I did some of the same things when I had the kit. I was able to use the bogie wheels on mine and all was well but I did not have the parts on hand to switch out the moter as I decided to go with an old club turntable moter I had but I was missing some of the couplings needed so was looking for them when I scored the Walthers 90' RTR and dropped the other project.
Thanks Dave!
Mike.
My You Tube
mbinsewiNot get too far , I have to dig back and find your build on that 90'er, I just picked one up.
Here is the condensed version of the turntable modification thread:
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/t/261225.aspx
Here is the longer version if you want to wade through it:
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/t/258912.aspx
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
Big Turntable,
I scratch built my first one on my Central Midland layout.
Roundtable Zone I’ve always favored steam engines for their intricate nature and great variety of forms. So naturally there is a steam engine turntable and repair facility. And why not put this right up front where one’s collection of steam engines can be on display. This steam display replaces the diesel facility of the original Atlas plan. It features:
a) A fully operating turntable capable of handling a BigBoy or Allegheny. b) A roundhouse, and several different repair shops c) Outdoor track stowage (nice display of steam roaster) d) A water tower and diesel fuel tank e) A twin track coaling tower f) A twin track bridge crossing to this steam facility from the freight yard.
Trackplan modifications, turntable area I was just reviewing some older CD disc I had, and ran across these modification dwgs I had made. The addition of a turntable/roundhouse,...and the dbl tracks leading into it from the freight yard,... .....and the loop of track under the turntable scene, .....and the single track going out to the gravel pit .....and the double crossover in the dual mainlines just outside the yard's throat
I was just reviewing some older CD disc I had, and ran across these modification dwgs I had made.
The addition of a turntable/roundhouse,...and the dbl tracks leading into it from the freight yard,... .....and the loop of track under the turntable scene, .....and the single track going out to the gravel pit .....and the double crossover in the dual mainlines just outside the yard's throat
As my space was limited, I could not provide for a roundhouse track long enough for the Big Boy, so it just had to reside outdoors, and in a straight shot thru the turntable.
At first I was just going to provide a manual cable and wheel to operate the table, but then I got the idea that it would be a challenge to make it motorized. I used a big 'gearhead' reduction motor I got from a surplus electronics supply (All-Electronics I think it was called). I hooked that to an extra transformer I had, and had a rubber wheel spring loaded to ride against the edge of an old stereo turntable, all located below the pit area.
The bridge itself was fashioned from upside down Atlas deck girder bridges with upper walkway portions fashioned from bottoms of the Atlas curved chord bridges. The turntable tower was a metal casting piece that could be purchased from .......Diamond ScaleFinding and stabalizing the EXACT center for the pivot pin was a challenge.Even while operating it sloowly I found it somewhat difficult to lineup with tracks, particularly when they were off center to my viewing angle (and I had real good eyesight at that time). there was also some 'delay hicups' when backing up from a missed alignment.
Personally if the turntable is within reasonable arms reach, I would just go manual cable drive, and adjust my preferred speed ratio with gearing.
Brian
My Layout Plan
Interesting new Plan Consideration
hon30critter rrebell No, I am talking the good ones, not the kits, I checked eBay and there were 11 newer Walthers 130' turntables. They were all priced in the $350.00 Cdn price range. For now we will live with the 90' turntable. Since I'm willing to give it to the club the price is right, and, as I have said, it operates quite well given the modifications I have made. No indexing, just an old model train power pack. Dave
rrebell No, I am talking the good ones, not the kits,
I checked eBay and there were 11 newer Walthers 130' turntables. They were all priced in the $350.00 Cdn price range.
For now we will live with the 90' turntable. Since I'm willing to give it to the club the price is right, and, as I have said, it operates quite well given the modifications I have made. No indexing, just an old model train power pack.
hon30critterNot so! If the track coming into the turntable is directly opposite a long enough stall in the roundhouse then any locomotive can simply run straight through the turntable to get into the stall.
Great idea! And as far as the 90' TT, I run modern stuff, and even my longest 6 axle loco easily fits on a 90'er.
Not get too far , I have to dig back and find your build on that 90'er, I just picked one up.
richhotrainalthough the larger locomotives cannot make their way into the roundhouse for storage, repair, and maintenance.
Not so! If the track coming into the turntable is directly opposite a long enough stall in the roundhouse then any locomotive can simply run straight through the turntable to get into the stall. The challenge will be to modify the roundhouse so that the stall opposite the turntable feed track is long enough to accommodate said locomotive. That will require some roundhouse kit bashing but hey, that's half the fun!
hon30critter the track plan allows for any locomotive to be turned simply by going around the loop that goes around the outside of the service area.
Rich
Alton Junction
richhotrainBut if this were my club, I would push for the Walthers 130' turntable.
Hi Rich!
Believe me we have discussed the merits of spending the big bucks on a 130' turntable, several times in fact.
Here are the conclusions that we came to:
- First, only one current member of the club has anything that would require a 130' turntable to turn it around.
- Second, the track plan allows for any locomotive to be turned simply by going around the loop that goes around the outside of the service area.
- Third, if we have a sudden influx of members with long equipment who demand to be able to use the turntable, then we can replace the 90' turntable with a larger version. The benchwork framing has been designed to accommodate the larger turntables if we choose to install one.
We are in a win-win situation here. For now we get a free turntable and roundhouse (six or nine stalls to be decided). If we later choose to increase the size of the turntable and the length of the roundhouse stalls then it will be easy to do. In the interim, we are ahead by $500.00.
Thanks for sharing your ideas Rich,
Cheers!!
hon30critter I checked eBay and there were 11 newer Walthers 130' turntables. They were all priced in the $350.00 Cdn price range.
Why? Because I have steamers that won't fit on the 90' turntable.
I have a Walthers 90' turntable and a Walthers 130' turntable. The 90' is manual and the 130' is the non-DCC model. On the 130' turntable, I do not use the indexing feature, choosing instead to manually operate the control box to select the position of the bridge track. That works quite well.
If your club limits itself to the 90' turntable, you also limit yourselves to the types of steamers that can use the turntable based upon the length of the wheelbase.
rrebellNo, I am talking the good ones, not the kits,
rrinker is some kit, not a Walters one, maybe CMR, don't think it's a Diamond Scale one, with a super simple mostly round plywood disk attached to the underside shaft and the drive out of some steam loco, with a rubber roller on the powered axle, the whole thing pivots and a spring holds the roller against the plywood disk
Sounds like it could be the old Bowser one.
http://modelrailroader.net/ho_turntables.php
A club I belonged to had one. It had pot-metal girder sides and a brass shim-stock pit wall. Once you got everything adjusted it seemed to run OK but we only had it in use for a few months before it was ripped out when the club went to N scale.
I have a 130 foot Diamond Scale and a New York Railway Supply stepper motor. Still can be a pain and the gear-reduced stepper motor has some back lash.
I wrote them to see if there is a better model of gearbox but the owner says no.
The controller can be upgraded so that one individual track can be programmed instead of having to re-program (re-index) ALL of the radial tracks just to make a minor adjustment on one track.
I may invest the fifty-bucks for this upgrade.
Good Luck, Ed
rrebellNo, I am talking the good ones, not the kits, though these are the ones that came out before the DCC ones but they have less problens than the DCC ones. They were fully assembled at the factory.
I'll have another look.
hon30critter rrebell I have seen RTR turntables from Walthers on e-bay on occasion for cheap. bought mine for $50, seen 130' go for under $100. Hi rrebell, I believe it is a case of 'buyer beware' with the Walthers turntables. The ones that are going cheap are likely older kits that were not well designed and didn't work properly. I have done the 90' kit and it took a lot of work to get it to run reliably. I had to replace the molded plastic bogie wheels with brass wheels (the originals weren't even round), clean a lot of flash out of the gears, reposition the drive system to get the gears to mate properly and add brass bushings where the originals were plastic on plastic. The newer built up versions also have a completely different drive system which I believe is much quieter, and the indexing system is included. The older versions required that the indexing kit be purchased separately. Dave
rrebell I have seen RTR turntables from Walthers on e-bay on occasion for cheap. bought mine for $50, seen 130' go for under $100.
Hi rrebell,
I believe it is a case of 'buyer beware' with the Walthers turntables. The ones that are going cheap are likely older kits that were not well designed and didn't work properly. I have done the 90' kit and it took a lot of work to get it to run reliably. I had to replace the molded plastic bogie wheels with brass wheels (the originals weren't even round), clean a lot of flash out of the gears, reposition the drive system to get the gears to mate properly and add brass bushings where the originals were plastic on plastic. The newer built up versions also have a completely different drive system which I believe is much quieter, and the indexing system is included. The older versions required that the indexing kit be purchased separately.
Local control with no indexing should be just fine, unless the turntable is way to the back of the benchwork. The one ont he club layout that actually gets used (STILL can't get the Walthers built up one to work properly - all the transporting of the modules seems to keep knocking it out, most times it doesn;t even want to turn under manual control, let alone home and initialize. Transfer table constantly gets stuck, too, no matter how clean the pit and gear tracks are.) is some kit, not a Walters one, maybe CMR, don't think it's a Diamond Scale one, with a super simple mostly round plywood disk attached to the underside shaft and the drive out of some steam loco, with a rubber roller on the powered axle, the whole thing pivots and a spring holds the roller against the plywood disk. The spring and pivot action handles any out of roundness of the plywood disk (if you can cut a perfect circle in plywood with a saber saw, or a band saw, or similar, hats off to ya). Powering this contrption is an old walkaround type DC throttle It has a center off reverse switch, and someone scrated in the faceplate where to set the throttle speed, so all you have to do it flip the direction switch to rotate the table at a reasonable speed. It's right up front so easy to align tracks by eye. On top, it looks nice, all the typical detail is there, including the power wire to the center of the arch (dummy - track power comes in through 2 wipers on the shaft, no split ring, there's a DCC autoreverser connected). Underneath it looks a little scary - btu it's never failed. It's one of the older modules on the layout, and it's been set up then packed away and hauled to shows for at least 20 years now. There's something to be said for simple, versus some complex gee-whiz drive and indexing system. I intend to do much the same for my layout, except probbaly build the controls into the fascia rather than on a tethered box. Adding a decoder to run it on DCC just makes it needlessly complicated, requiring people to know the DCC address to select. Out of the question on the club layout where even after nearly 10 years of DCC only operations, some people have trouble selecting their own locos.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
rrebellI have seen RTR turntables from Walthers on e-bay on occasion for cheap. bought mine for $50, seen 130' go for under $100.
I have seen RTR turntables from Walthers on e-bay on occasion for cheap. bought mine for $50, seen 130' go for under $100. Put in what you got now and just keep a watch. Heck, I just bought a Winchester coaling tower off e-bay, been looking for awhile and it is from a defunct company from over 20 years ago, new in box.
We finally laid the first turnout and about 10 ft of track tonight!
Also tonight I brought home about 50 turnouts so I can install the jumpers between the point rails and the closure and stock rails. Hopefully it won't take too long once I have the assembly line up and running. I did seven turnouts last night in about 1 1/2 hrs. I'm sure I will get faster as I go.
We are almost finished cutting the cookie cutter sections. We have about five pieces of Homasote and about 10 pieces of plywood still to cut. So far almost everything has fit together as intended, and any modifications have been minor. We have been able to get a good idea of what the elevated track will look like and how big the industrial areas and towns will be. The club members seem to be pretty enthused.
We made a decision to go with my 90' Walters turntable and the smaller Walthers roundhouse, at least for now. We debated buying a 130' Walthers builtup and two modern roundhouse kits but that would set us back by more than $500.00 Cdn. whereas mine is free. If, down the road, we feel we need a bigger turntable then we can spend the money at that time.
You may recall I did a thread on modifying the Walthers 90' kit to make it run smoothly. I replaced the bogie wheels with brass wheels from NWSL and installed brass bushings where the original design was plastic on plastic. Everyone is happy about how it operates except for the sound. If it is run at very slow speeds the sound isn't too bad but of course some of the guys had to crank the power up to see how fast it would turn. That's when the gears get a little noisey. Once it is installed in the layout hopefully it will be a bit quieter.
There won't be any indexing. We will use an old power pack to run it back and forth and it seems to be easy to control. We will see once we have some track down whether or not it can be spotted accurately.
I took my scratch built ice house to the club and people were impressed if I may say so. The only challenge may be that it might be too deep to fit where intended. We will know that as soon as we get the track down in that area. We will use a Tichy icing platform.
Wasn't my idea, so steal away! I think the cars carrying the display cards, the loco, and the caboose were lettered for the club name. Just plain Athearn gons I think.
Randy, the sponsors' train is a great idea! If you don't mind I'm going to steal it. Why would you mind? I've already stolen so many ideas from you that it is not funny!
Thanks,
Don't recall, I wasn't part of the club officers, I was mainly a wiring guy (unlike the Army, the club actually put people in jobs they were suited for). Not even the head wiring guy - they already had someone doing that before I joined. Just like I wasn't the head DCC guy for the modular group from the historical society.
It couldn;t have been too much, this was more than 20 years ago (though they may still carry on), perhaps $50 per year or something. It's only $120 or $150 for a corporate sponsor for the historical society today, which gets you listedont he web page in in each monthly membership newsletter, and any bulk correspondence - like when they sent out an email for a show or railfan trip, after the information there is always a page listing the corporate sponsors.
Now that is a clever idea, any idea what the sponsership fee was.
If only he was a kid - at the time of the incident he was about 50 years old. Unfortunately his life of addiction caught up with him a few years later and he passed away.
Anyway, back to trains, which is the first hobby I inherited from my Dad, and still participate in. Sentimental value is all many things have, which is why I have several locos that I will likely never put DCC in and run (not to mention some of those have old style deep flanges and won't run on Code 83 anyway). The cars too, still have their plastic wheels and truck mounted X2f couplers - they are now display items. One loco is the only thing I've found which I think is truly impossible to convert to DCC without cheating and putting the decoder in a trailing car, simply because the loco body IS the motor, there is no shell.
Instead I will represent family members with structures on the layout, or specific scenes. WHich gets me back on topic here - the club I used to belong to had a 'sponsors' train - the layout was designed to be a realistic creation of the area, so adding extra businesses to the towns, or putting other things ont he layout wsn;t going to fly. What they did was make up a train, highly colorful instead of realistic paint schemes, fitted with signs, making each car about the height of a double stack so it would still clear all around the layout. Each corporate donor got a card with their name and information in large type, and this train ran at all public shows. That turned out to be quite a successful way to secure support from local community businesses.
rrinkerI have a special commemorative edition Winchester lever action that was to be my 16th birthday present, but my Dad was never ever to give it to me since he passed away when I was 9.
Sorry for the loss of your dad, especially at such a young age.
I'm sure the Winchester can be restored although the value will take a hit. Unfortunately the sentimental value will always be tarnished by the kid's actions.
I think I would have made the perp do several extra rounds of PT - not for using it as a doorstop, but for taking it without permission in the first place. Unless the perp was an officer, then I can see how something so dumb could happen. Not much you could do there, but something along the lines of what was hinted at by Bryan Cranston's character to the Colonel in Last Flag Flying. (my GF's nephew is an extra in that, and visible on screen briefly - they needed AIr Force, sinc eitt was supposed to be Dover AFB in Delaware, but they filmed it in Pittsburgh, where he is stationed, and they used some guys from his unit in one of the pallbearer scenes.)
I know the feeling though. I have a special commemorative edition Winchester lever action that was to be my 16th birthday present, but my Dad was never ever to give it to me since he passed away when I was 9. He had it hanging in the family room in a display case he made, and somewhere about 10 years ago, the neighbor's son broke in (not really, in the neighborhood I grew up in, all us neighbors had keys to each other's houses and would check up on one another when someone was away, or feed each other's pets, etc) and tried to steal the gun to get money to fuel his drug problem. It wasn't locked to the wall, but there were special brackets that used a two-prong tool (like, cut a wide slot down the middle of a flat blade screwdriver) to unscrew. He just tried ripping it out, ended up leaving it laying on the floor because I gues she didn't know how long my Mom was going to be away. There is a nasty nick in the barrel from metal on metal contact, and the stock is nearly ruined from all the chunks and gouges. I even have the original box, and a set of posters that came with it. Right now it sits in the box, one of these days I will take it to someone and see what they can do.
hon30critterIt would seem that we are condemmed to deal with knuckleheads!
A new battery I can get, your cherished gift from your dad — I can see where you would have wanted to have a "Staff Meeting" with the perpetrator.
I sometimes read those Darwin Awards books. Amazing the dumb things humans can do!
Well, 'nuff said about that stuff... we're here to stay abreast on your club progress.
Cheers! Ed
gmpullmanSandpaper? All of my Midwest cork was leveled and profiled using the Stanley Surform "Cheese Graters" I mentioned in an earlier reply. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Stanley-Surform-Shaver-21-115/100654913 They are the perfect tool for taking the edge off the beveled side.
Hi again Ed!
I have heard about using a Surform toll to round off the edge of the cork roadbed before you mentioned it. Coarse sandpaper seems to have done the job quite well so rather than spending money on a new tool we will continue to use the sandpaper. I have noticed that the results are a bit inconsistent. It seems that it is easy to miss sections, or not round them off enough. That's where oversight by the senior members of the layout committee comes into play. So far, so good.
gmpullmanDave, you are conjuring up a lot of supressed memories from my "club days" I had just purchased a new $40. battery for my Makita cordless drill. (Back when 7.2 volts was tops) The following week, during a work session we needed the spare battery. Not in the charger you say? Where in blazes did that battery go? Twenty-plus minutes of searching tool boxes, shelves, even the loo. No go. So, a little while later one of the guys hollers "Found It". Sure enough, there it was, wedged in the bottom of the door jamb holding the door open that warm Summer night! No one 'fessed up to that one. Fortunately it didn't split open! The plastic groove was forever messed up so that EVERY time I put that battery in the drill I was reminded of the knucklehead that decided to use it as a door wedge!
It would seem that we are condemmed to deal with knuckleheads! Propping open a door with something inappropriate brings back a rather sour memory for me too. When I was an Air Cadet long ago my dad gave me a very special gift when I became a senior NCO. He gave me his drill staff (I hope I have the term correct). It was a leather encased wooden dowel about 30" long which he had been given when he was the senior cadet in his highschool squadron in the 1940s. I took great pride in carrying that staff while on parade with my own squadron. Well, one particularly hot and steamy day the staff went missing. I found it pinched in the side door of the squadron hall holding the door open. Unfortunately the leather had been damaged beyond repair by the pressure of the door. I was crestfallen. I have never raised a fist to anyone but I came pretty close that night when I found out who the idiot was who had used the staff as a door stop. The memory still causes me stress. Thanks for letting me vent.
rrinkerAs for track nails - caulk, my friend. Caulk. You would have had half the track done in a single night.
We are using nails because they allow for easy adjustments to the track position. Once the ballast gets glued down the initial method of installing the raw track won't matter. We have already decided that the track gauge will be checked at every nail so if we bend some ties that can be corrected.
Keep in mind that we will likely have several people laying track. Inevitably some of that will have to be adjusted. IMHO using track nails will make adjusting track cleaner and quicker.
richhotrainDave, I was reluctant to mention vice in the same breath as your name.
Rich:
I have several vices and I am proud of them!! I have spent my entire teenage years and adulthood perfecting them!! If they take me to an early grave at least I will go out smiling!
on me!