A little construction progress

 We started slowly back to having "Train Days" on Tuesdays, mostly work parties with breaks for random fun with train running. Tim applied some Automatic Car Identification (ACI) labels to cars and locomotives, to help establish our time frame of about 1973. Above, you can see one of the newly-arrived Athearn Genesis GP-18 locomotives with the ACI label underneath the "F" in "PACIFIC". This locomotive clearly fits in that time frame, having been renumbered for the BN after the merger in 1970, but not having been repainted BN green, which would have happened well before 1977. In this case, we put the ACI labels on both sides of the engine, but with freight cars we're only applying it to one side, in case some day we want to run trains in the eras either before or after the ACI craze.

Dave, on the other hand, has carried out a couple of track and scenery improvements. The first was to lengthen the "Marysville" spur, which we use as a staging track to represent industries in Marysville, just north of, and across the river from, the main yards in Everett. There is no end to the effort that model railroaders will put into adding additional track capacity, and this was no exception. We carved up a perfectly good sloping hill and replaced it with a Chooch retaining wall in order to lengthen the track by about ten inches. Before and after photos shown below:

Along the narrow gage line, there was a curve behind the "Needles" rock outcropping that was bare blue and pink foam, ever since I reworked the grade in that area (5 years ago?) to clear double-stack trains in the standard gage tunnel below. Dave carved Sculptamold to match the cast plaster rocks above, and then colored it with acrylic washes. Then I came in with dirt and scree along the side of the tracks, glueing it down with diluted liquid latex on the ballast and diluted white glue on the scree. Mission accomplished!