The gorge is crossed!

Today I finished the gorge crossing. Yesterday I had glued the bridges in place and today I ACC'ed the track I place through and over the bridges. Actually went pretty well dispite not planning on how to get the rail joiners in place. You see both ends of the bridge were turnouts that were fixed. I finally just pushed the rail joiners all the way onto one end of the track, fed it through the bridges and onto a bed of ACC. Lined up the track at the other end and slid across the rail joiners. Later I actually ran a couple of cars through the bridge by hand just to triple check clearances. Never can check this stuff too often. Don't ask me how I know.... The gorge will get some trees etc later. But this is enough to hold trains.

Now on with the main line track. The rest of the afternoon was spent installing roadbed and some short pieces of connector track. My hope is to have the mainline in place in a few weeks. I still have about 20 switches or turnouts to install so that may be a month plus realistically.

Early today when I was fresh I test ran my UP FEF #844 on the staging tracks. I hired Tony's Train Exchange to install a sound decoder and the loco returned this week. These guys are the best-period. They did a very clean install, programmed the CVs to match the FEF and even installed the backup light on the tender. It ran and sounded great. Soon we are going to Cheyenne WY to visit the Union Pacific roundhouse where the real FEF lives. As does the BigBoy undergoing restoration and several other historic UP locos. Should be a blast.