Recently I’ve mostly spent time at home continuing my software development for Conductor 2 and SDB as well as working on electronics projects that may serve for the Randall layout later.

Yesterday I swapped #1072 for #1067 on the automated freight train:

I should try to rotate the engines more often. #1072 was getting a bit sluggish. I need to open it and lubricate all gears and axles.

I’ve also added these two little trolleys here in Fairfield:

The image above clearly shows how much we need to dust the layout. Orion is going to drive that effort next week-end. Once our dusting effort is done, I want to spend a bit more time decorating the unused track.

These two trolleys in the image above are part of a donation we recently got. There are a few interesting buildings and rolling stock I want to display. I still need to go through the boxes, which is going to take some time. The rolling stock is all DC and I can’t run it on our DCC track, but it still makes for some decent static display, especially if we can keep it on a rotation.

Most of the donated rolling stock is Tycho trains, which to be honest are not exactly the most detailed around. So the purist railroaders may just snobbily pout when they see that; however I think our little young visitors and their parents will appreciate the material just quite right -- I, for one, enjoy these old-fashion no-thrills HO rolling stocks. They are colorful and offer quite some variety from the modern too-much-life-like equipment.

My goal is to have enough variety so that we can rotate the displayed items once in a while, as there are a lot of young visitors who just come back regularly and it would be nice if they get to see different things once in a while.