Tempus Fugit…….

It’ been a very long time since I had to read Virgil’s “Georgics”. Latin was a required language when I went to school and I hated every minute of it. My study habits were atrocious, passing the prescribed Latin courses only by the skin of my teeth. Of course what Virgil really wrote was: “Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus”. There are various translations, but I sort of like this one: “Fast flies meanwhile the irreparable hour”. However let us stick with “Tempus Fugit”. It’s short, to the point and it is the phrase most of us are familiar with. “Time Flies”! And indeed time has just flown by for Brad and myself. It is hard to believe that it has been five weeks since we packed up, left DC and moved to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware.

Those last five weeks have been busy indeed. Plumbers, electricians and various delivery folks have been showing up constantly. We had to find somebody to mow our sizable lot. And there was a bit of a learning curve regarding propane gas. Our area does not have natural gas, so most homes around here are heated, cook and get their hot water with propane gas. So we have a five hundred gallon propane tank buried in the yard. This gets filled automatically every few months by a distributor, showing up with a sizable tanker truck. Propane has more BTU’s per cubic foot than natural gas: about 2500 versus the roughly 1000 for natural gas. Things tend to burn hotter and boil faster with propane. Thus there have been a few burned dinner items…

Propane delivery

It has been an unusually cool year so far around these parts. Right now it’s 53 degrees Fahrenheit (11.6 C). Normally it should be hot and muggy this time of the year. No surprise then that our swimming pool hasn’t gotten much use. The water is a somewhat frigid 68 degrees (20 C), so we haven’t exactly beaten a well worn path to it.

Surprisingly I even managed to get parts of my garden railroad up and running. Originally I had thought to put the track down in the area in the back of the house. I mean there is all that space:

However that would have meant digging up several hundred feet of grass to establish a decent road bed for the garden railway track. That was something I was not prepared to do right now. Perhaps at a later time. What I did do though is lay down track on our driveway. That was relatively painless and quick. For the most part this actually worked. Unfortunately, at some place the track has to cross the driveway and it did not take kindly to vehicles running over it:

I did realize quite soon that this was my mistake. Generally I used Aristo-Craft Code 332 stainless steel track. That stuff may not be prototypical, but it is sturdy, rigid and stands up to abuse. Not so much the track I used in the above photograph. That was prototypical scaled Code 250 track and somewhat flexible. In hindsight with predictable results. That the Aristo-Craft track works can be seen here:

I have glued the track down with Loctite Clear Power Grab Adhesive and it has not budged at all, nor fallen apart. Unfortunately, I have no more Aristo-Craft stainless steel track to use on the other part of the driveway. On top of that, the company has gone out of business, so the track is hard to find. Perhaps I will have some luck on eBay. At the old house in DC I used “rerailers” which were about three feet long. Those were virtually indestructible, designed to be driven over and walked on. They would be perfect for the new driveway. Alas, they somehow got lost in the move to Rehoboth Beach. I also can not remember where I bought them and scouring the Internet has not proven useful either. If anybody knows where to get them, please shoot me a message! Here is a (not the best) picture of the 3 foot rerailer at the old house in DC:

A LGB G scale Rhätische Bahn ABe 4/4 electric rail car.

And a short video of the very first run at Holland Glade Road:

So much for the G scale part.

My readers will recall hat the last few blog entries were all about TT scale and available area for a layout. I really like TT scale. In many ways it is the “perfect” scale. Small enough to construct a layout in confined spaces, but still large enough to have great detail and it is, unlike N scale, easy to work with. Unfortunately here in the US TT scale rolling stock and accessories are hard to get. So back to the future for me. Now I have a 50 by 40 foot space to use for a potential HO scale layout:

So the area in the two photographs above will be my new HO scale pike. The G scale equipment on the floor will eventually be on shelves. The double door leads to another area where I have my work bench to futz with my trains and is also the storage area for my HO scale stuff:

Now I just need to come up with a nice track plan and start on the bench work.

I will leave you with a few photographs of our new abode:

Sunset view from our front balcony

His nibs trying out the pool. Too cold for me!

Front entrance. The neon house number was done by one of our neighbors in DC.

He also provided this neon fireplace insert:

Our resident ground hog munching on clover and dandelions:

And before I forget it: these three cute hand towels showed up in the mail yesterday. There was no note enclosed with them, nor a return address. So to whoever sent them a big Tank You!

All photos by Ralf Meier (iPhone 12 plus)