Tuesday, April 30, 2013

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.