Mike Stoner's SPSF Owens Valley Sub and Phoenix, Trains in Flagstaff &Sedona, AZ

This past weekend and week I had to go to the Phoenix area for a conference.  But first I visited with my good friend Mike Stoner who lives in Sedona.  We didn't have much time for a lot of activities but made great time with that we did have.

The first thing we did was visit Verryl Fosnight's Union Pacific Railroad.  OMG this is a BIG railroad!  Still being built it is housed in a huge warehouse building.  Here are some photos and you can see more details at the Yahoo Group, Wyoming_Division.

From there we drove to Flagstaff to see a few BNSF trains and that we did.  4 trains in all.  It was getting dark by then so we headed back to Mike's house for an update on Mike's layout.  Mike is building his 2nd railroad (the first got flooded in a friggin' water leak) and the new one is going to be awesome too.  Here are a few photos.

More GP60's!

Mike Stoner and me at dinner waiting for Brandi, his GF.  Until she showed up, we were getting weird looks here on Valentine's Day!  LOL

Mike's layout under construction...again!

Mike hand lays his turnouts!

He's a details oriented guy.

This is N scale!

Mike uses McHenry couplers and body mounts them on all equipment.  He likes these over MT's because MT's tend to have too much slack and bounce, causing strange things with the cars.  I agree, however, I'm not spending time body mounting anything!

The next morning I drove down to Phoenix to my hotel for the next 4 night.  Luck me, my hotel was right next to the UP tracks and at a RR crossing too.  My colleagues didn't think it was very exciting because 2-4 trains came by each night!  There's something comforting about a train horn in the middle of the night...to me anyway!  LOL  Here are a few photos of Phoenix, although most of the trains I saw were in the dark from my hotel room in the comfort of my PJ's.

This and the photo below are of a gypsum board mfgr yard.  Seems like they waste lots of board.

Yet another UP train in the night.

Frank Kenny CPRX

Second Day of Portland Crew Visit

Today is the second day of the Portland crew visit.

The morning started off great, picking the guys up at the hotel for a quick trip to the Belmont Shore Club.  We weren't expecting trains to be running, however, David Sheehan got there early, cleaned track and set up a 104 car coal train complete with NS regular and Heritage locos.

We stayed at the club for about an hour and then picked up sandwiches for lunch and headed down to Watson Yard where we say a couple of Pacific Harbor Line (PHL) gensets and two BNSF GP60's complete with ATSF Superfleet paint jobs, even one with Santa Fe still on the front and sides!

Once the GP60's left, we went down the road to the Alameda Corridor where we say a number of other trains.  We ate lunch there while watching all the train activity.  After about an hour there we went by the Dolores locomotive facility.  Unfortunately trains were on both sides of the facilty so viewing locomotives was difficult but one bonus was the tank train was one of those trains.  Most have not seen the tank train before, including me.  I have only seen the old original tank trains of years past.

Notice the new deflector "shields" on the new tank cars.

From there we went back to my house to operate.  That's where the day's fun sort of disapated, at least for me.  The railroad wasn't going to cooperate.  The main issue was the wifi connection between the main RR computer and the remote computer decided to die and it took us about an hour to get it figured out.  I think someone simply knocked the wife extender and it may have dislodged from the outlet, killing power...still not sure on that one but it worked for the rest of the night.

The railroad ran fine, no DCC issues other than the Duplex would not work, but that wasn't a problem. I will probably sell the Duplex equipment as I can live without it.  There were no derailments, except for a few minor ones that were caused by a couple axels not being the correct length.

After several hours we went to dinner.  Once we were done with dinner we went back to the RR for a debriefing.  A number of items came up and I'll work on those as time permits.

I will be adding more cars to the layout so we can run more trains.  I've kept it thin so as not to clog things up while we have been in the testing mode.  I've got just over 300 cars on the railroad, however, probably about 100 of those are for unit trains.  I'll need to add 7-800 more cars to the railroad before it is "full."  The main obstacle to that is having enough wheel sets with resistors...another project moving forward.

I was so wrapped up with everything going on during the day, I forgot to take photos.  Here are a few photos.

Frank Kenny CPRX.