I sent the jeweller some pictures of track spikes as well as a schematic showing the dimensions of the real thing. He has already produced the blank wax casting using 3D printing and he will cast the spike in silver, and then plate it with gold. He is using silver as a base so we can stay within my budget. I should have it by Saturday.
In the mean time, I have forbidden anyone from running the whole mainline route all at once until we have the Golden Spike Ceremony. We will test the track in sections, but anybody who defies my instructions by doing a complete loop will be forced to pay for all of the coffees and donuts when we visit Tim Horton's after our next meeting! Our chief track layer, Brian, threatened to come in at midnight just so he can run the first whole lap by himself!
Cheers!!
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
Mmmmm Timmy's. Hmm, how much coffee and donuts can one model railroad club consume? <grabs throttle>
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
rrinkerHmm, how much coffee and donuts can one model railroad club consume?
Be careful what you sign up for. Taking the oversized aisles in Dave's plan as an indicator, I'd assume that club could put away a whole lotta donuts.
I have the right to remain silent. By posting here I have given up that right and accept that anything I say can and will be used as evidence to critique me.
carl425Taking the oversized aisles in Dave's plan as an indicator, I'd assume that club could put away a whole lotta donuts.
I rarely eat donuts, but I'm still one of the guys who needs the wider aisles! We go for coffee and donuts every Tuesday after the weekly meeting but I just stick to the coffee.
Actually, the aisles have worked out quite well. We can move around the layout easily. There is only one 'squeeze' point that is 36" wide so it is still quite manageable. At our old club house all the aisles were less than 30". You got to know the other guy quite well when you were passing by each other!
Something else to keep in mind - you might want to make the "golden spike" ceremony more public - invite some local officials, etc. for goodwill and free publicity. Not necessarily open to the general public, but bring in people like the landlord, other historical groups. Newspaper, maybe a local TV station.
rrinker Floors are often not level, espcially in a basement where they may slope down to a floor drain
Why is it that when water actually spills on the flor it is almost always found that the floor slopes away from the drain or sump pump pit?
maxman rrinker Floors are often not level, espcially in a basement where they may slope down to a floor drain Why is it that when water actually spills on the flor it is almost always found that the floor slopes away from the drain or sump pump pit?
rrinkerSomething else to keep in mind - you might want to make the "golden spike" ceremony more public - invite some local officials, etc. for goodwill and free publicity. Not necessarily open to the general public, but bring in people like the landlord, other historical groups. Newspaper, maybe a local TV station.
Hi Randy:
That's a good idea! I was thinking of the ceremony as being oriented towards the club members only, but why waste an opportunity to promote the club?
Thanks,
OK everybody, here it is:
I think it looks pretty accurate. It is so small it is difficult to pick up off of a smooth surface. I hope nobody drops it!
The ceremony is yet to be scheduled, but it will happen within the next 2 - 3 weeks.
I showed the golden spike to everyone who was at the club tonight and it was quite well received.
I pointed out that it wasn't exactly HO scale. It is actually about twice the size that it should be, but if it was to scale nobody would be able to see it!
We still have to set a date for the ceremony.
As far as the layout goes, most of the mainline feeders are hooked up. We had to replace about five feet of the mainline bus because the person who was trying to connect the feeders to it butchered the job pretty badly. He was cutting through about 1/3rd of the bus wire strands at each joint. I had to ask him to stop.
The main yard is 3/4 installed. It looks impressive. We want to be able to power off each track separately so we will need a bus run for each of the tracks with a switch to interupt the power. The tracks are too long to supply with just one set of feeders.
Next week we will mark out the smaller yard track centers. I have revised the plan a couple of times to try to get longer yard tracks, but the turnouts off of the mainline have already been installed so there may be some re-working required. Probably the easiest solution at this point would be to just wing the track positions without bothering to try to stick to the detailed track plan.
One of our members brought in his seven year old son to see the layout for the first time. We had a bit of a language barrier because the family is from Quebec, but his dad translated our greetings. We put him to work drilling out the holes for the track nails in the flex track, and he did a great job! We even had him tapping some of the nails into place. He did well with that task too. No bashed rails or bent ties.
More later,
I have to pay closer attention to what people are doing when they are working on the layout!
Our feeder installation crew forgot that the reverse loop bus and feeders were supposed to be red and green as opposed to the mainline bus which is black and white. They spent quite some time soldering black and white feeders to the reverse loop rails and then to the main bus. This despite my having mentioned several times that the reverse loop bus and feeders were to be different colours.
What was that someone said about herding cats?
"One difference between pessimists and optimists is that while pessimists are more often right, optimists have far more fun."
"For a good job, do it once. For a really good job, do it twice!! "– the Bear.
We had an Executive Committee meeting tonight to try to figure out how to avoid having to do things twice. In the past two weeks we have identified a bunch of major problems with the layout construction, so we were asking ourselves what we as the leaders in the construction process were doing wrong?
Well, we concluded that we need to increase our level of control quite significantly. What does that mean? It means that I as the construction foreman and Henk as the President have to be a lot more assertive in managing the people who are working on the layout. I'm not talking about screaming at people when they goof up, but we need to constantly monitor what people are doing and if they are doing it right. Personally, I have made the mistake more than once of assuming that a particular construction crew had finally been trained to do the job correctly, only to discover that they had gone off track (pardon the pun). For example, we had two guys installing the mainline bus and feeders. Their first attempts at forming and soldering the feeders were 'clumsey' but after two or three additional coaching sessions we had them doing a decent job. The problem is that they forgot to stop where they should have, i.e. when they got to the reverse loop. The mainline bus used black and white wires. The reverse loop was intended to have red and green wires. This was explained to them more than once. Never the less, when they got to the reverse loop track they merrily carried on installing black and white feeders and then proceeded to solder the feeders to the mainline bus. That is my fault! I should have been paying closer attention! If we had asked them to report back to us on a more frequent basis we could have prevented them from wasting an hour or so installing useless feeders.
This is where things get complex for those of us who are trying to run the show. It took some time to get them doing a proper job of attaching the feeders to the mainline track. In fact, they were starting to resent the constant corrections to their methods. Once they were doing things right, any reasonable person would decide to back off and let them do their thing, right? Not quite. I had instructed them to not install feeders on the reverse loop because the red/green bus hadn't been installed yet. Being human beings, and being proud of the fact that they had finally mastered the art of installing feeders, they totally forgot about the different colours for the reverse loop and procceded to install black and white feeders until they ran out of track.
What do I say to them?!? "Great soldering guys!!,....but...."? How do you tell them that they screwed up when they thought they were doing a great job?
We identified two other situations tonight where things went a little astray but fortunately they will be easily corrected.
Our conclusion was that we will have to be much more restrictive when it comes to turning people loose on the layout. Instead of saying "carry on" we will have to say "OK, do that to this point and then come and get us so we can see what you have done", or "Do this once and let us check your work please". Then say "OK, do a couple more and then let us check again".
Connecting the Tortoises will be really entertaining!
One thing we have to remember is that nobody is deliberately screwing up.
Cheers gang!!
Sorry to say that you are part of the problem in not being able to overcome simple mistakes, that is your job as leader. The wrong color feeders if installed correctly could have been recolored with tape or paint. I am sure alot of the other problems could have been fixed easily (yes some you have told us about could not).
rrebellSorry to say that you are part of the problem in not being able to overcome simple mistakes, that is your job as leader.
EDITED:
Why do you say that we are not able to overcome simple mistakes? We have already fixed most of the mistakes and the remaining issues will be solved easily. My whole point was that we need to do a better job of avoiding mistakes. That is my job as a leader.
hon30critter rrebell Sorry to say that you are part of the problem in not being able to overcome simple mistakes, that is your job as leader. You are absolutely correct! I have apologised to the members for not doing my job as well as I should have. I will try to do a better job. That's all I can offer. Dave
rrebell Sorry to say that you are part of the problem in not being able to overcome simple mistakes, that is your job as leader.
You are absolutely correct! I have apologised to the members for not doing my job as well as I should have. I will try to do a better job. That's all I can offer.
rrebellGuess I came down a little hard on you, sorry but the solution stands.
Yes, you did come down a little hard. I edited my response to reflect that. We are doing our best to try to figure out how to get high quality work out of a bunch of guys, many of whom are not experienced model railroaders. Bad on me for not getting things absolutely perfect the first time.
Dave Warnica
Not bad on you neccisarily, just you expect to much from people who are proubly not in the trades, I mean it can be amazing to me sometimes how things that seem so obvious are not even thought of. Example I have a good freind and I got my hobby room vaccum from him as he thought it was broken (he had never replaced the bag or cleaned the filters). Did you know it used to be possible to put a dewalt battery into a cordless drill backwords, talk about a proublem, luckily I was there as we only got to the smoke stage and this was an employee working on a job at big box HD.
I'm looking at my 2 different DeWalt drills trying to figure out how I could possibly attach the battery backeards. The old 18V NiCad one, the shape prevents it from going in backwards. It would appear to take some doing on the newer 20V li-ion one to get the battery to slide on backwards far enough to make contact.
But you know what they say, make something foolproof and the world invents a bigger fool.
Since I work in a high tech business, I tend to think if I explain to people what needs to happen and no one questions it or says they need some additional clarification, they can run with it without constant handholding. Usually that works out, but sometimes it can come back to bite me because people are too timid or don;t want to appear 'dumb' by asking questions. Pretty sure I could never be a manager, because I HAVE had cases where I've laid out exactly what sould be done, only for the person doing the work to do something completely different and yes, it drives me insane. Especially when I have to then make the best of it because there isn;t sufficient time available in the project to redo all the other person's work. At least this is a hobby and hey, if we have to waste a week and redo something, well, so be it. No one says we're limited to X hours, or it has to be done by a certain date.
The old Dewalts had a raised plastic ridge on the battery and the case had a grove if I remember right, but the case was flexable enough that you could do it.
We had a good meeting tonight about how to avoid future mistakes.
The cork problem in the curved section of the main yard turned out to not be a problem. Our chief track layer who installed the individual cork strips in the curved part of the yard politely explained to us that what he had done was quite prototypical. Brian knows a whole bunch more about rail yards than anyone else in the club because he has spent many years of his career working in them as a CN employee. He told us that there would normally be drainage ditches between curved tracks in a yard because there wasn't much foot traffic there. Switching was rarely done on a curve because things couldn't be seen properly. He suggested that the ditches which look huge right now without ballast could be partially filled with ballast to make them look less extreme. Problem solved.
The next problem was that Brian's assistant (who is also named Brian) had misinterpreted some instructions so he cut off some of the yard tracks where they shouldn't have been cut. Unless we had been staring over Brian #2's shoulder at the very time he clipped the rails the problem could not have been prevented. Brian #1 had given instructions. Brian #2 thought he was following the instructions. It was absolutely not a big deal. We removed the cut off sections of track and replaced them with full lengths of flex track. Problem solved.
The third problem involved the installation of the wrong colour feeders on one of the reverse loops, and then having those feeders attached to the wrong bus wires because of their colour. This is where managing people got really challenging. Two of us tried to explain the errors to the two guys who made them but we just couldn't get them to understand. It was like talking to a pair of brick walls! I won't go into the details of the discussion. Finally, I just told them that somebody else must have made the mistakes and let it go, but I was able to convince them to check with me frequently in the future.
Overall, the evening was quite productive. Most of those in attendance were working on one thing or another. We also ran a DC locomotive all the way around the mainline several times without any hiccups. That despite the fact that about 1/3rd of the feeders were not yet hooked up. Note that we did not permit the locomotive to make a full lap. We deliberately blocked the track so that it couldn't. The first full loop will happen during the Golden Spike ceremony which will take place within the next two or three weeks.
We made another decision about the Golden Spike ceremony. We decided to only invite a few fellow model railroaders from outside the club instead of bringing in the press and the public. Our reasoning was that non model railroaders wouldn't likely grasp the amount of work that has been done to date. All they would see is a bunch of framework and some bare track. They wouldn't be seeing a 'real' model railroad. We will hold a public ceremony when the layout looks like a layout. That may be a ways into the future.
WOW!!!
As of right now this thread has 500 posts and more than 35000 views!!! (Of course, most of those posts are probably mine)
Who would have imagined that there would be that much interest? Thank you everyone for your contributions and for taking the time to follow the thread!!
Thank you Dave for keeping us all posted!
Mike
Hopefully you (or someone) is taking plenty of photos to document the progress. So that in the future you cna print some of those out and have them there for visitors to see: once it looked like this (empty room). Then like this (benchwork). Then we laid a lot of track (pics of bare track). Today, it looks like this (maybe one teaser photo of what they are about to see when they step inside)
Much better job of managing. I see you employed the saving face ploy on those two with errant feeder wires, your tongue must hurt from bitting it when tou did that LOL.
hon30critter We had a good meeting tonight about how to avoid future mistakes.
I'm probably misquoting cuyama here, but his advice is along the lines of make only new mistakes.
Robert
LINK to SNSR Blog
rrinkerHopefully you (or someone) is taking plenty of photos to document the progress. So that in the future you cna print some of those out and have them there for visitors to see: once it looked like this (empty room). Then like this (benchwork). Then we laid a lot of track (pics of bare track). Today, it looks like this (maybe one teaser photo of what they are about to see when they step inside) --Randy
We have a designated club photographer. I haven't looked at the website recently to see what he has posted but he has been documenting each stage.
ROBERT PETRICKI'm probably misquoting cuyama here, but his advice is along the lines of make only new mistakes. Robert
Good advice!
Seems that quote is generally attributed to the brilliant Esther Dyson.
Whoever said it first, it's great advice for sure.
rrebellMuch better job of managing.
Thanks, I guess. Actually, I feel that your comments are rather condescending. You make it sound like you think I am a rank amateur at leading people. I am not. Pardon me for sharing the fact that I wasn't on the top of my game the whole time.
Enough said,