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 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.

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.

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!

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.