The floor cleaners who were supposed to wax half the room last night never made it into the club room. It seems the good folks at facilities no longer have any sort of key that can get into our club room. The waxers showed up, saw the "Be back soon!" note from last Saturday's dinner, and waited around in vain.

Tomasz had been having some difficulties running trains: blocks that wouldn't reverse, switches that wouldn't throw. He and JP spent a while digging around for the culprit. It seems last Saturday's experimentation with the hardware cabs threw some breakers controlling the area around the freight yard. Once those were reset, the layout was running smoothly again!

Tomaz and David L. ran trains to test a few more locomotives. The train of ten autoracks turns out to be too heavy for most engines to pull up the helix by themselves. For the open house that train will have to be split or double-headed. The grade crossing in Middle Heights kept knocking cars off the track because the sidewalks were so close to the rails they literally picked up the sideframes of passing cars and threw them aside. For future reference, sidewalks should not extend inside the loading gauge, just like anything else. A couple of freight cars had problems and had to be fixed. It's really difficult to tell what's wrong with a car just from watching it derail or uncouple. More than likely, a tutorial on how to troubleshoot cars and locomotives will be forthcoming this fall, to shift some of the burden off David L.

Saturday's room cleanup continued, with the couch going under Middle Heights and the trash cans, bunkies, and remaning chairs being picked up. Unfortunately, cleaning up the floor seems to have cluttered the other horizontal surfaces in the room. Now we have to clear those before Saturday.

The happy ending to the mishap with the floor cleaners is that they returned at 11:00 and stripped and waxed the whole floor in one night. The dull, dirty, scuffed, and stained floor that we had all become accustomed to is now bright, shiny new. Everything is looking fantastic for Saturday's open house!

Plenty of progress but a paucity of pictures to prove it.

For most of the night the club room was occupied by only students and recent students. There hasn't been an all-student meeting night in a long while, if ever. David Backus, Quentin, Genya, Thomasz, and David Lambeth were all present tonight.

The first order of busines was to recycle five large bags of old, sticky, disgusting empty soda cans. David Backus, Quentin, and David Lambeth spent over an hour at Star Market feeding cans into the machine. It took so long mainly because the same poor supermarket employee had to keep coming back to fix four or five cases of full or jammed machines. Results: 673 cans and 82 bottles recycled, and an extra $36 revenue for the club.

With one week to go until the open house, it was track cleaning night. David, David, Tomasz, and Quentin polished the entire main line, including hidden track, and David L. wiped down the visible main with conductive hair clipper oil to remove the residual dirt.

David and David tested locomotives in preparation for the open house, and David L. made several new car storage trays to hold some of the passenger equipment.

Meanwhile, Tomasz, Quentin, and Genya were fiddling with the system and the prototype for the new hardware cabs. They debugged the software which talks to the h-cabs and prepared upgrades to the cab driver. After the open house, the new h-cab will be able to work anywhere on the layout, not just on the test jack.

The final event of the night was preparation for a floor waxing. David and David raised the soda cartons off the floor on 2x4s to keep them from being damaged. Chairs and trash cans were gathered by the computer desk and everything on the floor either got put away or shoved deep under the layout. David B. swept up the loose dirt and trash.

Testing locos in preparation for the Open House on the 26th.

	Andy painted a nice parking lot for Berkmannville.
	David L has been working on more storage cassettes for rolling stock. Unfortunately the material now available isn't as easy to use as the stuff we got a few years ago, and we're having trouble assembling the cassettes.
	Hot melt glue was tried, but doesn't seem likely to work. Note the plastic jig used to set the correct spacing for the side strips.
	John P brought the new cab back to the clubroom. It's now able to communicate with a computer in both directions. The numeral 3 indicates that it's connected to socket 3 on the driver (out of 4 available) and 56 is the present throttle setting.

A highly secret project was attempted around midnight, in the best club tradition. No picture.

Plenty of pictures this week!

Adam's parents made another visit, and the three of them did more work on the new farm, installed numerous human figures, finished the scenery at the back of the engine yard area, and installed the long-awaited White Tower restaurant.
John P came in with the box for the first of the new cabs, with a plan to cut holes to mount the keypad and LCD display. Quentin volunteered to make the rectangular hole for the LCD, which needed to be accurate in both size and placement. Looks like he got it exactly right.
Hugh complained that it was cold.He wore his scarf indoors and warmed his hands on the workbench light.

David L cut the wood and plastic for new car cassettes, suffering a serious electric shock when he rubbed the plastic parts together excessively.

	A grade crossing and ground clutter in Middle Heights.
	John Shriver has finished the trolley wire, at least to the point where cars run. This picture was meant to illustrate it, but it came out better showing David Lambeth's excellent U. S. Post Office, and Alex Bardow's trolley barn. The wire is good too!

David L made a mockup of the proposed helix between the 2nd and 3rd levels. It dominates the scene at Middle Heights.

James and Hugh dropped in. We hadn't seen them for quite a while. At this moment they seemed to be looking heavenward for inspiration.

David has also been putting together conductive wheelsets. He has quite a production line going.

Adam says, "Now we're really achieving something--four steam locos in the roundhouse!"
Here he is operating one of them in F-yard.

The theme for this week is PROGRESS.

	There was much Progress in East Berkmannville, pressed ahead by Adam, Quentin and David L. "Gentlemen, shall Progress occur here?"		Adam says there are lots of pictures in existence showing him bending down to work on something. So we rearranged gravity to let him stay upright.	Progress promotes paraphernalia's proliferation.
	Sometimes Progress is achieved by lone efforts.		And sometimes it requires a team, not forgetting the one who provides financing, by consumption of products of the Coca-Cola Corporation.
	David L made Progress of an electrical variety on the Digital Widgets high-rise wing, using electroluminescent wire.		No, the second picture isn't very good, but the lighting conditions were difficult.	Less spectacular but not to be forgotten, John P finished the track on the mill siding and the little temporary (ha ha) bridge in Berkmannville.
	Yet still the level of Progress was insufficient! There was an investigation of a high-powered (7.2 kilowatt was mentioned) multi-channel light dimmer. Keep the fire extinguisher handy, guys. The inspection team considers it very important to note that the unit has a CINCH JONES connector.

Progress for tonight was WEEDS. A lovely new patch of WEEDS has appeared between the main line and the bulk transfer siding across from F-Yard. Also, last weekend (which was actually in December '07) the aforementioned siding was subjected to tectonic forces which lowered it relative to the main line and changed its slope from downward to level. This has the effect of ending the unpleasant habit of cars rolling from the siding down onto the main line. It also gives a more pleasing appearance, with the difference in levels making a visual separation between the main line and the siding. And it creates an attractive location for WEEDS. Genya did some programming which was "somewhat technical" but "related to Java 1.5". It had nothing to do with WEEDS. Bill stained ties on the extended industrial siding at the back of F-Yard. Again it featured no WEEDS.

Although we haven't posted progress reports for a few weeks, there has been progress.

David L has constructed several buildings in Berkmannville, and John P's warehouse has been added too. Berkmannville is shaping up as the New England mill town it's intended to be, crammed into a valley with a river and (of course) a railroad.

Quentin worked on a building and scenery in Middle Heights. He filled in the missing scenery closest to the road, and he added LED lighting to the small building.

Genya worked on software involving train direction.

We got a Bachmann 44-tonner. It is So Cute.

Tonight half a dozen people showed up despite the looming holiday, and a considerable amount of work got done. David Lambeth went around the layout repairing track problems that cropped up at the open house, which included replacing a section of flextrack by sticking his head through the tower ladder. Genya glued down the part of the Berkmanville passenger platform that was sticking up and hitting the trains. John McNamara and Andy Miller schemed up a way to build a difficult hill on the east end of Middle Heights. John Purbrick continued work on his new warehouse building.

Genya also devised a train-break detection system that should fix a problem we had at the open house. Since the plan is to have all cars occupy, if two or more unoccupied blocks appear in the middle of a train the train will get a red signal. This allows the operator a chance to reconnect a split train before the front end races halfway around the layout.

New member Ben Kaduk came by and worked on the Gifford City firehouse. The firehouse now fits neatly in place on the layout and needs only a roof and some detailing to be complete.

Our soda supply is now fully stocked. Star Market had coke on sale this week and David Lambeth took advantage of it by carting off sixty cases. The supermarket staff don't seem to mind when he walks in with the TMRC handcart. Sixty cases may seem like a lot, but after the open house and four normal days of sales it took fifteen cases to refill the coke machine today!