Afternoon fun at Minnehaha

This Saturday started out as just about any other contemplating what we were going to do for the day…

Actually… he’s probably just thinking “mmm… donut…”

We eventually decided to go to Minnehaha park which really isn’t that far from us and is the home to a Milwakee Road station. Of course it closes after labor day but we could still enjoy the outside!

They have a section of track running along it that doesn’t go anywhere, once we convinced my oldest (Luke) he ventured out to take a look at the rails. He still wasn’t to sure that no trains were coming but he did noticed the rails were rather rusty… Still he thought he’d better go check to make sure a train wasn’t coming

Meanwhile Jacob, my youngest son, was kind of wondering what exactly he was up to…

After reaching the end of the line Luke’s concern became about how a train was supposed to make it into the station with the rest of the track missing. Maybe he wasn’t paying close attention when we assured him no trains were coming anymore.

Since the tracks were a dead end, both literally and in interest level it was time to investigate the station.

He never did tell me if he saw anything interesting in the mail slot, I’m guessing no.

After a stop at the restrooms we made our way down to the falls, on the way down we stopped for a picture of the boys together

And of course, can’t forget an obligitory picture of the falls:

All pictures taken by my wonderful wife Stephanie.

Saturday Update

Today was a good day for trains, first I went to the Jackson Street Roundhouse in St Paul, MN. Then in the afternoon I made it over to Scale Model Supplies (also in St Paul) and got some supplies for my County Road 23 module.

Jackson Street Roundhouse

This was someplace I’d wanted to go for a variety of reasons, one of which is it’s currently the home to GN 400 Hustle Muscle. We were lucky to see it outside and running. It appeared they were running through it for some upcoming trips. If I heard correctly it’s going to St Cloud, MN for a while and then over to Wisconsin for a the rest of the summer I believe (It was hard to hear with an SW1200 running in the background).

The Saturday tickets include a caboose or classic bus ride and I was looking forward to the caboose ride. Unfortunately they didn’t have a qualified brakemen on hand today so we got cab rides instead. We got to go for a short ride on NP 105 (EMD SW1200) which was very cool. The Jackson Street Roundhouse is a museum I’d definitely recommend, I’ll be going back sometime with my kids and try to remember the camera.

County Road 23

In a previous post I’d mentioned I’d built up a crossing with Walthers modular street system but was still looking for the regular concrete street pack to finish out the road. I found some at Scale Model Supplies and have started building roads. Naturally I’ll come up a half inch short on each side if I use whole pieces which means I’ll have to make two very careful cuts (yay).

I’m starting to nail down the structures I want on this module. I’ve known for a while I wanted an O’Reilly Auto Parts store from Summit Custom Cuts bit I hadn’t really started narrowing down the other structures. My oldest son wants me to put a water tower on it so I’ll definitely be putting one of those on it. I also have some DPM kits from a previous layout so I think I’ll add a few more buildings of that style. I also got to thinking a firehouse might be a cool feature, I’ll have to think about that one though.