8/14 Saturday

Today was a long day filled with trains and repairs. We arrived and found Chuck Park had arrived from South Dakota with sons and his friend. They brought an assortment of locomotives and cars that are beautiful.

First we wanted to inspect the condition of the inch and a half rails so we went around using Rich's Burlington locomotive and a work train and in the process found many signals not working. We were able to get some of them repaired but decided we needed to check out the inch line as well as the scope of the problem was not yet understood.

We wanted to see the inch line's condition as well. We got out the Club F7 and assembled a work train. Starting off we found the first signal not functioning then another and another. The storms during the week zapped about 20 signals so we had to replace the integrated circuits that sense the track and perform the logic to operate the signals. Don asked us to check the turnout at summit again as he had worked on it again and we found that it appeared to work fairly well. We did have a derailment but we determined that the car was not properly loaded so we gave the turnout a pass. We talked about it and decided to split up and I would do the inch line with Bob and Rich would take the inch and a half.

We decided to start working on the signals right off and dug out all of the spare chips we had and started off with out tools and work train. The idea was to put the train at Summit on the siding and work on signals that were malfunctioning in that area first. After the signal at Summit being repaired we decided to split up and we sent Bob off to disassemble signals that were malfunctioning so we could repair them faster. I started working my way back down the track checking and repairing as I went. I met Bob coming down the hill the other way and we walked together fixing signals and Bob keeping an eye out for trains and assisting me.

When it was time for lunch we had repaired many signals and still there were a few more to go. We talked with the guys and then back up the hill, this time on foot. We started back up fixing and testing and finally used up all of the ICs that we had. We did get it mostly working so tomorrow on Choo Choo Bob's run day the equipment should be working fairly well.