A year ago I had a empty room. Recently there were a number of posts I made referring to the railroad I am working on. So I make some pictures of two. One half of the room here and the other half there. But first off...
The corner supports of the benchwork are cheap metal/hard plastic tables from walmart. I have watched them closely since last fall for signs of weakness or failure in integrity. The main part of the benchwork is 4 discarded doors that we no longer needed after replacing several doors many years ago. These doors were sitting in various aspects of storage for years both outside and inside in all seasons and did not display warps or any issues. So onto the tables they went.
After everything was somewhat level, level enough for a train to think that the track is level and the rolling stock to stay put after being switched.... nothing in Arkansas is level It's either crooked, bent or off by this much. Heck, the room the table is in is has a three dimensional twist and not so true on all the floor, walls and ceiling.
Makes for a interesting twist to layout building. Perhaps I needed a crooked house to make everything I do look good =)
Anyhoo. You come out of staging and into the branch. A few laps later arrive at the industry with a small train of 16 cars, give or take a few depending on the previous day's work. Mostly inbound loads, some empties to be loaded with the finished product.
After the road engines come off the train to be turned and set out of the way, the switchers come in and take the train apart and get into the switching. The switcher set is dedicated to industry but sometimes uses a caboose to take special loads to and from staging. The switcher also can get into places the big road engine cannot.
When everything is finished and the train reassembled, the road engines now take the train out the way it came. Depending on the power used, it might have to run in reverse, so my steam engines have to have a large light on the tender with a doghouse to make it work the desiels not so important.
The area represented by staging is in the other room. Someday that staging will become a town. The town sits in the various boxes under the layout built and ready to go with thier industries etc.
I have to think about the backdrop, scenery, roads to build, wiring to do, front panels to make and countless other things to deal with if I want to actually FINISH this part of the layout. But one year does make a different. working maybe a few hours each week at a time. Sometimes a whole day is spent throwing track as happened recently.
The buildings are not considered finished. They have to be decaled, lettered, weathered, problem areas fixed etc. Will they ever be finished? Who knows? Maybe one day. All that horrible raw signs of early work such as large areas of dried glue can be taken care of... in time. I already have weathering supplies on hand and started to experiment.
I can see that the trucks are not as high as the loading docks. That is because the roads will need building. Some of the track will not be Class one mainline for the sidings or dock they are next to. All of that will have to be dealt with by scenery.
Those very big rolls of wire disappear one by one as they are tested and certified for service. Eventually the space under the layout will become additional shelving, storage areas and more organized. Those large paint cans, tools, riff raff etc will all go away.
It aint perfect and it's good enough for right now. Who knows where we will be a year from now?
Here is the other half.
Bravo! I give you a digital hand clap... Something is always better than nothing, and a few hours here and there can make a big difference. You've got a great start on a great model railroad. Good job.
The Dixie D Short Line "Lux Lucet In Tenebris Nihil Igitur Mors Est Ad Nos 2001"
THIS is a digital hand clap...
Hey, not bad at all!
Hey, nice layout. Great progress. Those are beautiful buildings. Are they Walthers Modular? Also what color did you paint them?
tim
Thank you everyone for generous replies. It is much appreciated!
Yes Buildings are out of both the Sterling and Tannery Kits built to fit a purpose and space availible. It would take a few of these kits to make it happen over a long time.
Painting was problem. I left the plastic bare tan. However some patching needed doing and painted over gaps and such. Docks and foundations were painted Tamiya's Buff color and some were sprayed light sand as a subtle alternative depending on availible store stock. The roof, canopies and windows are medium green from testors.. #1913 to be specific. The black is flat from testors. The mcgraw tanks in the far corner were gunmetal from Tamiya spray. The fire tower in one of the buildings is oxide red with battleship grey bottom. The tall water tower is undecorated walthers already built.
The brown top is 1/4 inch birch in the best I could find locally counter sunk with about 450 number 8 screws tetonic plate style to ride with the seasons however the house is pretty constant. I didnt want to have to paint the awful doors.
I have started to experiement with Bradgon weathering on spare panels to choose which tints make the glue spots and off color paints blend in. Not there yet.
It was a rather expensive way to make a industry, however I think from the box of spare parts, alot of those buildings were built from leftovers.
Each building as a purpose in the over all plan. However it is not hard to convert the entire complex to do whatever it is you need doing. I kept to a two-three story maximum in height because they were high enough already with the switching to do.
Next up is electrical work and final track laying. Stay tuned.
Last, looks pretty good, my next layout will be done in the same fashion. Will you run the layout from the inside of the layout or the outside? Few more pictures would be nieces as well. Buildings look top notch.
I hate Rust
Good progress.
Sue
Anything is possible if you do not know what you are talking about.
It will be run both inside and out. There is a duck under.. ok.. tunnel on the west side. That is where kadee couplers and extremly strong magnetic uncouplers come in. The one end of the loop serves as the drill track during switching, that way I can get to either end of the cars and thence to any siding. The problem becomes interesting when all the different cars must be pulled and spotted.
I deliberately kept it simple because there will be enough going on without making a hash of stuff.
The buildings are not quite ready for closeups .. they are stacked at the bench undergoing work one by one. Keep in mind that eventually the loop will be unwrapped and the industry rebuilt in it's own area along one big wall of the addition.
Nice layout. I like your yard area, and I am planning to add a similar yard to my layout. How long is your yard area? Also, what # turnouts did you use? Lastly, it looks like you used sectional track - did you have to use any odd lengths/special cut track segments to build the yard ladder that you did? Thanks!
-wyo
Modeling the UP Sidney Sub in Nebraska & Wyoming in fall of 1999 in HO scale
It looks like a yard, but it is only a set of spurs off a short runaround.
The ladder was in need of several varying lengths to make it all work. The Ladder drove me crazy because it needed to work and behold ... it did.
The only track I cut was a short section of straight to remove the ballast to build a walthers conveyor grate kit to provide for a coal unloading pit. That was done in a mitre box with a saw. I will need a small bag of kato ballast mixed with woodland scenics stuff to blend it all in. Will have photo of it later when the chaos clear away.
Kato Unitrack all around. Number 4's I preferred number 6 but those were just simply humongous and not used here.
The short run around will hold 4 50 foot boxcars and there is room for two engines to get to any industry building with at least two to three cars anywhere in the complex.
The room is a little less than 12 feet by 8. Layout is 2 foot wide rectangle around a man opening in the center.
There were many different unitrack peices used in different ways to make it all fit. I just bought a small batch every few months and kept going until the layout plan fell into place. The last of the track is on order and I expect to drop them into place later this month.
The long runaround will hold at least 18 cars and two road engines. Unfortunately the curve radius inside the complex is low as 21 inches off the main and that is why the two switchers are there.
The switches were power selecting, so I had to insulate the frog rails and defeat it with feeders all around, since there is a large resistance on the Kato rail anyway, many feeders is good. Every track has at least one feeder.
Waiting on the PDB's to arrive so I can run bus and connect the track. Switches go with the DS64's tied to loconet to the Chief when the track is finished.
Kato is expensive. I could probably do better with flex on cork, thinking back on it Im happy that I went with Kato this time. The next layout can have the cork with better trackwork options such as single and double slip switches.
All kinds of track lengths were used. They never seems to workout exactly the way you think they will, it is a game of millimeters between joints and when you see the joints relax and all the rail is straight and not under tension or compression you know you got it right.
Eventually most of the kato spurs will be buried with rails sitting on scenery ground level. No need to have class one mainline next to a dock.
I expect the layout to survive the winter fairly well. Ive been carefully watching the benchwork for signs of temperature/humdity related problems between seasons for a year or more now. Some of the track has been in place more or less that long as well.
Ain't progress wonderful. I love the baseball cap shaped building. I assume it will be a sports bar.
I admire your tenacity. If it took me a year to do what you have done, I think I would give up. By that I mean I have a tendency to push and rush so that the layout is up and running. I wouldn't be able to temper my pace and end up with what is a clearly nice and polished layout that you are building. So, my admiration and compliments go out to you.
-Crandell
Great looking buildings.
Check out the Deming Sub by clicking on the pics:
Some more progress this weekend.
The wood sub surface is great, but some of the track is too high for the buildings with raildoors. I moved the team track over to another oppertunity spot that worked out really well. Also that introduces the need for the rule saying switch engine gets a cut of cars as a handle to get to these gondolas.
Anyhow I put down some foam with the intent of raising the buildings and succeeded. I ended up laying additional foam around the drill track (Actually 1/4 of one end of a loop...) to help define where the mainline's final position and to provide for a gradual grade crossing to get the trucks in and out of the team track area. Or they can drive through the building itself to get to it, but what is the fun in that.
Im not exactly happy with the way the foam around the rail doors turned out. I learned to sand some during the process and think in future I can bury those bad spots in scenery of some kind.
Without further ado...
Next up
Stamp house foundation and ladder area. This structure is supposed to recieve coil cars and unload them. The coils go up to second floor to be stamped out into parts and transferred to truck to go to assembly building later in the process. You can see the different foam experiments I have done with varying degrees of results. Nothing that scenery cannot fix.
The other elephant in the room is the material house. Way too low for the covered hoppers of material that gets unloaded here. So half inch foam in a single sheet cut around the one kato track inside fixed the problem one time. Learning process in action here. I think the remaining bare wood around the buildings in this corner is just going to be covered in trees, ground roads etc.
The lumber dock will go roughly into this area. I found a spot to park two lumber flat cars to unload and send to the assembly building for use in packing/shipping. I will have to lay more foam or do something with it to make it all fit the flat car deck, team deck and the truck dock... I think I can sleep on this and attack it sometime next week.
That is it for this weekend. The Power Distribution Boards are awaiting installation and electrical work will probably be priority before I get too far along in scenery. Hate to bury all the track and have to dig it all back up again to chase a short.
By the way, that camera im using is a cheap GE digital with 7 mp from wally world. It has a bad habit of picking up things that I need to do to correct to make buildings look better and other little issues easily missed by the eye. You should see the silos on the team track picture... gotta get them to stay put LOL.
Cheers.
A bit of progress along the electrical front today.
I divided the layout into 4 zones. One on each side of the rectangle. The track feeders were grouped so that all on one zone can reach the Power Distribution Board near the center under the layout. Care was taken to color code the feeder blue and white to match one rail being the north rail and one, the south rail.
Here is the initial shot of the PDB, one of 5 involved here.
The board had brown stand offs that go into the bottom because the bottom contains metal pins and large metal surfaces corresponding to the screw terminals above. It created a good amount of space between the birch mounting board I cut for it and the rest of the PDB.
I used number 6 screws that were just about an inch long, maybe a tad bit longer. Each of the screws went into the corners and all the way through the birch board behind it adequately. There were a little bit of sharp points sticking out behind the birch board a little bit.
I added a 1.5 inch wide 8 inch long peice to the top and to the bottom rear of the PDB and Board assembly. They were clamped with titebond glue and left to cure for at least 6 hours and to "Rest" for a day minimum before being mounted to underside of the layout with bigger number 8 wood screws. The Titebond was a water clean up after the clamping was done. care was taken never to wipe the pdb or it's board with any water or liquids.
There are going to be 5 of these boards. The first one will tie the Super Chief Command Station's Rail A and B outputs. That board will then ship power via 14 gauge Stranded Power Bus wires to each of the 4 remaining "Local zone" boards. Then the local boards will tie the feeders to the power. The feeder wires appear to be about 18-20 gauge, they will be kept as short as possible to increase safety in case of a dead short. I can always run bigger wire direct to the feeder track itself if there is a problem with heat during testing.
I went into one of the big box stores and fainted at the cost of a spool of wire. I think 500 feet of wire on a spool were roughly 60 dollars plus or minus 20 depending on gauge and even higher when one gets into serious home wires and shielding.
I had the worker bee spin out 60 foot each of blue and white 14 gauge wire at about 24 cents a foot. So far it ran me about 30 dollars for a total of 120 feet of wire. That would be enough to start construction. Keep in mind I may need more power bus wires to finish the job. I believe there will be ring terminals used to finish the connection to the red and black pdb inputs.
Each board probably will be protected by a local DCC circut breaker as well. I think I will have to look into that carefully as both the Command Station and the Digitrax 2012 power supply is quite capable of stopping a short very fast via a "Quarter test"
Finally but not last. The board is rated for 15 amps. The most it will ever see is 8 and not for very long. working load on the entire layout will not exceed 3 amps if that much most of the time. The Wire I purchased can withstand 15 amps each color for the size and strand I spec'ed.
Over engineered? Perhaps. I think far into the future there might be a path to O Scale trains and I believe those have much larger power requirements than HO or N.
The layout's power bus run from the command station will probably be a maximum of about 12 feet to the furthest PDB one way making for a total of 24 feet circut plus up to 3 feet to a rail feeder somewhere in that local zone. The engine should never think that it is more than 3 feet away from a feeder rail and the entire DCC system should not have to communicate to a train more than 14 feet one way distant to the loco.
If I wanted to add on to the layout in the future, I simply purchase more PDBs and run Bus wires off the command station's Board.
Wow, good job. I really like the big industries that you have. I wish that I had enough space for industries that size.
Hello again!
Thanks everyone for the kind replies. It is much appreciated.
The original industry complex did fit into a 2x12 foot section along one wall until I realized that due to a number of reasons too many to list I had to use the Loop construction to get it to all work. It basically bloated on me and still three more structures to build.
Anyhoo. Recently I started electrical work.
I installed the first board earlier today. I called it the A board for the A zone area under one side of the rectangle layout. What I did was install the board, standoffs to the birch, then I installed (Titebonded) the cross structure stripes on the back so to create a 1/2 inch of wood for the mounting screws to bite into in addition to the 1/4 door material above.
More titebond between the cross strips and the underside of the layout 4 number 8 screws driven in revealed this:
As you can see there are several feeders nearby marked for the tracks that they serve. From under the layout I can easily determine which wire goes where.
With the board comes a blue paper with a 12 line chart to be filled out corresponding to which wires you attach to which terminals. Eventually this A zone board will serve 7 seperate feeders.
I already emptied my little town's supply of machine screws, wood screws, titebond etc. Im about to go out tomorrow morning and empty the town's supply of cable ties and network clips that mount bus wires to the structure. Ive already counted what was left in my computer repair kit and came up short.
It aint the engines, the DCC or the track structures etc... watch out for all the little "Goodly bits" and tiny things that help finish the thing right or at least as best as I can think... uhh.. invent. Already a few store keepers are eyeballing me wondering which little tiny sale they will see when I come into thier store LOL.
The ring ternimals are a bit beefy I think they were for 12 gauge wires. A big set of pliers will make them fit onto the 14 gauge wires well enough. They will be marked + for some color and - for another color. I just need to flip a coin and decide.
Electrical testing will be with the "Pig" a analog engine and a tech 4 power pack. That way I can find problems, fry some track or start a fire without burning up the good stuff until I know all rails have power and gaps installed and working correctly.
Tools? Very simple. A set of Sears Craftman 19.5 volt battery operated drill, worklight, 5 something inch SAW... ( I fear this one, but the cuts are pretty durn decent) battery charger, hand sand paper with 150 coarse grain paper, a number of screw drivers and about 560 number 8 screws and counting. At last count I got about ... 32 to go. And a set of 4 foot long Irwin Clamps as well as a number of straight edges, measuring tape and a 90 or 45 degree square. Oh and a recip saber saw with a two inch deep cut ability.
If I thought the battery operated tools were not up to the job I would definately have discovered this by now. They recharge in about an hour and provide a adequate amount of work.
looks like real nice progress Last Chance!
LC told me about his thread while in my store today, don't know how I missedit earlier.
always gratifying to see customers making progress on a layout.