Layout Prep for Client Appreciation Party

I haven't posted for a while now and that's because of two things.  First, I am still burnt out from the Portland guys visit in Feburary.  LOL.  Nothing negative, just a lot of layout stuff before, during and after.  Second, work has fortunately been busy and unfortunately that keeps me from the railroad.

Every year I host a Client Appreciation Party at my house and have the railroad open to guests.  They always love seeing the layout and the kids like it too.  I have a few of my crew over to run trains and they always let the kids (and adults) run the trains.  And therefore, I must get things cleaned up and running.  It's funny how one day things run fine and then the next time the system goes on, some things don't work fine.  Murphy....Get the heck outta here!

With that in mind, I put together a track cleaning train and ran it around the railroad about a dozen times.  I found two places where the track is dead!  I fixed one spot and the other will take a bit more time to repair.

My layout room is very sealed.  However, the cleaning train picked up quite a bit of "stuff" from the rails.  And it's amazing how much metal the magnet picks up from the track too.  Where did all this junk come from?  No one has been in here in 2.5 months!

Due to our recent earthquake in March, I had one 4' ceiling light panel fall to the floor and break.  Fortunately it missed all the cars in Bakersfield Yard and I don't know how it missed the yard because it's right under the panel.  Anyway, I replaced that.  No damage to anything else on the layout fortunately.

A while back I created maps for the railroad so operators would know where they were on the railroad.  This weekend I took one more step and used post-it arrows pointing to their location on the railroad.  Hopefully that will help people a little more.  See the photo below.  The top arrow is for the upper level and the bottom arrow is for the lower level.  Hopefully that is clear enough.

I was going to prepare several trains in JMRI Ops for the guys to operate during the party, however, I'm thinking they will be occupied with guests so I scrapped that idea.  I did add a few more cars to the layout however.  I ordered more wheels to replace the plastic on a number of new cars I'd like to add to the layout so hopefully they will arrive this week and I can bang that out.

I've been pondering a paint scheme for the CPRX but no concrete designs yet.  I'm going to send some shells out to get painted and see how it looks.  More on that in a future post.

And finally, I added a photo of the "temporary" engine facility that is becoming more and more permanent as I haven't posted that in the past.  See below.

I think that is about it for this post.  Thanks for reading along.

Frank Kenny, CPRX Railway

Route map with arrows added to identify the locations a little better.  Top arrow is for upper level and bottom arrow is for lower level.

Track cleaning train at work.

Bakersfield "temporary" locomotive facility.