LabFiles at LightningRod Labs

The pictures below are of the old HO train I set up recently in my shop. In my youth I liked trains. In 1946 I received a Marks wind-up O scale for Christmas. In the early 50’s I started building HO model kits. My brother sent me two Japanese brass locomotive kits when he was in Korea during the war. About 1980 my son and I acquired a incomplete HO setup at a garage sale. We got it rewired so it ran and he built, decorated and arranged things. It was sharp looking and took up a big part of the spare bedroom. A few years after He graduated from college and no longer lived at home, the train was packed up and stored in a farm shed. Now his youngest son has a strong interest in trains. I dug out the old board with the tracks on it and rebuilt the set up so my Grandson, Gunnar, can run it. below is the picture of it.

It was a time consuming job setting it up, but it was fun. Electrical connections age and get dirty along with everything else. Me, I build and fix things, but My wife, Donna, does all of the painting and decorating, for she is very artistic. She picked a lot of things to use that we had. You can see in the picture that Santa Clause is even there for Christmas.

We found lots of fun stuff to put on the board. We had acquired treasures at garage sales and auctions over the years.

The picture below of the Cheerios store is an old treasure of mine. It was from a Cheerios box in the middle 1950’s. After I ate all the Cheerios as fast as I could, I cut out the store from the empty box, folded it out and glued it together. It brought back lots of memories when I found it.
One last Picture, it is of the flock of sheep my wife put in the pasture. We have had a lot of fun with this project. My grandson, who is eleven year old, has enjoyed it very much. He has suggested that I should add more track and area to the set up. His suggestions have made a lot of sense. If it is a cold winter and I spend a lot of time inside, who knows what will develop.

My Sheep on Pasture

The weather turned nice today, actually it turned nice last night. It got warmer all night long as warm air from the south blew our way. It was windy but it felt good. below are a couple of pictures I took this AM. The snow is always moving on these prairie lands, it is pretty to watch, but it does make some work for you, as you can see from the picture of my driveway below here. The wind packs the snow hard, so you get good exercise cleaning out. It does feel good to go outside and be active when the sun is shining and the temp is rising. We had several day when the high temp for the day was below 0 Fahrenheit. That made even shoveling snow today a pleasure.

The snow stopped, The sun came out and the wind slowed down. It was a little more than 25 degrees below 0 yesterday, but today the temp climbed above o. Tomorrow it will rise to near freezing.
The sun light is so pretty with the ice crystals in the air. It gives a sparkle to the sky that you don’t see any other time of year.
The snow keeps moving across the fields in this prairie land and the wind always blows. Some time it is soft, mostly it is in the 15 to 20 MPH range. Many times it blows at 25 to 35 MPH and often in blizzards it will pass 40 MPH.
The snow will end stacked in farm groves and house yards, road ditches and fence lines.
I like to watch the snow move when the sun is bright. It is so pretty to watch it drift and dance across the fields.