. So I lined the inside of the bulwarks with a layer of 0.020 inch styrene. I had to trim and fit the liner pieces to the complex curves. A little bit of putty was needed to hide the seams. Tomorrow I'll add the frames using styrene glue. That should go much more smoothly.

Hull split in two

It's starting to look good after a coat of primer.