It's Uno de Mayo and time to start ramping up those summer projects! Personally, this time of year makes me think about Christmas! And around MY house Christmas means train layouts and lots of em'!
So here we go!
You ready for round 3?
Are you ready to see what's new, exciting and in the works for my pocket Disneyland?
Well then...
Strike up the band!
Let's have a parade!!!!
Who's that cheeky fellow in the lead? It's James from the Isle of Sodor with Peter Pan and Wendy whipping up the crowd from his running boards!
Mickey and Minnie are on the first float in this small parade that salutes some of my favorite Disney characters, films and theme park attractions.
Including It's a Small World.
We also have Chip and Dale bearing down in a trolley on an unsuspecting Donald Duck as he tries to deliver mail to Daisy and Pluto. Cinderella shows off her carriage while sharing a float with Belle. Nemo races a seahorse around the coral reef that he calls home and Snow White and Aurora pick flowers near a fairytale carousel.
Now for the technical info.
James is a Tomy product as are the blue tracks he runs on. Mickey's "Big Drum" is from the Polly Pocket Disney castle playset which I modified to operate on Tomy rails. (It's also carrying quite a bit of ballast to keep from toppling on those tight curves!) The other 5 float vehicles are built on frames stolen from some cheap bullet train toys I had. (The car bodies crumbled like a bad Dorfan alloy! ) I added a strip of balsa to each "bogie" to create an elevated platform and then built the respective floats on corrugated cardboard clear of the wheels. Three of them have a shape that represents the subject of the float. Small World is the "happiest cruise that ever sailed" so that float is boat shaped. Similarly, Cinderella's float is an hourglass and Nemo's float is supposed to represent bubbles. The other two are just "anything but square".
The wheel base on these cars is approximately 2 1/2 inches so as you can probably imagine proper weight distribution was absolutely critical. But I'm not a trained engineer and the only mathematical equation I know is how to calculate the length of the angled side on a right triangle. (Thank you Mr. Pythagorus! ) So I wing it and add weights and shift things around until it stops falling over on the curve! Between the cars are very thin strips of flexible clear plastic cut from vacu-form packaging and they act as couplers for the floats. The heaviest cars are up front and even some of them required extra ballasting in the form of old sinkers glued to their undersides in order to pull the cars behind them. So that's how I decided on the order of appearance for the parade.
The Tomy track has a turn radius of approximately 16 inches so it makes it ideal for a layout with such limited space as Disneyland has. Originally I wanted to use N or HO for this project but in the end I decided simplicity was best on a layout with very limited accessibility. That meant derailments would be ridiculously hard to correct. So a train running in a "trough" beat out flanged wheels on rails. I started using Tomy wye tracks but their operation is unpredictable so I've gone back to a simple dogbone configuration. A side benefit of that is that I can run through a different area on the return trip. I'm hoping to further enhance the parade train's rerail ability by embedding the track in "streets" with flanged edges to help push stray vehicles back on the rails.
I have several boxes of these Tomy trains sitting in the basement and I figured it's time they started doing something around here! I chose James rather than Thomas because he runs on a C battery and Thomas only uses a AA. Several other Thomas series engines in my Tomy collection also use C cells, but James was faster than any of them. And for this job speed was equivalent to power, so James got the job. Besides, he's cute! Even if he isn't technically a Disney product per se!
So what's next? You'll find out shortly after I do! But I can tell you I plan to get that monorail finished come h......well, you know!
Becky
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
Love the animals on the small world float. You should do a close up shot of the rest.
This one is a perfect edxample of all 4 sources for character figures I used. Daisy in the foreground is from the Polly Pocket Disney Castle Playset of 1999(?) while Plute to her left and Goofy are figures from sets used with Disney's current Monorail playsets. Chip and Dale (You're seeing Dale here, Chip has a black nose like a chocolate chip in case you ever wondered how to tell them apart) is riding on a Jolly Trolley wind-up toy from Burger King. And Donald is from a series of capsule figures which approximate the Marx Disneykins line of the 1960's. "Capsule figures" or "Gashapon" are what you see in vending machines these days in place of gumballs. They cost a couple of bucks each on Ebay.
Mickey, Minnie, Daisy, Peter Pan, Wendy, Belle, Cinderella and Tinkerbelle (on top of James' boiler) are Polly Pocket. Goofy and Pluto are monorail figures and Donald, Aurora and Snow White are Gashapon.
Becky,
Another great post!
Regards, Roy
It's not ALL castles and mountains!
wrmcclellan Becky, Another great post!
DITTO!!!
Celebrating 18 years on the CTT Forum.
Buckeye Riveter......... OTTS Charter Member, a Roseyville Raider and a member of the CTT Forum since 2004..
Jelloway Creek, OH - ELV 1,100 - Home of the Baltimore, Ohio & Wabash RR
TCA 09-64284
So cool
Life's hard, even harder if your stupid John Wayne
http://rtssite.shutterfly.com/
What's old is new again. The coolest mountain in the Disney range gets rebuilt.
Here's old Space Mountain. As you can see, it got a bit squished!
The train had also been whacking into it a bit. So, it was time to build a new one. Which is one of the things that I love about paper modeling: when the old one's done, recycle it!
So here's the new, stronger (and straighter) Space Mountain:
Under the dome I've increased it's crush resistance by adding a central support structure and additional parts I didn't have on the original (2006). The original kit (free for download at www.disneyexperience.com) has the dome segments attached directly to the angled ring near the top. On my original build, I followed the instructions but was unable to make the dome fit as designed with 110lb cardstock. Consequently, not that anybody could tell at first sight, my dome was one segment short and had a slightly higher pitch than designed. It wasn't a big problem, except for when I added the base with the "veins" which attach at every other rib. On a 36 segment dome it works great. But on a 35 seg. dome I had one section on the back that looked goofy. So this time I separated the top from the dome with a disc of foamcore cut to fit the dome, not the top ring. This also gave me a solid surface to push up against from below and made the dome A LOT straighter.
Next step: lighting and landscaping. Something else that was missing from my old model.
Blown away again! Can't wait to see space mountain all lit up. I think once I get further along on my layout you need to come visit and spend .... oh .... about a month here helping me construct a few of these master pieces.
This one I've been trying to figure out for years. Well, I finally came up with a reasonable way to make it work. Tomorrowland is a bit dark in my little Magic Kingdom. At WDW, there are these "killowatt palms" acting as street lights that I've always thought were pretty neat. But how to make them as 4 inch models? I've tried several times before but all the prototypes ended up in the trashcan, wether paper, plastic, metal or otherwise. What made it work this time, is that I finally have my favorite program up in a workable format on an old PC and was able to draw the way I like to. Those paper fronds along with some styrene tubing, plastic beads and 6v brass N scale streetlights did the trick.
That one little photo in the book "Since the World Began" is all I had to work from and I had to modify a bit, but overall I think they give the same effect. I'll be making round bases for them with a built-in full circle bench and flowers at the base of the "trees".
Tomorrow I hope to do some shopping and #1 on my list right now is finding blue lighting for Space Mountain.
Becky, check out the Bethlehem Lights section on QVC. They offer strands of LED lights in various colors. I plan on using a set on my power plant smoke stack.
Completed palms
Space Mountain light tower
(I had to do a bit of photo manipulation to get it to show up as blue.)
Becky, love the new Space Mountain!!
Joined 1-21-2011 TCA 13-68614
Kev, From The North Bluff Above Marseilles IL.
This should lighten up Tomorrowland a bit. I found the planets at K Mart a couple of years ago. The dome base is a disfunctional tap light. The lighting is being provided by a string of 110v gow bulbs. The sign is a replica of the real thing even though the tower it's attached to isn't. Under "Tomorrowland" it says "The future that never was is finally here."
I spent yesterday and today polishing steel rails and pins. I also did some painting on that train I've been working on for some time. Since I started that piece of the project, 2 of the biggest issues have always been #1 track and #2 which version of the 7 possibles should I do. Stylistically it's closest to a Mark IV, at least as far as the "nose" is concerned. But as far as decoration goes (due in no small part to the shape of the windows on the Marx M10000 cars I used) I decided to do a Mark 1 paint job. So, it will be Red and silver with white running boards and black windows.
The track was always problem #1 once I decided on using Marx cars and a Lionel (modern) motor. There was just no way to get a motor that big (and reliable) into car bodies that small and have it end up looking like a true monorail. So the solution I chose was to mix designs a bit and cross monorail track with peoplemover track. In the end, the rails will be mounted without ties directly to sections of 1/4" luan plywood. A secondary smaller circle of plywood will be mounted to the bottom of the deck to give it both more girth and a bit of detail. The rail sides will be painted to match the shade of the track system which should help hide the fact that it's a 3 rail system. But if you want to get technical, so is the real thing! It has wheels that ride top, right and center on the beam plus 2 slteel power rails. So the Alweg "Monorail" actually has 5 rail connecting points making the system work!
This may splain things better:
Anybody for tea?
The things you come up with just floors me! How in the world did you figure out a half of a ping pong ball for a cup??!! I have trouble figuring out stuff that is made to go together.
Just amazing
Well, I'll tell ya.
Initially I searched for child size and doll sized tea cups but they were either way too big or way too small. I also discovered a plastic mold for a teacup along the way and considered making them from plaster or Sculpey. Or, I could have cut out and used the molds themselves. But that didn't pan out either. I was resigned to the fact that I'd have to make them myself as either cardstock models or something else. But what to use?
It was just a couple of weeks ago that inspiration finally hit me while I was playing with a fishing bobber. I had bought several of them in various sizes to experiment with making a dome for the monorail. I had cut one of the larger ones in half and sitting there looking at it it was just about the right size and shape. It would work. But the downside was bobbers were both hard to cut in half and a bit pricey considering all I wanted to do was destroy them.
So, the search continued until Monday of this week when I stopped in at a Dollar Tree to see what was new. I love those kind of stores because I almost always find useful things. First I looked at the toy section, no help there. Then the party goods where I found some clear plastic cups about the size of shot glasses. They were OK, but not really the right shape. I was taking one last trip around the store resigned that it would be those shot glasses or nothing when I saw the package of ping-pong balls and knew they were the better choice. Monday night I cut one with an X-acto knife and built the prototype. In reality the saucer was harder to come up with than the cup. My unfortunate familiarity with medicine bottles is what led me to thinking about using a cap as a saucer.
Here's the real trick. When I go shopping for supplies, I only see shapes. I don't care what something was designed to do, only what it can do. Circles, squares, cones, balls, rectangles. They're everywhere in items I may be able to use for my own purposes. So on Monday I was looking for something teacup shaped. A ping-pong ball was 2 teacups stuck together at the rim. All I had to do was figure out the rest.
Very nice work.
Me and the family spent many a day at Disney world when we lived in Fla. and the boys were younger.
Space Mountain finally has it's lighted base:
And in Fantasyland:
Dumbo has recieved some enghancements. There will be another turnaround like this one in Frontierland to house the Golden Horshoe.
All looking great as we have come use to from you but it still amazes us at easy you make it look and we would be having fits trying to do it.
Just like the real Disneyland, available space is becoming harder to find. The list on the left of the map is structures I plan to build this year.
Wanted to say thanks for all your postings. It gave me inspiration to figure out my bridge I needed. I shopped around but ether didn't like them or the price was just to high. I will post up pics when I get them finished. I'm currently looking for more parts to finish them. I'll test ya to see if you can figure out what I used.
R.j.
Becky here are the bridges I made for my layout. One is made from bed rails the other is from garage door opener rail.
Here is another shot that didn't show in last posting for some reason. I plan to paint the rail road name on the outside bridge. Might try to build a walkway on the other.
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