Day 172

We got up at 7:00 this morning so that Ellen could go to the airport.  The traffic at the Loop 1 stoplights was surprisingly light.  Unfortunately the traffic stalled just at the William Cannon exit.  So I got off and went around to get on 290.  I might have been better off staying on the freeway.  Oh well.  The traffic on the way back sucked.  It was backed up for a mile at the 130 light and was really slow around the exit to 360.  I had the paper though, so I jest read as I was waiting.  I happened to notice that the round trip is a little over 45 miles.

IT'S FINISHED.

I finished laying the track today. 

I started out drilling holes in the base board and then fishing the wires through the viaduct and the base board.  It was a little easier than I thought it would be.  Then I screwed the track to the viaduct.  It doesn't look half bad, but I need to paint the screws black.

After the viaduct was in place I nailed down the switches at both ends of the upper mainline.  Then it was time to lay the track on the upper mainline.  It went really well, except I kept getting distracted.  First, I noticed that the storage 2 siding was too long.  So I ended up taking off both storage sidings and messing with different configs.  I finally ended up adding a short section to storage 1 and cutting off part of the last piece on storage 2.

Messing with the storage sidings got me rethinking the east siding.  I ended up changing several pieces in it.  At least it wasn't nailed down yet like the storage sidings had been.  In doing that I noticed that another one of the short switches didn't have it's wires connected.  So I pulled it up, connected the wires, and nailed it back down.  I still have one of those to do.

Finally, changing around the east siding freed up a short curve that I could use to start the center siding.  So I did it.  Because I didn't have any short straits left, I decided to cut a long one in half.  I messed up the first one I tried, but luckily I had another spare one and that one worked fine.

I finally got around to nailing down the upper mainline and the east siding.  It sure was great to have that done.  In fact I wrote this early because I feel so good about it. 

Poor Lucy had to be outside while I was doing all of that.  She would have rather been inside on the couch.  She came into the well house several times to try to get me to do something other than work in there.  I plan on having lunch now and then taking the dog to Circle C.  She deserves it.