Adam's Railroad

Yard Work

2018-11-13T23:45:00-05:00

Work has been progressing very gradually but nicely on the Bryson yard. Last night I finished getting the two “A/D” (arrival/departure) tracks in and noticed that, with the cars that were somewhat randomly sitting on the track, it sort of made an interesting scene. There’s something about a yard – the parallel tracks, cars at various depths – that’s much different than your usual car-on-mainline. It’s obvious to say, but when you’re building a layout it’s fun to see it emerge.

Signs of Signals

2018-11-11T19:00:00-05:00

I’ve been helping Mark install signals on his layout, essentially working as the assist to the Chief Signal Maintainer, Rick. The system we’re using on Mark’s layout can be summarized as:

JMRI - the brains
Digitrax BDL168s - block detection
Digitrax SE8Cs - LED signal drivers
Digitrax SMBKs - the signals, painted silver and black
Tam Valley Signlets - switch control

I started out knowing very little about any of this ended up understanding the system pretty well, thanks to Rick. Turns out you can learn a fair amount simply by running wires and what is essentially data entry in JMRI’s tables.

I’ve been wanting signals on my layout(s) for years now. Thankfully I haven’t considered the technical aspects to be much of a barrier, but it always seemed so expensive. That all changed with the introduction of Digitrax’ “Plug’n’Play” signals for HO scale, the SHABC and others, for about $20-25 per plant! They’re nothing fancy – essentially a black PCB with surface mount LEDs – but they’ll get the job done and over time I can either replace them with more realistic signals, or mod them to look more realistic (silver paint, hoods for the LEDs, ladders, that sort of thing).

The combination of affordable, simple entry level signals and relatively affordable control hardware have finally made it possible to implement signaling on the Murphy Branch (never mind that the Murphy Branch was probably never signaled, as far as I know). It’s certainly not cheap, mind you, but it’s within reach. Going into the particulars of my setup is best left for a dedicated future entry (once it’s done or half working, at least), but suffice to say that a single BDL168 and an SE8C are sufficient to run the signals for my entire layout.

The photo above shows my SE8C driving an SMBK, the N scale equivalent of the SHABC signals. The SE8C includes one of these N scale double-headed test signals, which Mark is using on his layout (after a careful application of black and silver paint). I’ve built a basic “signal board”, shown below. Ribbon cables will come in from each “plant” to the SE8C on the left, and current-sensing feeders to the BDL168 on the right.

A little while later I set up one of the SHABC signals and made a simple video. In the video the signal aspect is being controlled manually using JMRI.

I’m presently working on wiring up blocks and putting in a few signals – among several [dozen] other projects. More to come!

Briefly: switch commands and track power

The instructions for the SE8C walk you through sending switch commands to change the signal (which is how I made it show yellow over red here). When I frist tried it, however, it didn’t work very well: the signal LEDs flickered, and the status LEDs on the boards lit up red for a few seconds. It turns out this is sort of a known issue with Digitrax command stations when the track power is off. From the JMRI docs on LocoNet:

Turnout command rejection when track power is off

Some more recent Digitrax command stations will refuse to accept switch commands when track power is turned off. This can result in a “storm” of repeated switch messages on LocoNet if track power is off when switch messages are sent. This problem can be avoided by ensuring that track power is on when switch messages are to be sent.

Groan. I actually figured this out by checking the LocoNet Monitor in JMRI, which allowed me to see that my switch commands were not getting acknowledged and were being rapidly retried. Searching on that led me to those JMRI LocoNet notes – thanks to the JMRI folks for documenting it. At least I know my equipment is working “as expected”.

Technical bumps aside, exciting times for the railroad!

Clouds Forming (in a good way)

2018-09-20T23:49:19-04:00

As I mentioned in my last post I’ve been wanting to get started on scenery, and adding some nice Appalachian mountains to the backdrop seemed like a good idea. Using Dave Frary’s scenery book as a guide, I conducted a brief and ill-fated experiment with backdrop painting. I learned that I have a lot to learn about mixing paints. I resolved to take my sky blue color to the paint department and pick out colors for hazy background mountains and less hazy foreground mountains, rather than trying to mix those colors. Then I’ll try mixing paints again to do the trees. It takes a lot to get me to the store, though, and I really need to get some good reference photos first. So that will wait a bit.

In the meantime, on Saturday morning I was feeling pretty motivated to get something done, and so I decided to try my hand at clouds. The Frary book briefly discusses making clouds using white spray paint and templates/masks. As luck would have it I already had some flat white spray paint. I didn’t have any cloud masks, but I did have scissors and card stock, so I set to work and made a few test clouds.

Quite frankly I was amazed by the results. The technique is to hold the mask about one to two inches away from the backdrop and spray, keeping the nozzle a good distance from the template. Having an appropriate respirator mask and ventilation is also key. As I’ve worked with spray paint more and more over the past year I’ve found that there’s a technique to it. It takes some finesse to not end up blasting pools of spray paint onto your subject. Practice.

Over this past week I proceeded to paint basic clouds over the entire backdrop of the railroad. This is a great “break” task if you have small chunks of time. Open the window, turn on the box fan, put on your respirator, get a glove for your hand, cover the layout (there are a few prep steps, but they go quickly), and spray six feet of backdrop.

I had some mistakes – somehow I sprayed enough at one point in the above scene to almost form a drip line. Yikes! I let the area dry and the next day applied 220 grit sandpaper. With some care most of the thick paint came up and I was able to re-spray it; you’d never know it happened if I hadn’t written a paragraph about it here. I also found that if you get some splatter from the spray can nozzle and you’re quick, you may be able to simply wipe it off the backdrop.

I made about four different templates. They tend to get pretty wet with paint (oftentimes you are just letting the overspray mist the backdrop around the template), so it’s helpful to be able to set them aside and keep going with a different one. Of course, different templates help keep all of the clouds from looking the same. If you’re thinking of adding clouds, I highly, highly recommend this technique. It’s inexpensive and with a little bit of practice and care gives great results.

I may wait until I get the mountains in before doing another (final) pass and build up some of the clouds (not the pictured ones, though – they are done). One thing I haven’t tried yet is adding a light gray underside to the clouds. It seems like a good idea but I don’t think it’s necessary at all. I’ll test it.

An Experiment in Focus Stacking

2018-09-09T09:48:53-04:00

A common “tell” in model railroad photographs (and all macro photography, I suppose) is a shallow depth of field. Back in the early 2000’s my friend Chap and I put a fair amount of work into simulating this effect with both a real tilt-shift lens (Chap’s), and Photoshop filters.

When I take photos of a model railroad, however, I’m either trying to get a good representation of what I see, or I’m trying to make it look real. Frequently, conditions require that I use a relatively shallow depth of field, either with my iPhone’s camera, or shooting without a tripod. Depending on the shot, this can lead to disappointing results: in a photo of an oncoming train, only a small part of the train will be in focus.

Note that only about three quarters of the locomotive is in focus; ideally the whole train would be, but that’s simply not possible with phone cameras. (It should be possible with my dSLR, depending on subject distance, lens, etc. Good followup post topic?)

There is however a technique called focus stacking that uses image processing to combine photos with of varying focal plane settings into a single, [almost] tack-sharp photo. I was reminded of this while working on Mark’s layout – Daryl had come to take photos and he mentioned that he was going to be focus stacking. I resolved to try it out. (Another benefit of working on other people’s railroads!)

This photo is made up of six different photos taken on my iPhone, using Camera+ as the camera app, for better control the manual focus setting while keeping exposure constant. Affinity Photo’s built-in focus stacking feature was then used to combine the images, resulting in the image above. Certainly not as simple as snapping a photo, but worth it for a shot/scene that I care about.

While it is satisfying to have found a good way to take better photos, this post really serves to underscore the need for actual scenery on my railroad!

September 2018 Update

2018-09-05T22:22:11-04:00

It’s been a busy summer on the railroad! My uncle visited in August and there’s nothing like a visiting dignitary to get you motivated.

The Roundhouse

One of the exciting parts about moving to HO scale was that I would be able to 1) afford and 2) have room for a roundhouse and turntable. I decided to make this one of my first projects on the railroad, despite the fact that this is one of the more complicated structures I expect to build. As if it weren’t a big enough project, I also decided to light the interior.

Making decisions is one of the hardest parts of model railroading, which is why I chose the roundhouse/turntable as my first project. Why? Because there’s very little to decide! Sure, you have to decide how many stalls (five) and what model manufacturer’s kit to go with (a vintage kit from Heljan), and what color temperature LEDs to buy (warm white). But more importantly and relevant to my point, there is really only one way for the roundhouse, turntable, and the track that connects them to be laid. In other words, it makes a good module to work on, because it doesn’t affect much outside of itself.

I’ve still got a good bit o work to do yet (the undisguised wires are mercifully not visible in the above photo), but I’m happy enough with the progress that I’ve moved on to other things for now.

Filling out the roster

I’ve put a fair amount of time into researching operations on the Southern Railway’s Murphy Branch. For the uninitiated, I’ll translate: what trains were run on this railroad and what was their purpose? By answering these questions I can better model them, or at least be a little better informed if I decide to freelance the trains I run.

Passenger service on the Murphy Branch ended in 1948, but in the 1937 timetable there were a total of four passenger trains. Two eastbound and two westbound. Since my tentative plan is to model the 1940’s, four passenger trains a day sounds pretty good to me. As such I have begun to acquire a few pieces of “varnish”:

I was pretty happy to find these. The price was right and as far as I can tell they are a good match for the kind of coaches that were run on the Murphy Branch. Once I find some baggage cars I’ll be set.

I’ve also been thinking about how an operating session on the layout might work. How many people could it support? (probably four) How many trains would there be? Would a session be a day long, or half a day? How closely should I follow the employee timetable?

Elsewhere

A lot of work has been going on elsewhere on the layout, including building a scenic divider between Bryson and the grade from “Asheville” (staging), roughing in mountains along that grade, hanging track lighting, building structure kits, and mocking up track layouts.

I’ve also been doing a fair amount of work beyond the Murphy Branch, helping out my friend Mark on his N scale Feather River Route, along with Rick, the Chief Signal Maintainer. If you’ve never worked on someone else’s layout you might think, “Hey bub, imagine what you could be getting done on your own railroad in that time!” The truth, however, is that working on someone else’s layout is so rewarding that it’s beyond worth it. Beyond the fun of working on something as part of a team, when you come back to your own pike you are inspired to do more, and sometimes we all are in need of a little inspiration and motivation. My uncle’s next visit won’t be for a while!

Mainline Completed

2018-04-21T10:00:00-04:00

On Monday evening I completed the mainline. Last weekend afforded a lot of time to slog through the remaining ~50 feet of track, and so slog I did, strategically dropping in a few switches for passing sidings along the way. By Sunday evening about five feet of track remained to be laid, which was rather quickly knocked out the next night once the kids were in bed.

Laying flex track is one of those things that I perceive as a big hassle and so I put it off. For every piece I have to swap glasses for protective goggles, use the Dremel cutoff wheel to cut the rails to size, swap goggles for glasses, file the cut rails, remove a few ties, and finally attach rail joiners. Then, once it’s all done I step back and think, “Well that wasn’t that bad.” Repeat.

With the mainline completed I was obligated to run a few trains to test out the track, which went well, but strangely it didn’t feel as great as I had hoped. Perhaps because it’s still just a train running on plywood?

Or, perhaps more critically, it’s just a mainline. With exception of staging, there are no sidings, no spurs, no nothing. So all the train can do is run in a loop. It’s time to get some scenery going.

On that note, I have made two very small steps toward scenery, both visible in the photos accompanying this post:

I put down a base coat of brown paint on much of the plywood. While it sort of makes the ground look like a muddy, flat wasteland, I think it’s better than bare plywood.
I sprayed a short section of track with Rust-Oleum Camouflage Earth Brown, let the paint sit for a couple minutes, and then wiped off the top of the rails. The result is very basic track weathering. The tops of the rails are gleaming (as they should be), the sides of the rails look rusty, and the ties no longer have a plastic-y sheen. The one surprise I had was that it turned out to be more difficult to photograph than I expected.

Taking this layout beyond mainline-on-plywood (the fabled Plywood Pacific) is my next hurdle. I think the next logical step in this direction is to pick a town and develop a plan for its industries and sidings. Lots of decisions to be made – should be easy!

March 2018 Layout Tour Video

2018-04-03T23:59:08-04:00

As a follow-up to last week’s post about the new layout, I’ve created a short video to walk you around it and hopefully give a better sense of it than text and photos can.

New Layout, New Scale

2018-03-29T12:00:00-04:00

In April of 2017 I attended my first operating session. For the uninitiated, an operating session is where a group of people get together to operate a model railroad as if it were a real railroad: usually you have a dispatcher, yardmaster(s), and a bunch of engineers. I was lucky to find a great operating group for my first session: they were helpful and encouraging. They also match my sensibilities about these things: they take it somewhat seriously, but not too seriously.

I’ve been curious about operating for several years now, but didn’t know whether it was something I would enjoy doing, and therefore how much I should consider operating in my layout design (a layout designed for operating tends to be much different from one designed for watching trains go around). I read books, articles, forum posts. I scoured YouTube for good videos on the topic (this turns out to be rather difficult: it’s one thing to run a train at realistic speed (slowly) along a run-around when you’re holding the throttle; it’s quite another to watch someone else do it on video). It wasn’t until I attended several sessions that I felt I had a decent grasp on it. If you yourself are curious, I strongly suggest you seek out a group to give it a try.

After attending a number of sessions it turns out that operating is something I like. I like simulations, and I like complicated systems. A signalled railroad with five or so people operating on it at once is just really cool. Depending on how crowded the railroad is you can run into times when you are stopped at a red signal for several minutes. While this might sound boring, my experience has been that there is an almost zen-like quality to it. Yes, you’re having to wait, but you’re waiting because there are other things happening around you. There’s much more I’d like to say about operating, but I’ll save that for another post.

The layouts in the operating group’s rotation are predominantly HO scale, although there are several N scale. A few years ago when I got back into model railroading, I bought into O scale for the theatrics of it. Lionel Legacy engines have great stage presence, if you will: they’re big and heavy, sound awesome, and have great smoke effects (synchronized chuffing and simulated steam blowing out when the whistle blows). By comparison, HO seemed more like a model, and N just ridiculously small. Additionally, in the smaller scales derailments seem much more common: the cars are sometimes rather light, and any flaws in the trackwork are magnified.

After spending some time running HO scale trains, however, I was starting to realize that they weren’t that bad. Some even had rather good sound, even if it didn’t have the richness of O scale with its relatively massive speaker enclosures. At the same time, the expense of O scale was starting to weigh on me.

Think of what you could build in HO scale, I thought. Sure, I had put close to two years of work into the layout, but if my goal is to build a layout for the next twenty years, better to get it right a little late than never, right?

An Experiment

I resolved to make a small investment in some HO equipment: an entry level DCC system (Digitrax Zephyr), a locomotive with good sound, a few cars, a few switches, and a little bit of track. I built a sort of shelf layout (2’ x 8’) as an learning experience and a test, to see if I could handle such tiny trains.

To be perfectly honest I didn’t let the test run its course. After putting down the track (and finding that it was incredibly easy to deal with when compared to 3-rail O scale “flex” track), barely a few days had gone by before I started putting together new layout plans in HO.

A New Layout Takes Shape

At first it felt amazingly freeing: compared to O scale, I now had all the space in the world! It took some time to temper that. While the smaller scale afforded me the ability to do numerous things that were impractical or prohibitively expensive (have a turntable and roundhouse, for example), my space was not limitless. Additionally, while track configuration can generally be scaled down to close to a quarter of the area, curves still take up roughly the same amount of room: research showed that 30” was a good minimum radius for HO, if you can swing it, which is not that different from the fairly generous 36” radius curves I had built in O scale.

At one of the operating sessions I mentioned that I was looking seriously at building an HO scale layout and another of the members, Norm Stenzel, generously offered to design a layout for me. While I have generally prided myself on my layouts being all mine – my design, my construction – Norm’s layout, the Brandywine & Benedictine, had been one of the layouts I had been studying for design ideas. I couldn’t accept Norm’s offer quickly enough.

With input from me on my interests (long mainline, space between towns, small yard), Norm created a design for a point-to-point layout with shared staging entered at a wye, which makes the staging more flexible, as well as cleverly allowing for continuous operation (i.e., running trains on a loop when guests are over). My plan is to loosely model the Southern Railway’s Murphy Branch in western North Carolina, possibly from Bryson City to Murphy, where it interchanged with the L&N. This part is still in flux, however.

Construction has begun in earnest. In some ways this is my favorite phase of layout building; the astute and snarky reader might say that that’s because it’s the only phase of layout building I’ve done, to which I would reply that that is only 80% true (I have made plaster mountains and rock molds). Still, building benchwork shows quick results and laying stretches of the mainline is gratifying work. I’ve managed to reuse and repurpose a great deal of the benchwork and subroadbed of the old layout, thanks to using a similar radius, and have been gradually selling off my O scale equipment to fund capital purchases for the new railroad.

The photo shows construction from the right hand side of the layout plan. You can see part the wye at right, partially obscured by the (trackless) viaduct which leads to the yard. The track from the wye leading left enters a single turn helix down to staging, which can be seen in the distance.

Onward

So far I couldn’t be happier with the change to HO. There is so much available on the market compared to O, and the economics are vastly better. Interestingly I have heard long-time HO scale model railroaders complain about the market being a fraction of what it was, and prices going up and up, but from a former O-scaler’s perspective, the water is fine!

I hope to complete the mainline in the next few weeks; construction of the next sections of subroadbed will be trickier because because I need to accomodate the staging track below, but it will be great when trains can run the full mainline.

Revival

2018-03-26T00:00:00-04:00

Over the years I have occasionally blogged about my model railroad hobby. In 2013 I established this site to document my second layout. The third layout didn’t get much publication. In 2016 I started my fourth layout and, in an effort to simplify my life, decided to post about that layout on my main blog.

Now it is 2018. A new layout is underway, and I have decided that this site would be the best place to write about it. My hope is that it will be easier to write more frequently if I am not trying to consider an audience that has no interest in model railroading (not that my main blog has much of an audience anyway). Plus, it seems nice for my layout to have its own dedicated home on the internet.

I’ve moved the posts about the 2016-2017 layout to this site here, and hope to publish a entry about the new layout soon!

October 2017 Update

2017-10-30T22:36:35-04:00

It’s been a tough year for the railroad, but things are looking up. I’ve been very lucky to have never lost anything to lightning before this year, but I suppose my luck ran out – this spring we suffered a couple of lightning strikes. Judging by the path of destruction it appears to have come in on our cable line and used the ethernet as its guide. (Make sure your cable connection is properly grounded, kids.) Most frustrating, it seems to have caused some damage to my Lionel Legacy base unit, which took some time to get repaired and doesn’t seem to be fully resolved yet. I may need to make a budget allocation for a new one. Needless to say I am aggressively unplugging the layout nowadays.

A more happy development has been that I’ve found an operating group to be a part of. (This is also the nerdiest development of the year.) If you’re unfamiliar, “operating” on a model railroad involves a group of people getting together at somebody’s layout and running trains. But not just running the trains – running them as if they were part of a rail railroad. Typically there is a signup board with a schedule of trains. Each train starts in one place and usually ends up in another. Along the way you may have stops to make, cars to pick up and drop off, and other trains to safely make way for, with the dispatcher’s help. They tend to run around 3 1/2 hours and while they were initially pretty intimidating, I’ve found them to be quite a bit of fun. The people are great, and you end up learning quite a bit about how railroads operate – more on that in a moment. Perhaps best of all, I’ve found it to be helpful in keeping me motivated to work on my own layout. On that note…

The most obvious development on my layout over the past few months has been the mountain range, a chunk of which can be seen above. This range separates “Town A” and “Town B” on the layout plan (the two lowest towns). I originally intended this to be a backdrop dividing the two, but after mocking it up I quickly nixed it upon determining that it cut up the room too much for my liking.

The profile of the mountain is formed by 2” pink foam, and then the traditional cardboard webbing with plaster paper towels gives it some body. Rock walls give its steeper inclines some detail, which brings me to another development: I learned how to make latex rock molds! It turns out to be quite easy; the hardest part is finding good rocks. As I mentioned in the last update I used the methods demonstrated by Rich Battista in the Black Diamond Railway to fill in the gaps between the molds.

Eventually everything but the rock faces will be covered in trees and greenery. For now it has been painted a dirt color, as you will see in the later photos.

Over the past week I’ve started to develop some more concrete ideas about “Town D”, the highest and largest municipality on the layout. The seeds of this have come from my involvement with the operating group – I’ve learned why you might want to have a “passenger main” and a “freight main”, and why the track configuration and positioning of key structures like the passenger station might be arranged a certain way. I had designed (and built) Town D to have a lengthy siding, but it turned out that this didn’t allow for the passenger station to have my preferred orientation (toward the viewer) while having the other track be the freight main (from which industry spurs extend). So I’m reworking the path of the siding to be more effective freight while allowing the passenger station its rightful prominent location.

Oh, and the passenger station is new as well: an Atlas O kit that I picked up from Legacy Station. I used a brush to paint the roof and decided that that was way too much work, and so I dug out the airbrush and used it to finish the rest. This was my first time doing anything of substance with the airbrush, a device which can be almost magical when you are operating it properly. Unfortunately I have found the learning curve to be significant. More practice is needed. The cool thing is that it does use a tiny amount of paint, and of course the finish is very smooth.

There is still work to be done on the station: installing the window glazing, interior lights, maybe some very basic interior. I’d also like to weather it at some point. Maybe in 2019.

Lastly, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about lighting on the layout. For a few years now I’ve wanted to do some sort of RGB computer-controlled lighting so that I could simulate a day-night cycle, or at least have a more credible nighttime lighting mode than “lights off”. This is one of the few areas of model railroading where there isn’t a well-trodden path to follow. There are a number of people experimenting with this, but it seems like it hasn’t been fully figured out yet. So I’m joining the group of people experimenting with it.

I’ve determined that LED strips are the most reasonable and economical way to achieve this effect (RGB smart bulbs are much too expensive to be practical, and frequently their version of “soft white” is not terribly good). The trick has been finding the right LED strip that is bright enough. A good number of people are using LED strips on their HO and N scale layouts, but those scales can get away with having the lights much closer, say 18” away from the track. For my O scale layout I’m looking for a minimum of 24”, and preferably more to keep the lights out of your face and camera field of view.

After trying out a number of strips I have finally settled on SMD2835 600 LED/5M warm white strips. The photo above was taken under one such strip, 32” off the track.

The photo at the top of this post was intended to resemble a night shot, lit using only the blue channel from an RGBWW strip I had handy.

(The California Zephyr car is one of the only pieces of rolling stock I added this year. While it doesn’t have any business on an appalachian railroad, it looks too damn good not to be on my railroad, if only for photo ops.)

Here’s my test lighting rig. The plan is to suspend these light bars from the ceiling.

I didn’t get nearly as much done as I might have hoped, given my progress over last winter, but I’m optimistic for the next few months. One thing I’ve learned about this hobby is that many times the hardest part is making decisions. Especially when deciding what contours the landscape should have over a vacant space. The usual advice is to look at what a real railroad did, and model that. I should do more of that. While I have vague ideas that my railroad lies somewhere in western North Caroline, or maybe north Georgia, or perhaps even part of Tennessee, and I’ve visited those areas many times, I haven’t made dedicated trips to take photos of the landscape for this purpose. (It turns out that you can do a certain amount of this research using Google Maps streetview, which is especially handy when it’s not the right season.)

I’m going to continue to focus on a few small scenery areas, in the interests of filling in those voids, so that I can start to experiment with how to make trees and so forth. And while I’m happy to have made a decision on the lighting, I’m not sure how aggressively I’ll work on it. It’s one of those things that can wait, and there are more problems to be solved (how, exactly, am I going to build those bars? And how will I power them? Control them?) I haven’t even mentioned signals and occupancy detection in this post. (I also haven’t made much progress on it.) So many interesting little things to figure out and build, and new mistakes to make and skills to develop.

Until next time!

January 2017 Update

2017-01-15T23:20:00-05:00

Time off from work or school has long brought with it the promise and the pressure of making something cool – making progress with my projects. More often than not these breaks have yielded somewhat disappointing results in terms of productivity, and so exceptions like this past winter break stand out brightly.

That’s a rather long-winded way of saying that I got some stuff done on the layout over Christmas.

The River Valley Gets A Bridge

Practically all of my layout energy went into the river valley (formerly referred to as the “back left area”), which has transitioned from prototype cardboard profiles to a basis for real scenery: a plywood riverbed, pink foam banks and cardboard webbing. This area continues to be gratifying to bring to life (it’s featured prominently in the video below).

In addition to pink foam, the valley now has a real bridge. I chose the MTH Steel Arch Bridge and I’m trying out salt weathering on it. I first learned about this technique from Eric Siegel’s YouTube channel, but there are numerous other examples on YouTube. The steps are simple:

Paint the model a rusty base coat
Spray with water and apply sea salt liberally where you want a corrosion effect. As the water dries the salt sticks (quite well, actually)
Paint a second color on top.
Chip off all of the salt and you are left with the rust showing through.

Chipping the salt off can be a very time-consuming process, especially for a structure as complicated as a bridge, but I think the results were pretty good. For the second coat I chose a deep red, which unfortunately means that the effect is somewhat subtle (especially in photographs), due to the similarity of the two colors – rust vs. red.

Progress Video

To mark the progress of the past few weeks, I made a video of W&LE 8002 pulling a consist of six B&O passenger cars. Think of it as an “excursion”. The video starts in the lower return loop and follows the train all the way up to the upper return loop, where it crosses the bridge:

Shifting Landscape Building Techniques

For a few years now my plan for creating the shape of the landscape has been to stack layers of carved pink foam. While using this approach on the river valley, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s simply too slow (and, my god, messy – static-y pink foam sticking to everything) for me, at least for mountainous landscape. Perhaps it has something to do with perfectionist tendencies, but it takes a lot of energy to select the right piece of foam for each layer, then carve the piece to my liking, and so forth. So I’m trying something different.

Many times I’ve looked to Rich Battista’s excellent Black Diamond Railway series for inspiration. In the first volume he demonstrates his basic mountain building technique which is essentially to ball up craft paper, tape/staple it into place, add plaster sheets, and then adorn with molded plaster rocks. It looks to be very fast, and it offers a lot of control.

As much as I love the results on his layout, the thought of great big damp wads of paper under my landscape is just not that appealing (damp from the wet plaster sheets, and the water sprayed on from his excellent approach to rock mold blending). So my plan is to use foam to build the base and back profile (against the backdrop) of the landscape, and the classic cardboard lattice covered in plaster sheets (and molded plaster rocks) for the actual surface.

Next Up

I expect that I’ll remain pretty focused on scenery in this area for the next few weeks. I ordered tunnel portals and bridge abutments. I expect to start applying plaster relatively soon, although before I get too far into that I need to build out the tunnel interiors for that area.

In my last post I mentioned that I was working on signals. My wife gave me a Raspberry Pi for Christmas, which will make a great nerve center for the signaling system (I like the thought of being able to SSH into the signal system). I haven’t made much more progress in this area, however.

December 2016 Update

2016-12-14T07:00:00-05:00

The layout is coming along quite nicely. Fortunately for the layout, I’m much more consistent about working on it than I am in writing about it here.

What’s New

There’s been a great deal of progress since August! The main line, which is terminated by reversing loops on either end, has been complete since November, and trains can run the entire length. Two passing sidings allow me to have two (or I guess three) trains on the track, although this amount of mental juggling is not something I attempt often.

Aside from the sub-roadbed and track work, the backdrop has grown significantly and received a coat of primer paint. The photo above was taken a couple weeks ago; as of this weekend the backdrop has made it around to the corner at the left rear of the room. One more 4’ section remains.

The backdrop has been a challenge. It’s made out of 2 foot tall panels of hardboard (Masonite). The most time-consuming part of this has been in smoothing out the seams between the pieces. I’m using drywall joint compound to do this, and I’ve learned that my skills with drywall mud have a long way to go. For some of the seams I tried using paper tape, but it’s taken a very long time to smooth over the ridge that the paper tape formed. Perhaps after it’s all over I’ll have something to share. At any rate, once I get the seams smooth I’ll be able to finish painting it, and then I’ll be able to get started on roughing in scenery, hopefully by the end of the year.

One of the areas I’m most excited to start work on is in that back left area. I’ve used cardboard to sketch out the profiles of the mountains in this area and I’m really happy with how it’s looking. A closer look:

The dip in the center represents the river, which flows toward the camera, from up around the bend to the right. The track of follows the river, of course. I had formed an idea in my head of what I wanted in this area, but prototyping it with cardboard really helped it come to life. The two lengths of elevated track in this photo are the upper return loop. The one in the foreground will be a bridge.

I had been planning to build a backdrop down the center of the smaller peninsula. I even wrapped another piece of hardboard around a tube to make the endcap, but after temporarily assembling that section of backdrop I decided not to proceed. These floating backdrops chop up the room of course, and in this case I didn’t think it was worth it. So the challenge will be to develop scenery that logically separates the two halves of that peninsula (as they are not intended to be geographically back to back). Being able to look out over a wider, unbroken landscape will be nice.

Visitors

We’ve had a fair number visitors to the layout over the past few months. It’s been fun to see how people respond to it. In particular it’s cool to see some pull out their phone to take a picture.

I’m also learning how to “entertain” guests with the layout. Yes, you run the train, but with a single track main the action can be somewhat limited, with only one train moving at a time. (Trying to make oneself available to talk to people is not a good time to attempt to move two trains around the layout simultaneously. I need a crew…) Still, I would do well to remember what I said about Tom Brennison’s layout: limited action allows visitors to take in the details. This will be more of a long term goal – my layout has no details yet.

Perhaps half of my visitors are friends’ kids. I try to make sure they get to blow the whistle on the big trains, or I’ll tuck the big train safely away on a siding and let them run our Thomas LionChief train around. Thomas can handle flying off a curve at full speed a lot better than the big trains. I’d love to find a way for them to run the big train. Perhaps using the speed limit feature would be sufficient.

What’s Next

I’m looking forward to getting started on some scenery. The base backdrop needs to be finished first, however. Also, although the mainline and major passing sidings are complete, none of the industry sidings and spurs are. They still need to be planned beyond sketches or general notions in my mind.

I’ve been doing some preliminary work on signals. The present plan is to use an isolated rail for block occupancy detection and an Arduino or Raspberry Pi to make the logic work. It’s been fun to prototype it out on the Arduino. Here’s a little video I made testing out opto-couplers for isolated rail occupancy detection:

A Visit to The New River Valley Railway

2016-11-20T17:41:17-05:00

Today we had the pleasure of visiting Tom Brennison’s New River Valley Railway. It was on the last day of this year’s Piedmont Pilgrimage and a friend told me that Tom’s railroad needed to be seen, so we loaded up the family and headed south to Fayetteville.

The New River Valley Railway is modeled after southwest Virginia, where Tom grew up. It’s a wonderfully sprawling HO railroad, with small towns and industries joined by green river valleys, hills, and mountains. There’s an abundance of elegant and intricate trackwork, enough that I was surprised to learn that the overall track plan is a single-track main with two passing sidings.

A lone Virginian train was making its way along the mainline while we were there. I’ll admit that I was initially disappointed by this, but let me tell you that there was no shortage of interest: there is so much to see on Tom’s layout that in retrospect I think it was better to have less action. It allowed us to focus on the details – and there are many – rather than being distracted by the train action.

A few notes on the details:

I was impressed by how varied the landscape was. Some layouts have very discrete levels on which the track runs, but I felt like Tom had done an excellent job of making the terrain and its transitions feel very natural (something which I would like to emulate on my own layout).
The areas entering a tunnel portal tended to be very nicely done. The range of bridge styles represented was also fun.
Two other favorite scenes were great examples of modeling abandoned trackage - one of them can be seen below.
We should have gotten a babysitter and brought the “good” camera.

Hopefully the New River Valley will be on the Pilgrimage in coming years – a repeat visit would be well worth the drive, and obviously I’d strongly recommend you visit as well. Until then, you can see a bit more of the layout in this NMRA YouTube video.

Tom was an outstanding host, making himself available for questions, generously explaining how his signalling system worked (and even showing the circuitry), and volunteering interesting details. Thank you, Tom!

Planning

2016-08-11T23:48:16-04:00

We moved last summer, and with that move came an opportunity to build a new layout in a new space. I built three layouts at the old house (none of them got past track-on-plywood benchwork). The space in the new house is 32 feet long by 13 1/2 feet wide – wonderfully large, but it proved to be quite a challenge to design for. I think that smaller rooms have fewer options, especially with a larger scale like O. With a large (for me) room like this, the possibilities multiply.

It took about six months for the dust to settle from the move, and from that point a few months of layout design failures followed by a few weeks of false positives. One day: “This is the layout I will build!” Two days later: “This isn’t good enough.”

Around this time, I was frequenting the excellent Model Railroader Video Plus, and came across two layouts that really resonated with me. The first was Tom Piccirillo’s Somerset County Traction System (O scale, MRVP link, track plan, photos). The second was Gerry Leone’s Bona Vista Railroad (Mark III) (HO scale, YouTube walkthrough).

Somerset County’s gently winding track plan is lovely, and it was inspiring to see that great scenes can be made in O scale with relatively little depth. Like many I’ve always wanted to build a layout with a great big yard, but in O that requires a massive amount of space. Your layout tends to be about the yard itself. Over time I’ve come to think that a shortline with several passing sidings and spurs allows for more interesting modeling and operation, given the constraints. It’s more about the journey than the destination, right? Tom’s layout exemplifies this.

The Bona Vista was a more direct inspiration for two reasons. First, Gerry’s layout space somewhat resembled my own (even though his layout was HO). Second, his track plan was delightful: clever and surprising. I like layouts that take a while to figure out what’s connected to what. The way that the Bona Vista curled around on itself and popped out and back in – a point to point without looking like it – was exactly the sort of effect I was looking for.

So I set about essentially adapting the Bona Vista to my space. It didn’t fit (it would have needed a space closer to 32x32), but I managed to come up with something that I think will work rather well. I adapted it by running one of the return loops through a wall into the next room to make it fit, but that’s okay. Right?

Here’s my high level track plan. Green shows the edge of the benchwork; blue is the backdrop.

It’s a point-to-point with a return loop at each end (not shown is a return loop underneath the large upper peninsula). At this point only the shape of the mainline is set. The four towns are less plans and more sketches of what’s possible in those spaces. I’ll build the mainline and then come back and cut in the siding and spur switches once I have a better feel for it in real life.

(Panorama stitching made my curves look terrible. They are smooth, I assure you.)

Construction has already begun; I’d estimate that I’ve got about 30% of the benchwork built, and maybe 25% of the track. Work practically ceased during the summer, but I’m starting to ramp back up on it now.

Perhaps you are wondering about the era, location, and theme. To be frank I don’t have much railroad knowledge to draw on here, so the best I’ve got is that it will be based on a fictional shortline in the southern Appalacian foothills. Probably transition era, as I’d like to run both steam and diesel.

There’s more I’d like to say – about trackwork, lighting plans and so forth – but in the interests of actually publishing a post (as I have intended to do for many months now), I’ll save those topics for future posts and end it here. Thanks for reading.

Progress Update 5

2013-09-08T15:48:00-04:00

I started cutting ditches and laying roadbed over the past couple weekends (I tweeted a photo). It’s gone fairly well but it’s tricky to get the center line of the track just right so that the roadbed matches up (the roadbed tears down the center and is applied to each side individually). I’m marking the center of the track on the foam base, which is error-prone because there’s this goofy center rail in the way.

While I’ve had a few trestle bridge bents built for, well, months now, I haven’t made much progress. There’s been a lot of strategizing, which is code for staring at it and wondering how on earth I’m going to do it. For a first trestle it’s pretty daunting, primarily because it’s curved, and also because there’s no symmetry to it. So I waffle back and forth on how to make the bents the correct height for the [in progress] terrain.

Searching for inspiration, I came across Lex Parker’s excellent Building a Wooden Trestle series. While much of it isn’t directly applicable to my situation (extruded foam construction vs Lex’s thin shell; Lex is laying his own ties and rail) I think it did send me in the right direction. Plus there’s tons of other great inspiration in the series, as well as in his other clinics. I wasn’t familiar with Lex’s work but that’s likely only due to my newness; you don’t have skills like his (and YouTube videos) without having some notoriety.

Lex’s videos made me start to ponder how I’ll handle my mountainsides and rock faces. He uses latex rock molds and plaster, Eric Siegel uses geodesic foam resin (see also: Bragdon Enterprises) reinforced with window screen, and Evert does great things with just extruded foam. In the short term I’ll stick with going the foam carving route. If I don’t get the results I want I can shift to rock molds later.

The Weird, Weird 3 Rail World of Clyde Coil

2013-08-01T18:32:00-04:00

This one’s for the heavy model train nerds, one of which I suppose I am slowly becoming. You have been warned.

There are a couple of short films up on YouTube featuring O scale figures on a three rail Lionel layout. The series is called “3 Rail World” and sadly there appear to be but two of them, both from 2006. My friend Joe sent me these without much comment. The first is Episode 1 - It’s A Fake: fairly rough but a decent introduction to the series, such as it is.

But while Episode 1 feels like an experiment in a new medium (which I suppose it likely is), Episode 2 - Details is something not unlike art. Its surrealism and use of the abstract, static figures as characters is really pretty special. Aside from the conductor in Episode 2, one of the most interesting characters is the priest, who regurgitates Lionel marketing bullets breathlessly (I’m not sure whether it’s actual Lionel marketing copy or something they made up, but the point is made).

I hesitate to say much more about what I found on the origin of these videos (such as who the voice of Clyde Coil is - you can find it fairly easily), as I didn’t know when I first saw them and I think it helps to evaluate them more objectively. This may be one of those entries where 9 out of 10 people reading it think I’m insane and move along, but hopefully you’re one of the 1 in 10!

Here’s to the weird, weird 3 Rail World of Clyde Coil.

Progress Update 4

2013-07-28T21:44:00-04:00

Progress has been a little slow over the past few weeks – hard to find time to get down to the layout, and some tricky problems to solve. One bit of very good news, though: the backordered track arrived, so the main line loop is finally complete!

Trestle Work

Most of the work has involved the trestle bridge. The bents have been easy to make, but figuring out how to line them up with the curve of the track has been challenging. The path I ended up taking was tracing the track on a piece of lauan and then cutting the stringers to match the curve (the stringers are the 1/4” strips of wood that the track will sit on top of, which then sits on top of the bents). Now that I’ve got these cut I need to get the profile of the gorge set so that I can cut the trestle bents to the appropriate height.

Switch Derailments

On the old layout I had a good bit of trouble with the pickup roller on my CSX SD80MAC getting hung up on the Atlas O switches, and those problems haven’t disappeared (the plastic insert pieces Atlas provides didn’t fix it, either). The problem is particularly bad on my newly-added O-72/O-54 curved switches.

On the old layout I tried creating inserts for the switches, but I spent some more time looking at the locomotive trucks and determined that at least a large part of the problem was due to a significant amount of lateral movement in the outer axles, which allows the pickup roller to shift and roll off the center rail in these switches. With the normal non-curved switches the locomotive would stop dead with the pickup roller wedged into the switch; with the curved switches the wheels climb right up out of the rails. Not so good.

Constructing custom inserts for the switches seems like it would be really time-consuming (there are 15 switches on the layout), so instead my thinking is that I’ll put spacers on the axles to reduce the amount of play. I’ve tested this with cut up cocktail straws; E-rings seem like the way to go long-term, though.

Excursions

Last weekend was a pretty great weekend for train nerds. The National Train Show was in Atlanta and it’s about four or five times the size of most train shows we see around here. I suppose we have the NMRA 2013 convention to thank for that. There were a lot of fantastic layouts at the show, though. HO and N scale were everywhere, with one or two O scale layouts and one G. A few Z’s.

Aside from the layouts, which were outstanding, my favorite part was getting to visit the booths of some of the companies that make products for model railroaders. A real highlight was the Scenic Express booth, where the photo above was taken. Their website has tons of cool little things and it was killer to see scenes like the one shown above. No doubt we are looking at hundreds of dollars of their products in these scenes, but holy crap. Unreal.

Another vendor that was fun to see was Iwata, who makes airbrushes. They had airbrush classes going on and I got to play with one of their airbrushes. I never thought I’d want an airbrush but it could be a good backup if this whole programming thing doesn’t pan out. The world needs more Panama City t-shirts and license plates.

I also got to head up to Woodstock to see Eric Siegel’s layout during his open house, which was very, very cool. I tweeted a photo. Eric does a lot of videos on YouTube and so I’ve seen almost all of his layout in one stage or another via YouTube, but it was a treat to see it in person and get a feel for the scope of everything.

Ditchin’

I bought Basic Model Railroad Benchwork a while back and have really found it useful (wish I’d bought it sooner). One of the techniques that’s covered in there is using extruded foam as the landscape surface and using a hot wire foam cutter to cut ditches alongside the roadbed. I finally tried this out with my Hot Wire Foam Factory kit (the one with the freehand router and ‘knife’). I plan to write more about this in a later entry, but in short it went well. I tweeted a photo here.

Calca

2013-07-28T20:07:00-04:00

A cool Mac/iOS app called Calca came out this week. The basic idea is that you can mix mathematical expressions with Markdown-like text. The Mac version was an instant-buy for me. I was buying some LEDs for the layout this week and the seller said that you could find the required resistance for compensating for LED voltage vs supply voltage. So I made a Calca document:

# Parameter units: volts, volts, milliamps
ohmsForSupplyAndLedVolts(supply v, led v, led ma) =
    (supply v - led v) / (led ma / 1000)

supply volts = 18

ohmsForSupplyAndLedVolts(supply volts, 1.8, 20) => 810

Calca fills in the result after whenever I enter =>, so to run a 1.8V LED on a 20V power supply I need at least an 810Ω resistor (probably 1KΩ). It was fun creating this document, but sites like ledcalc.com are probably a bit more useful (this one shows the resistor colors).

Another example, pretty trivial but handy none-the-less:

mm per inch = 25.4

scale ratio = 1/48 # O scale, 1:48

scale_mm_in_inches(mm) =
  (mm / scale ratio) / mm per inch
  
scale_mm_in_inches(2) => 3.7795

For this one I used a handy Calca feature where you type in a string, such as mm per inch, and append = ?. Calca will then ask Google for the result. So in this case I typed in:

mm per inch = ?

And Calca turns that into:

mm per inch = 24.5  # googled

A very handy app for your toolbox. It’s still a little rough around the edges but I imagine that will improve. Another handy app in this space is Soulver, which is nice but much more like a spreadsheet. To me Soulver feels like it has a bit of a learning curve, where Calca feels much more natural, like living math expressions written on a page.

Progress Update 3

2013-07-06T23:29:00-04:00

It’s been a busy week! In particular, a very productive Saturday. This week I got serious about the signal tower project, as you may have seen a couple posts back: painting the interior walls black, then giving them a coat of off-white. Interior trim in brown. Wiring it up with warm white LEDs. Filling in the mortar lines (more on that later).

Signal Tower Project

I’m learning a lot about painting models. Because the selection at Michaels was pretty sad, I started out with some tubes of acrylic paint, likely intended to be squirted onto a palette and painted on a canvas – it comes out like toothpaste. I used this stuff for blacking out the interior walls, which is fine because it doesn’t matter that much that the brush strokes show up in it. I might have been able to thin it out with water; I might try that next time.

Thinking that there had to be something better, I went to Legacy Station and picked up some Polly Scale and Model Master paint. Both are acrylics as well, and much more appropriate to the task at hand. While they’re significantly more expensive (particularly Polly Scale, likely because it is discontinued, I later found out), they are much thinner and go on much, much more evenly. It takes two to three coats with this paint. Same with the goopy acrylic though. The nice thing about these water-based acrylics is that true to the advertising they do clean up very easily. Accidents will happen.

One such accident involved trying to mask off part of the interior windows of the signal tower. The transparent window plastic is one continuous sheet for each set of windows, so it doesn’t look like individual windows from the inside, particularly with the shades. So I wanted to paint brown lines to suggest the trim between the windows. I used blue painters tape to mask them off and everything seemed to be going well until I pulled up the tape again – the paint had seeped under the tape in a number of places. This is where the easy cleanup with a damp paper towel is key. I suspect the paint is just too thin for the tape. Instead I’m going to try painting strips of card stock and glue them on instead.

I’m very pleased with how the lighting is looking. I’ve put two warm white LEDs in, one for each floor, and I think they look great. I need to find a little figure to trap in there. Earlier I tweeted a photo of the paint job on the levers. Lastly you’ll notice that the bricks now have mortar between them. I used some spackle paste that I had in the garage for this, along with some gray acrylic paint (next time I’ll use more/darker paint). Thanks to YouTube user MonsterRailroad for the video describing this technique. He makes me want an airbrush. Hmm.

Trestle/Gorge Project

I’ve also made some moderate progress on preparations for the trestle bridge. I hung a shelf of sorts that the bottom of the gorge will be built up from and cut away the joists and foam above it (tweeted photo). I also got serious about staining the wood for the trestle bents and glued up the first one; it’s drying now. I’m somewhat concerned about getting a solid joint between the cap and the pilings (the cap is the piece of wood that goes across the top, the pilings come up like fingers). I don’t have a good way to cut the exact angles so the dowels aren’t making good contact. The cross braces should be solid, however.

It’s cool to see the space for the gorge starting to take shape; makes the layout start to feel more like a real layout, even though I’m still waiting on track. That should arrive next week though – hooray!

@imtzorr

2013-07-06T16:03:00-04:00

I’ve been doing a lot of little things lately where I’m taking pictures of progress and instead of making a post for each of those, or saving them for a big recap article, I’ve created a Twitter account where I’ll post such things: @imtzorr. You can follow layout progress and other railroad-related bits there.

I’ve also added a widget to the sidebar on the right that shows the most recent tweets when you’re on the actual site. Thanks to Robert Cottrell’s post which made that last bit easy.

Paint It Black

2013-07-01T23:25:00-04:00

A few weeks ago my wife and I had started work on the Atlas O Signal Tower model, the first plastic model I’ve built in probably twenty years. I am trying to “do it right” this time and not take any shortcuts, so when I realized that the walls were going to be so thin that any interior lights would make the walls glow, construction stopped and I headed to the hobby store to buy some paint.

Now I’m finally getting around to doing that painting. I had to paint the lower level assembled, but the second story was unassembled so it was much easier to get some paint on – next time I’ll paint everything before starting.

The results are good; as you can see above Before there was quite a bit of light coming though, and now after about three uneven coats of flat black there’s very, very little. I intend to give the interior another coat of off-white to make it a bit more interesting inside, as well as possibly adding a dividing wall, furniture, etc. to provide a bit more interest.

The photo above is being lit by a single warm white LED which is pointing down. I’ll probably have a ceiling light in the lower level and try to do one or two lantern style lights in the upper floor, which will have a worker in it manning the switch levers. Not quite sure how I’ll turn a LED into a lantern yet.

There’s an exterior gooseneck lamp too, which I spent quite a bit of time researching sources for a few weeks ago. There are some cheap lamps from China that are similar on eBay, but the Cadillac seems to be the Gooseneck Light Kit from Ngineering. If they sold them assembled I’d have ordered a few immediately, but the construction process looks somewhat daunting to somebody who’s pretty new at modeling.

Backorder Blues

2013-07-01T00:12:00-04:00

Progress has been slow the past couple weeks. I was away from home for work, which didn’t help, but the bigger limiting factor right now is that I’m still waiting on the larger Atlas O curves I had ordered. The remaining switches arrived, which is good, but I have decided to make alternate arrangements for the curves. It’ll probably be another week before they get here. Even with my paper track stand-ins from the prior post, I’m reluctant to actually start doing much serious work beyond setting track on foam until the final pieces arrive.

I did spend some time tinkering with grade up two inches to the inner section of track. My Lionel CSX SD80MAC locomotive had some trouble getting up the grade on my prior layout, and with this new (much gentler!) grade I’ve been seeing the same thing. Except on this layout I can actually see what’s going wrong. Essentially the two outer inner axles on each of the trucks are the motorized wheels; the outer axles spin freely. When the grade increases too sharply, the locomotive gets stuck on those two outer sets of wheels. I’m also noticing that this locomotive’s pick-up roller, which has caused problems on the Atlas O switches in the past, is not negotiating the lovely O-72/O-54 switches very well. I think the best solution may be to look at limiting its downward travel. Tyler at Legacy Station told me some people use lash-ups to solve the problem (two or more locomotives working together) – the second locomotive pushes the first one over the trouble spot. An expensive fix to the problem, to be sure.

This weekend I began doing some preliminary work on the trestle bridge in the form of building the bent jig, shown at right. I’m pretty pleased with how it is turning out. Right now I’m using 3/8” dowels for the pilings, 3/8” square for the cap, and 1/4” square pieces for the sills and diagonal supports (not shown). The posts here are 16” long, which comes out to 64’ in O gauge, if my calculations are correct (16*48/12).

The next step is to do a stain test and if all goes well begin building some bents. I’ll also need to figure out how I’m going to build out the gorge that this trestle will cross. Building up (for mountains and so forth) is pretty easy; building down will be a bit different. I imagine I will end up building up from the floor. The L-girder benchwork is so easy that when I actually have to solve a benchwork problem, I’m not sure how to go about it. Access hatches will be another such problem to solve.

If you want to nerd out on trestle construction, there’s a pretty great post by Bob Hyman, Wooden Trestle Construction on the Rio Grande Southern Railroad.

Backorder Workaround

2013-06-16T14:30:00-04:00

The larger Atlas O curves in my layout (O-81, O-90 and O-108) are on backorder, so in order to put down what track I do have, I printed out actual size stand-ins for the missing track. Awkward, but it works.

Progress Update 2

2013-06-15T23:03:00-04:00

With my findings about operating noise from the foam, I knew I’d need a number of sheets of 1/4” plywood, as well as more foam (I want to build a mountain eventually, after all), so I got my friend Joe to help out with an acquisition trip with his trailer. We got the foam and plywood home and this weekend I’ve been working on finishing out most of the remaining joists as well as laying down the plywood and foam.

The layout really starts to feel like it’s taking shape now that I’ve got the foam cut to fit. I did a test fit with some of the track last weekend but several of the larger curves (O-81, O-90, O-108) and a couple switches are on backorder, so that’s going to make it tricky to get the track fully laid out to make sure it really fits.

One issue that I did notice was that my ideas about what I would be able to reach were quite optimistic, leading me to seriously rethink the need for access hatches. The rule of thumb seems to be that you should require no more than a 3 foot reach, but even that feels a bit long, and I’m pretty tall.

Last weekend my wife and I worked on putting together the Atlas O Signal Tower, probably the first model I have worked on in 20 years. Humbling in many ways but I’m trying to do it right this time. I’d like to paint the insides so that the walls don’t glow when it’s illuminated, as well as look into doing some very basic weathering (mortar for the bricks, mostly).

The model has a gooseneck lamp over one of the doors and that got me thinking that it would be great to have an actual light there, so I spent quite a while researching options for this. While there are quite a few cheap-looking lamps of this sort on eBay (they all ship from China), I did find a kit from Ngineering which looks very cool, although possibly at the very top of my skill level. If you know of a better source for these (preassembled, maybe?), I’d love to hear it.

Still on the thread of lighting, I thought it would be cool to have a lit lamp inside the signal tower on the operator’s desk or thereabouts, but I found it practically impossible to find any sort of kit for this. There are tons of vendors selling tiny LEDs, but lamps and lanterns are oddly hard to find. A vendor called Berkshire Valley makes little metal lanterns but I’m not certain how practical it would be to modify it. At this point my best idea is to try to create a lantern in modeling clay and then use Amazing Mold Putty to make the plastic version. I got this idea from a great little series of videos where Mark TrainMaster uses this product to duplicate dwarf signals (part 1, 2, 3). Perhaps this is an obvious task to someone with more modeling experience than I have.

I ordered a kit of hot wire foam cutting tools from Hot Wire Foam Factory: the Freehand Router and 4” Hot Knife. The plan is to use them to terraform this 2” foam. After a brief trial I think they are pretty good tools, but am concerned that my foam is quite a bit denser than the foam these tools are designed to deal with (styrofoam). In cutting a chunk out with the hot knife the wire kept bending back by 45 degrees, and the freehand router had similar issues. I did notice that the power cable leading to the tool gets pretty warm, which makes me think that I might get somewhat better (hotter) results by making my own cable out of higher gauge wire. Certainly, more practice is needed.

So with the plywood decking screwed down and the foam resting on top of it I think I’m ready to lay out what track I’ve got and start tracing it out, as well as figuring out a ditch-cutting hot wire rig.

Dealing With Track Noise

2013-06-10T23:02:00-04:00

As mentioned previously the landscape surface of my layout is going to be extruded foam, the pink stuff. In doing some tests I quickly found that there’s a significant amount of operating noise when putting the track (I’m using Atlas O) directly on the foam and rolling my heavyweight O gauge passenger cars on it. I ran a series of tests with the following materials, from top to bottom:

K-Line Heavyweight Passenger Car
Atlas O 40” Rigid Straight
Woodland Scenics Track-Bed
2” Owens Corning Pink extruded foam
1/4” Lauan plywood
L-girder benchwork topped with 1x4 joists

In short I found that by placing a sheet of 1/4” Lauan underneath the 2” extruded foam I was able to significantly reduce operating noise. Adding the Track-Bed improved upon this even further. Here’s what I found, in order of noisiest to quietest:

Track, 2” foam – unacceptably noisy
Track, Track-bed, 2” foam – unacceptably noisy - 1
Track, 2” foam, 1/4” Lauan – not bad
Track, Track-bed, 2” foam, 1/4” Lauan – very, very little added track noise

I don’t have the equipment to measure this scientifically, but my sense is that the foam amplifies whatever bass component there is to the train rolling on the track. Thankfully 1/4” of Lauan is enough to deaden that component back out.

In the interest of completeness, many people on the forums like to use Homasote boards as their sub-roadbed, but Homasote is pretty difficult to find in the southeast. If you’re thinking of doing a plain plywood sub-roadbed, Homasote seems to be worth looking into, but in my own small layout experience a plywood subroadbed was fine, even without the Track-Bed. Still though, I had cut the plywood to outline my track (like cookie-cutter style, but with the non-track areas removed, which was probably a mistake).

So I’ll be layering Lauan beneath my foam, which should give it a tiny bit of added stability too. Added expense and work, but worth it.

Lighting the Layout

2013-06-09T23:51:00-04:00

Overhead/room lighting for the layout is something that I want to take much more seriously with this time around. With the last one I was hoping that the room lighting would be enough (it wasn’t), but honestly I didn’t give it that much thought. With this layout, since I won’t be able to climb on it, I needed to come up with a lighting strategy before continuing much beyond basic benchwork construction or I wouldn’t be able to reach the ceiling very well.

I tried to do quite a bit of research on the internet but didn’t come up with much. Here’s what I did find:

YouTube user MonsterRailroad uses CFLs in bare fixtures. Note the cloth baffles, I believe to cut down on glare. (link)
Layout Lighting Consultant David Zelly does an informal interview at a noisy train show. I found the interview difficult to understand but I did come away with the wisdom that the lighting should be a few inches off the edge of the layout to avoid shadows close to the viewer. I also got the impression that Mr. Zelly could design a rather expensive (yet amazing, no doubt) lighting system for your layout. (link)
Ken Shores has an article that has a nice overview of the basics around lighting. (link)

My thoughts leading up to my decision were thus:

Though I usually love warm lighting, I came to the conclusion that daylight bulbs would be the way to go. I might mix in warmer bulbs here and there, too.
Incandescents suck energy and get very hot. No.
I’d love to use LED bulbs for their very low energy usage and low temperature, but the price for LED floods, plus concerns about their performance (flood light vs spot light) and color temperature, make them impossible at this point in time.
I loathe fluorescent tubes (my office at work is kept dark, thank you very much), but they seem like a great choice. Cheap and even light, and you can get a daylight (5100K) tube. Not dimmable. Fixtures are pretty crummy. Fluorescent tube fixtures for track lighting exist and look cool but are very expensive.
CFLs are inexpensive and available in daylight. Mercury content is a concern.
The flexibility in positioning allowed by track lighting seems ideal.

I decided to go with track lighting, with 23 Watt (100W equivalent) CFLs in the cans.

Upon buying everything and getting it home I realized I had a problem, however: I had bought normal CFL bulbs, not CFL floods, and the black interior of my track lighting cans ($9 each) was sucking up all of the light. I got a sinking feeling when I realized that all of my precious watts were going to waste. I could try to get CFL floods but they are fairly hard to come by, and much more expensive. I got to thinking that I could try to silver the interior of the cans and thus bounce a lot more light out, and that’s exactly what I did. I used Valspar Silver Spray Paint to coat the can interiors and immediately got significantly better results. My watts were now being much more fully utilized.

Our layout has two sides, so I setup two 12’ lengths of track on each side, each with 5 cans in it presently. We quickly realized that because of this the viewer can easily look directly into the incredibly bright lights shining from the opposite direction, thanks to that silver coating. We talked about putting up cloth baffles (thanks, MonsterRailroad) but I don’t think that will be necessary. Normal people will probably manage to avoid looking into the lights.

It’s a week later now that I’m writing this and while I don’t have any scenery up to speak of, I did set some cars on track in front of the lighting and I think it looks pretty good. There are still some shadows which I may try to fill in with a track of lights down the middle, but all in all I’m happy with the setup. There’s an eerie blue-white glow around the door, and I imagine the neighbors think we are growing, so there is that to consider.

Construction Begins

2013-06-08T14:56:00-04:00

This week I started construction on the new layout. This is my second real layout – we won’t count HO track-on-plywood pseudo-layouts I had as a kid. The first layout was built in November/December 2012: O gauge, L-shaped, 15 feet wide by 7 or 10 feet deep. Although it never got past track and a few structures directly on unpainted plywood sub-roadbed, it was a great learning experience. More about it in a later post.

The new layout is 17x14, also O gauge, and in another, larger room. I tore down the old layout and cleared the new room with almost unnerving efficiency.

Once the room was clear I set to reusing large chunks of the old layout’s benchwork. The first layout’s L-girder benchwork was a design interpreted from bits and pieces of what I’d been able to find online (not much). Model railroading is a strange hobby in that there’s not a lot of information online. There are forums, and some great material on YouTube, but the best information seems to be in books. (Most of my other hobbies aren’t old enough to have books.) One of the books I bought was Basic Model Railroad Benchwork. If you’re considering building a layout for the first time and you’re of the generation that expects to find everything for free (that’s me), I’d suggest that you buy the book. I should have bought it the first time along – it would have taken all of the guesswork out of my first layout’s benchwork.

One thing I learned from the book was that I really didn’t need quite so many legs. The old layout had 8 legs; the new one has 4. In part I’m able to get away with this because I don’t plan to climb on it. The 2x4 legs support the 16-foot L-girders, upon which the 10- and 12-foot joists rest.

For this layout the sub-roadbed will be 2” extruded foam. My local big box home improvement store carries the Owens Corning Pink 4x8 sheets. Why foam? Another bit I picked up from Basic Model Railroad Benchwork: Bill Darnaby’s method for using a hot wire foam cutter jig to cut ditches around the track. It seems like a brilliant way to add a lot of depth to the layout, and I think there will be lots of other opportunities to add depressions and so forth to the landscape. More on this as I experiment.

At this point I have the L-girders supported by the legs, and about 30% of the joists in place. Enough to experiment with the 2” foam and get a feel for the height of the layout.