The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!!

[Running Bear]

As I reported earlier the Bachmann GP7 arrived today. I applied some homemade number boards, painted,rusted and weathered the shell, changed out the cheap couplers with Kadee 148 Whisker couplers, removed the Bachmann decoder and put in a Digitrax DZ125 decoder. Doing that last wasn't without it's issues. I quickly discovered the 8-pin plug of the DZ125 stands too high and won't allow the shell to seat properly. So I cut the plug off the decoder, cutting the wires right at the pins then did the exact opposite with the Bachmann 8-pin plug, cutting the wires right at the decoder then spliced that plugs wires to the DZ125's wires. I now had a DZ125 that had a plug that would allow the shell to seat. The hardest part was soldering the wires together and that wasn't a problem. I put the loco on the program track and it checked out OK.

I don't have the GP9 yet. It only made it to the Leesville PO today so it's gonna be another day or two. The GP7 was sent USPS snail mail and the GP9 was sent FedEx Smartpost which is supposedly faster. They were shipped the same day and we see which one got here first don't we?

It's raining here, has been since early afternoon. It's 43 at this time and there's a fair chance it's gonna rain most of the night. The low is supposed to be 38. Tomorrow will be near 60, much warmer than it's been lately.

I copied Pacman (some of y'all might remember that game) from one of my SD cards to a floppy disk but had a problem getting the program to load. Kept getting an I/O Error. I verified the integrity of the disk and it checked out 100% good. Turned out the DOS on the disk was clobbered. That was an easy fix. I simply copied the DOS from one of my system disks to the disk with the problem and that fixed it. I played several games of Pacman using the keyboard controls. I HAVE GOT TO GET A JOYSTICK! More important things to do first.

Time to call it a night. See y'all tomorrow.