Time for the chainsaw

After a friend commented on my last post, and sent me a link to the MBTA station in Walpole, MA, I decided that it was time to start working on a new track plan. I am planning on modeling the CSX branch that operates between Milford,MA and Mansfield, MA. I can't wait to get started, I just need to get some work done around the house first.

Thanks Don!

Getting there is half the fun?

I have been thinking a lot lately about my current layout. And I have some doubts about some of the givens that I laid out early on.

• HO Scale
• 2 railroads on the layout
• Need to provide a sense of distance between towns, implies multiple towns
• Must have a yard
• Intermodal terminal
• Corn Syrup
• Car Cards and Waybills
• DCC
• Multiple trains per op session 
• Multi person crew

With the layout in a room that is 20x11 some of these 'requirements' just don't make sense

• HO Scale. It's what I have always modeled in. It's almost too small to see as it is.
• Does having 2 railroads really add much more operational interest? Does it even make sense if I will mostly be a lone operator?
• With crews being light on the regular weekly ops sessions I realize that getting there is only fun for me if there are a bunch of other guys out on the layout. If it's just me, it's not fun.
• Yard? Why? Sure it's fun on a big layout, but again for a one man show, do I really need it?
• I love intermodal trains. But does it make sense on a small HO layout? Sure I can run small intermodal trains, so what. And do they add much interest operationally?
• Corn Syrup. Stays
• Car Card and Waybills. Stay
• DCC. Stays
• One man, one train
• Multi person crew? Doesn't seem likely

While I struggle with these questions I am still working on the layout, but not as enthusiastically as I would like. I really don't want to be one of those people who never gets a layout operational, but I have some serious doubts with my current plan.

I am considering doing something like the Downtown Spur to either Worcester, MA or Washington Park.

I often wonder how people can actually get a layout complete enough to be up and running. Between all the different avenues of interest that are available to explore, and changes in perspective due to experience I don't know how I am every going to get to the point where I can run a train from one end of the layout to the other.

It's been a while

It's been a busy summer, lots of farm work to do, and not much time for working on the railroad. I did make some time to play around with backdrop photos and card stock buildings to use at the yard. I have been using textures from Clever Models, CG Textures and Model Builder to make some building flats.

Some of the buildings are just card stock, other are glued to foam core, but my favorite material is the matte board that is used in picture framing. I need more practice, but I am pretty happy with the result so far. I have had better luck using Modge Podge over spray adhesive to glue the card stock to the background material. With Modge Podge I can get better adhesion across the entire board, and it's easier to apply to multi-sided buildings. Now I just need to get better at making the boxes to glue the card stock to. After reading the article on using actual photos by Lance Mindheim in MRH I want to try that technique as well, and there are a couple industries in Worcester that look like they might be a good subject to model. I smell a rail fanning trip coming up.

I have also been cleaning up my track work in the yard. A bunch of turnouts needed debugging, proving that I can screw up pretty much anything, including turnouts made with Fast Tracks jigs. The good thing is that I have been able to fix all of them.

I even found the problem in this one,

now all I need to do is take it out and fix it!

To test the track in the yard I have been making up switch lists and having mini op sessions just in the yard. There 3 industries, and an interchange track with another railroad, so I find it pretty easy to spend over an hour just running trains in this section of the layout. Of course some of that time is spent trying to  understand why a certain car derails on one turnout, but not the others.

Winter/Spring 2013 Update

I haven't had nearly as much time for railroad projects as I would have liked. We did a lot of work in the barn this winter which took up most weekend days. I made some minor changes to the yard, and completely replaced 'Grafton', so there are more pictures of rail on homasote, but there was progress, trust me.

Original 'Grafton'

New 'Grafton' with Propane Transload

Another view of new 'Grafton'




I put a valance around this side of the layout. It cleans things up a little, and to give something a little less sharp to bang my head on when I'm working.






In the yard I took out 1 yard track, and added 2 sidings against the wall. My plan is to represent another siding in the space freed up from removing the yard track, but I haven't really made up my mind on that yet














I have been playing around with printing out building flats. I haven't decided if I like using photos, or building stuff from Clever Models I definitely want to  have layers of buildings to see if I can add a little depth. Maybe I'll print the ones in the back out a little smaller and see how that looks.







And finally I jumped on the TI Launchpad bandwagon.






 I want to see where I can go with these. I want to create a scale speedometer from this instead of the arduino. Someone already did that, so I can just use that. I also want to try and use strain gauges to see if I can build something for my friends car ferry to indicate that it is loaded incorrectly.

December 2012 Progress

December was a pretty productive month for my layout.

I finally got around to adding the rest of the lighting to the layout. I went with CF this time, now I need to add the valence. I like these better than the halogen puck lights I used on other sections of the layout. The lenses keep falling off the puck lights. I don't know how they work under kitchen cabinets.

Let there be light

I also decided to include the proposed I-90 Propane Trans load  facility in my version of Grafton. Unlike the RL people of Grafton, I have the full support of all my neighbors.

So I tore out the original and got ready to start over. My track work in this area was pretty bad, so I new it had to go, this just gave me the excuse. Once I removed the track I was able to get to the backdrop supports, and move the backdrop back 2 inches, which will give me a little more space for the new yard track,

Out with the old

I finished laying almost all the track in the yard, and dropped most of the feeders. I hit a snag when I realized that I didn't have the extra frog juicer that I thought I ordered, so I can't finish this section up util my wallet recovers from Christmas
I decided to go with N Scale switch throws. I plan on making some modifications to make them look like back saver switch stands, but still be functional. We'll see how that turns out







I printed out most of my car cards, so I starting building the boxes to keep them in.