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@babidi you are most welcome. We really enjoyed Spain. We spent 2.5 weeks there and one week of it was an architecture tour of southern Spain with an academic which was very fun. Rest we did on our own using trains. You can’t go wrong with food in Spain, we never had a bad or mediocre food experience. Little cafes usually had interesting and tasty stuff and lots of light tapas fare everywhere to snack on while out and about and feeling peckish. Even little grocery stores had a little deli counter and would whip up small sandwiches on the fly for you. Tons of great reds from Spain and Portugal that were dirt cheap and fresh and tasty. Find a few place to have a long, late dinner with multiple courses, it’s a real experience. Many places have them at not exorbitant prices (well hopefully they still do!) As tony notes, like any places with tons of tourism watch your wallet and possessions. Las Rambles is notorious for pick pockets as it’s just a huge meandering stream of people. I tend to look around at people around me in public, make eye contact and smile. Makes folks around you aware you are not out to lunch and observing what is going on around you and folks with bad intentions tend to not target you then, they want the spaced out tourist oblivious to all around them. It’s served me well traveling to very dicy places for decades, never had any incidents. Plus acknowledging others around you with some eye contact and smiles gets you nice smiles in return (and sometimes in very touristy areas looks of bemusement) and sometimes folks will actually strike up conversations when you don’t look like the oblivious tourist. I’ve found folks very appreciative of such a simple, human act. I also just enjoy watching people in different places, fun to see the similarities and differences and big point to travel to me. It has made travel more safe and enjoyable for me over the decades. jeff

Hopefully the overhaul is doing good.

If they make something you want (train / livery wise) that others don't make then they are "worth" it. That's the biggest question is are there multiple versions of it from multiple makers or does Greenmax sell an assembled and a kit version of the same or is this the only one of whatever it is that exists? Besides the most popular trains, a lot are one vendor only so you take what you can get.

What do you mean by "worth it"? The pre-painted one are relatively easy to do and wouldn't take long if you don't go building your own lights or paint the interiors. The non-painted ones obviously require a bit more time and efforts. Susukuma made a couple of videos of him making these kits. You can also get upgrade parts for them if you want to invest more time. Greenmax still make those and you can also buy them at your usual online dealers. If you go the buyee route, you might one with one of the old motor units. It might be worth buying one of the newer ones to replace these as they were relatively noisy.

Thank y’all so much! I’ll keep searching but this narrows a lot more. 😁

Hey all! I was recently scrolling through Buyee.jp, and came across some Greenmax kits that come with motors. They do seem to look cool to build and some are pre painted. I know they 100% do not come with head/taillights. But before I purchase, those who have built these kits, are they worth it? I’m still pretty new to the hobby and it just seems like some nice projects to do when I’m not busy. thanks!

Today’s trip was back on track - literally - at the Kyoto Railway Museum. The weather had started off poorly but by the time I reached the museum just after 10:15, it had fined up considerably. And with a gentle cooling breeze to start off with, the heat wasn’t too bad either. Weekdays don’t seem to be any less busy than weekends as there’s still plenty of kamikaze toddlers around with their parents, though there were also a number of school groups on site too. Steam on site that day was provided by my old friend 8630, while in the workshops was the tender of C62 2, and the boiler and chassis of C57 1 which is being overhauled to rejoin D51 200 in SL Yamaguchi service - the latter engine, it seems, is hunkered down at Shin-Yamaguchi during its month-plus-long break. I couldn’t get any photos of the C57 for @Dillon though, thanks to some awkward angles and the bird proof netting on the doors. There was a little work going on in the roundhouse with both C62 2’s engine unit and C56 160 being worked on. When I first arrived, one of the staff was also cleaning down C59 164 too. As an added bonus, I also got to see the museum’s maintenance shifter briefly at work too - it was being put back in the working side of the roundhouse when I showed up. Weird little creature… Having provoked some discussion about an N-scale C53, here’s the sole survivor which hasn’t run under its own power since 1960. Although semi-successful, the type lost favour with JGR management due to their complexity and the fact they were the only three-cylinder engines on the network. By the end of the Second World War, the type was kept running until 1948 by which time enough C59’s had been built to enable mass withdrawals to take place, with the last examples out of traffic by 1950. And for my friend @SL58654号, one of the three surviving 7100-class ‘Moguls’, and the only one capable of running no less! I’ve never seen it out of the roundhouse though so clearly only a special-event engine. Having wrapped up at the museum by mid-afternoon I shambled back to the hotel, then headed out after a rest looking for a 7-Eleven that might have my favourite kiwifruit soda. Finally found one (goodbye, lousy one-yen coins!), then walked back to Aeon Mall to sample the kakigori festival food trucks nearby. Dinner, not so long after, was at Spicy Marsara once again, this time a chicken cutlet curry. Tomorrow, I tackle my first Japanese theme park, and hopefully get some parcels on their way. Alastair

Time for more updates because I’m still a bit behind. Thursday’s adventure turned out to be a trip to Saga-Arashiyama to visit the SL Hall, the Randen terminus, and the Togetsu-kyo bridge. This meant braving one of the most heavily touristed parts of Kyoto… even though it was a weekday, perhaps there might be less people? Short answer: no, not really. Having stopped at the SL Hall on the way out, I snagged a fresh crème brûlée donut from a shop at Randen Arashiyama and headed south to the bridge. A few minutes walking beyond that brought me to the Hankyu Arashiyama station, from where I shambled back to Togetsu-kyo on my way back to the Randen station. One of my reasons for going back to the Randen station was to try another kakigori dessert, from the same shop I’d visited last time. They’ve changed slightly and are now takeout only, but the kakigori is still just as delicious as ever! For those looking for other food options there are plenty of cafes and restaurants nearby, not more than a few pickle sellers, and, for the adults, a couple of sake shops with tasting options. I’m sure @Grant_T would enjoy that if he hasn’t already been to this area. Having had my fill, I headed back to the JR station, and returned ‘home’ to Kyoto for the next round of entertainment: a running session at the now more compact Popondetta Kyoto store. Last year they’d been spread across two shop spaces diagonally across from each other; this year they’re in just one shop space, the former restaurant one, with the Kyoto layout turned through 180 degrees, the ‘main’ rental layout on the other side of the shop, and the former back room now holds most of the second-hand stock and track. I had track 14 on the Kyoto layout - where I’d previously run trains in 2023 - with once again my EF65 doing the honours with the full container train this time. Much fun! Once I finished up, it was off to Gourmet Curry Spicy Marsara at Kyoto Station for dinner. They’re a nice little spot, and their curry’s tasty too. Alastair

Watch your wallet! Especially in places like Las Ramblas. There are a number of nearby places for a day trip by train. We went to Montserrat and enjoyed that. Got to see both passenger and freight trains on the ride so bonus for me. If you do a search on the Rick Steves' Travel Forum you can find a list of potential options. Tony

I was reading an article about a restaurant beside the railway station near Barcelona. I can't really remember the name, I guess La Mundana or something. I might visit there as well. I did check them out on Quora, looks like they are still in use

Wow jeff, thanks for such elaborated reply. Appreciate it. And sure, I will have a lot of hams.

More E721 from Microace. Guess I'll have to buy this one since I've got the others already!

Thanks, I’d forgotten the Hokuhoku line. The day I saw it at Echigo-yuzawa it was a single car, unfortunately I didn’t have time to travel on it that day as I was going to GALA Yuzawa.

Futurama Buildings On Thingiverse by b.nice.. aka... Andy G Scale.. somewhere near 1:150 ish, maybe ! AnonyCo https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6668562 Applied Cryogenics https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6668578 Eye of New New York https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6668587 Horseshoe Tower https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6668603 New New York Plaza https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6668623 #42 Parking Station https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6668639 Satellite Tower https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6668637 4 more to add soon

I got a few of the new Shinkalion: Change the World toys recently and now I really want to get some Plarail tracks and trains since they are compatible. Does anyone have any particular recommendations for getting started? It looks like they have decently priced starter sets for tracks and then I'm looking at getting some of the motorized shinkansen (E5, E6, and E7) that I'm hoping will be able to attach to the Shinkalion stuff. But it seems like there's endless variations of the starter sets and the actual Plarail trains so it's hard to decide what to get.

Here is a short clip of the signals working automatically.

Whoops totally forgot these! Yes I agree. Yeah I chalk my reaction to Park Guell to really heavy crowds, luckily the rest of our time in Spain did not have much in the way of crowds and this was the exception. ham, wine, repeat! The kinds of ham is just stunning. Lots of great cuisine, but the ham just kept calling in all of its wonderful ways. jeff

I would endorse cteno4 comments on Barcelona and Gaudi's architecture, except to say that we found Park Guell pretty amazing too. Yes it does get overrun with tourists (as does the whole of Barcelona) and the locals are becoming less enamoured with mass tourism. Cordoba Mosque and Cathedral is truly one of the great sites of Spain. Seville (like most Spanish cities) has an amazing cathedral and Alcazar but my personal favourite (besides Bilbao) is Granada with the Alhambra and Generalife Gardens (ok I am biased as I am a retired Architect and Landscape Architect). But as Jeff says enjoy the food, and yes the ham in Spain is wonderful. There used to be a chain called the Museum of Ham (or some such) which had an array of legs of ham suspended from the ceiling and a choice of ham to sample (and buy) that was beyond belief! Oh and the wine is not bad either. Graeme

This is a little more what Im used to showing here lol. The JR103 with more windows is one of the new kits that arrived today.

Normal service is indeed 2-car sets, but there are (or were) instances where HK100s were used as single-car trains, probably during off-peak and low-traffic days such as holidays. Here are a few pictures of single-car HK100 in revenue service (scroll towards the latter half of the post) https://matsumoto-superazusa-1m.blog.jp/archives/46946790.html

Spain is a place I'd like to visit but have never been. When your back upload some photos for us! Hopefully you can check out the trains as well. Looking at Wikipedia it appears the Renfe Class 251 freight locomotives are still in use? They have the EF 66 as one of their ancestors (though with many changes in mechanical design etc). They very much look related.

Signals ✅

Casa Batlló And Casa Milà are very fun to photograph, many odd little views and details, it’s one of those places you have to keep looking around and looking for different views. Also lots of changes in the light in rooms and especially on the roofs and their figure headed chimneys over the course of the day. We spent many hours at each and I wish we had spent more. Sagrada Família Is amazing, but huge and at times hard to frame in shots. They have been adding all sorts of led lighting to help make the architecture pop as it was pretty monotone and everything looked pretty gray when we were there a decade ago. Again a place you have to look for those shot angles that pick up cool details and angles. I’m hoping the new lighting will help make the place really shine now. The Rambla and El Raval are fun and great places to hang out and watch the tides of people go by. Lots of interesting architecture to see and good public art. We stayed at a place on the Rambla and was great to have an aerial view of the river of people. Park Güell has interesting bits and pieces but wasn’t all that taken with it myself. It may have been due to the crowds as we unfortunately went on a weekend so both tourists and locals crushed in. Seville has a lot of interesting architecture, like a lot of this area tons of baroque cathedrals. These can get repetitive at times, but if you look closely at all the wild sculpture done o the walls and columns, you can find some very interesting things to photograph in the details. The Parasol is wild, it had just been built when we were there. If you can get to Córdoba the grand mosque is quite spectacular. It’s huge and its internal dimensioning makes it sort of an infinity space and it feels like it never ends! It’s even got a good sized cathedral in the middle of it and wild how that floats in this larger space and it totally swallowed up by the mosque. Challenging to photograph as it’s dim lighting and the visual effects don’t make it into the camera well, but definitely one of those experiential, neurochrome places. I know Bilbao is the other side of the country (but Spain has nice high speed rail!), but Gehry’s Guggenheim is mind blowing. In my book truly the best pice of architecture in the world. One of those places you can keep walking around and look at spaces and details from different angles and not find a bad view (I really tried), really amazing. Usually in most good architecture the main space and path everything looks right and good, but go off the main path or look at spaces from odd angles and things can look bad or sloppy, but at Bilbao it’s not the case. Gehry’s mind I think is 4 dimensional and what we see is that projected into 3 dimensions for us. The exterior is also amazing to take in and also at many different distances and angles. Building really changes a lot depending on the distance from it. It nestles in well with the rest of the city, river and bridge. We found a nice little riverfront cafe on the other side of the river and it was a grand long lunch watching the light change the look of the structure over a couple of hours. Best time I’ve ever had scoping out a building for 3 days. Bilbao is also is fantastic as it sets an extremely high bar for the art shown in it. You can clearly see art below the bar “have no clothes” when presented in Bilbao, while those above the bar shine wonderfully in the space. There was a temp exhibit on some comparison of old masters and abstract pieces and the old masters were fine in the way out building. Serra’s pieces there are amazing to experience. Scale and mass are dimensions that is usually not a big part of art that is played with much, but his are all about that and such amazing detail to curves on massive chunks of iron! enjoy your trip and eat a lot of ham for me! Food is really wonderful in Spain. jeff

yes no doubt. My comments were not on the study or need or lack of need or anything. More on the presentation and spin and stuff like that. I think it a reasonable thing to study and understand.

Finally, back to the subject of steam, what would the odds be of a green 58654 and SL Aso Boy being made? They have the tooling for that, at least for the period that it wore its cast iron chimney, and not the ugly mock-diamond stack.