Rainbows in the Lehigh Valley Gorge

[TMo]

Not much progress or good news to report this week.

Decided to run my TOFC D&H Apollo this week - it's been problematic lately and I wanted to figure out the reasons for the problems.  It's a long train with long cars on marginal curves for them and I was running into an issue when the locomotive consist was headed back downhill out of a curve pulling the rest of the train coming up the slope.  The extra strain was transferring to the first TOFC flats - I was getting some bucking that led to derailments and tossing of trailers into the Lehigh.  Turns out my Athearn Genesis GP39-2 was only pulling sporadically - running....not....   running...not....  Ran it by itself and consisted with another locomotive after checking everything over.  Didn't get better - in fact it ended up with a hot and non-functional DCC decoder (21-pin type).  New one has been ordered and I'll re-double check wiring in the meantime.

I did some prep work - underbrush for more trees.  I might get to build and install some trees this evening if I can get the bathrooms cleaned.