Garden Railroading: Our Awesome Pedestrian Crossing

Our Awesome Pedestrian Crossing

Bernie managed to make it over to Fred's yesterday (Thursday) where he found Father Fred "hard at it" with continued work efforts on the new pedestrian crossing.

Bernie tells me in an e-mail, "It took us about two hours. Freddie got right in there and did a great job."

Teamwork always ends up with great results.

Fred is getting a good workout here "Layin' 'em in and tyin' 'em down" as Gordon Lightfoot wrote so eloquently in his Canadian Railroad Trilogy!

A good workout deserves a good breather and we have one proud Papa Freddie!

Looks good Fred!

Mark visited the Canadian National Museum of Science and Technology with two of his youngsters. In this image we capture the" very young" in the foreground with the "very old" in back!

This was Mark's message in his e-mail...

"Hi Mike, some 1:1 scale action this cold but sunny afternoon at the Canada Science and Technology Museum courtesy of the Bytown Railway Society. Winter touques on in the middle of May! I’m sure this centre-cab beauty accomplished a lot of “Workday Wednesdays” back in the day...Mark

To help add "bulk" to this blog entry I'll share with you what I witnessed out my back kitchen window the other day.

The tall pine you see had almost bent over 90 degrees in the derecho storm which occurred a year ago this coming weekend. With many children living on the street in back, the owners felt it would be best to remove the tree.

Halfway down.

The "fire fighters" who formed the work crew cut the trunk in pre-ordained lengths for board feet...smart that is!

On a side note, Lisa and I will be having our 80 foot pine tree removed this coming Tuesday.

It also bent quite a bit in the derecho and we are wondering if its root structure is up to par anymore as evidenced in the obvious lean.

Besides, the previous owners planted it so close to the house that if it ever blew down it could very well damage our roof and dormers!

While it appears quite "airy" in nature, I don't want to take the risk anymore.

Here's another view from the other angle.

We already have the blue spruce which I planted from a sapling which came in an eight inch baggie as a fund-raiser for my daughter's school back when she was in kindergarten. She is now a high school teacher herself!

The tree will be down within an hour!

To help fill out this blog entry, let's check in on some new shelving Lisa purchased for me for around my workbench area.

We opted to buy a few "add-ons" to the Kallax shelving from IKEA such as these drawer additions. Note how each drawer holds 72 of my paint jars from Michaels. Two drawers fit each opening.

This version of the Kallax shelving is two high by four wide. You can purchase these units in a variety of arrays but we wanted lower shelving for the area near the entrance to my layout room which is located in the basement addition that we have on our home. The original owners put a three story addition on the back of our home to accommodate the five children they raised in the house.

There is lots of depth for some of my dioramas. I will eventually create a full length diorama with operational trains around the "L" shape of this area.