Darn, then I guess I will have to upgrade after all. That would be neat - and maybe not all that hard to do, just have to allow for the left and right rails to be set to different colors instead of both the same.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
One of the challenges that we have had with our track plan is determining where to put the reverse loops. It took a long time to find solutions to the problems, and in fact we missed one problem area entirely until we actually started to lay roadbed.
One of the limitations of my track planning software (3rd PlanIt) is that it doesn't have a tool for determining rail polarity. I'm not sure if any of the software programs do have that capability. I decided to contact Randy Pfeiffer at 3rd PlanIt to suggest that polarity detection would be a great addition to the software. Randy got right back to me saying that he had been discussing exactly that with a client a short time ago. My suggestion came as a pleasant surprise and gave him enough of a push to get him seriously thinking about the design of the software. He actually wrote a fairly long note describing the possible approaches, and took the time to show me how he determined polarity on a Disney layout that he designed.
Polarity detection capability would be a huge advance in CAD programming especially for the more complex plans, IMHO.
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
Thanks for the suggestions guys!
Hey Dave
Having workers once a week is actually good news. You're making progress.
Tuesday night work session. Saturday morning coffee-and-donuts. Avoid pizza-and-beer. Great for getting people to show up; not so great for getting work done.
And Randy is right. Make sure to have a radio on hand so everyone can listen to the curling matches.
Robert
LINK to SNSR Blog
This. After the stress and running around for the holidays is over, people will have more free time. A weekday evening is limited hours for people who work, so a Saturday session, especially if someone can be there nearly all day, will likely get more attendance.
What would really help is if you can get a TV in there so no one has to miss the hockey game. Or at least a radio. After hockey season I'm sure there will be no shortage of helpers.
Maybe after the holidays are over and folks schedules theoretically clear up a bit, having Saturday Pot Luck work sessions may bring some in. Slate a descent portion (most) of the day for everyone to bring a dish to pass and time to kill working on the railroad.
Congratulations on the first cork roadbed! Please keep us posted on the progress. With no club local to me, I'm doing the railroad club thing vicariously through your thread!
Mike
Tuesday night we laid our first cork roadbed!
Henk, the President, and I were trying to figure out how to get members to come in on other than the normal Tuesday nights to work on the layout. If we only work on it on Tuesday nights it will take forever to build. We have put out several notices in the past where we will say "I'm going to be at the club at such and such a time so please join me", but it has more or less been on the spur of the moment. I think what we will have to do is set some specific times throughout the week for work sessions.
We took a break from the sawdust and glue last night. We went to a very nice Buffet in Barrie and had a good time. I ate too much of course, but how could I resist with most of my favourite foods right in front of me?
Unfortunately for the restaurant the weather was exactly what you can expect in Barrie at this time of year. It was cold, the wind was strong, the snow was really coming down and the roads were very slippery. I say "unfortunately" because the restaurant which could seat about 150 people was empty. They must have lost their shirts last night with all the food on the buffet that wasn't consumed. (Hey, I did my best to prevent anything from being wasted!). Somebody suggested that the leftovers may go to a local shelter but I'm not sure if that is true.
(Burp!)
To bring you up to date on the layout progress, we are at the point where we can start laying some track and doing some wiring. We are learning as we go. We have worked out a main power bus set up that has reasonable runs, 25' or less. We are going to use 12 ga. and 14 ga. stranded wire. I won't bore you with all the details, other than, thanks to the process of design by committee, it has taken us forever to make a few simple decisions.
I have calculated the position of each piece of the cookie cutter sub roadbed relative to the walls. So far the plotting process seems to have worked quite well for cutting the sub roadbed sections, so hopefully my numbers will work for getting them into the right positions on the benchwork.
I'm really looking forward to getting the individual teams up and running. That won't happen until January. We are setting up our portable layout at two different libraries in the Barrie area between X-mas and New Years, and our annual X-mas dinner is on Dec. 12th. Both of those activities have pretty much taken care of December as far as working time on the new layout goes. Once we do start work in January I can see myself getting run off my feet by all the team leaders who will no doubt have questions galore! That should be interesting! I'll keep you posted.
Cheers everyone!!
hon30critter richhotrain l'état c'est moi Pardon? (spoken with a French accent). No, not quite. I still choose to be a team player. I managed to avoid French class from grade 10 on. Stupid move on my part, but of course, at the time, by getting out of French class I thought I had pulled off a major coup d'etat! Now all I can manage are a few swear words! I have a nephew who is just about to graduate from a French Immersion high school in Mississauga, Ontario. He has travelled to Quebec several times with his family and each time he has been able to communicate quite easily with the locals. I guess they aren't teaching Parisian French in the schools anymore. Now the kids just might actually get something out of it! Dave
richhotrain l'état c'est moi
Pardon? (spoken with a French accent). No, not quite. I still choose to be a team player.
I managed to avoid French class from grade 10 on. Stupid move on my part, but of course, at the time, by getting out of French class I thought I had pulled off a major coup d'etat! Now all I can manage are a few swear words!
I have a nephew who is just about to graduate from a French Immersion high school in Mississauga, Ontario. He has travelled to Quebec several times with his family and each time he has been able to communicate quite easily with the locals. I guess they aren't teaching Parisian French in the schools anymore. Now the kids just might actually get something out of it!
hon30critter I never let my classes interfere with my education!
I never let my classes interfere with my education!
Rich
Alton Junction
rrinker Was that purposeful you used a French word to describe getting out of French class?
Of course! I couldn't resist the irony!
When I was given permission to drop the French class I felt like I was walking on air! The class was so incredibly boring. The only other time I felt that way when I was in school was when I quit high school entirely in grade 12. The Principal had caught me talking with a friend in a hallway. We were supposed to be in the cafeteria on our spare period. I was hauled into his office and told that if I didn't like the rules then I could quit! So, I quit!! He was speechless. I was thrilled. My dad wasn't!
I spent a year working at General Motors in Oshawa and then I went back to school, with, I might add, a ton of money in my pockets! That year at GM paid for most of my University degree. I can only vaguely recollect what classes I took. I never let my classes interfere with my education!
rrinker Was that purposeful you used a French word to describe getting out of French class? Also, I thought King Louis' famous quote was "It's good to be the king" Oh wait, wrong Louis. --Randy
Was that purposeful you used a French word to describe getting out of French class?
Also, I thought King Louis' famous quote was "It's good to be the king"
Oh wait, wrong Louis.
hon30critter We have chosen our project manager! It is me!!
We have chosen our project manager! It is me!!
l'état c'est moi
Perhaps the French king Louis XIV most famous quote.
"The state, it is me".
richhotrainl'état c'est moi
richhotrainYou clearly need a project manager in addition to team leaders
We have chosen our project manager! It is me!! Heaven help us!!!
Hey Brian:
Funny ad! I'll send it to the team leaders and Henk.
Hey Dave,...something like this 'herding cats'.....HA...HAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk7yqlTMvp8
Brian
My Layout Plan
Interesting new Plan Consideration
hon30critter 22 as it stands now, I believe. Our beloved secretary, who is getting on in age as it were, isn't quite up to date on the membership list. He is a longstanding member of the club and he has done a lot of work supporting the club and organizing the February Show, so I choose to be patient with him. Dave
22 as it stands now, I believe. Our beloved secretary, who is getting on in age as it were, isn't quite up to date on the membership list. He is a longstanding member of the club and he has done a lot of work supporting the club and organizing the February Show, so I choose to be patient with him.
Good luck with the project. You clearly need a project manager in addition to team leaders which is a good idea by the way.
Dave, remind me. How many club members?
OH how I love dealing with all of the characters in the club! We had a meeting on Monday night to finalize some details about the February Show and Sale. Things got a bit acrimonious. Suffice it to say that I kept my mouth shut and waited until the black clouds of egomania had passed! I can laugh now, but at the time I was asking myself why am I here? Don't worry, that was a momentary weakness!!
We also had a Layout Committee meeting, and there we actually managed to accomplish some important things IMHO. We recognized that Henk and I have become a bottleneck in terms of making progress on the new layout. On our regular Tuesday night meetings everyone is coming to us asking "What can I do? What can I do?", which is great except that we end up trying to assign 10 different people to 10 different tasks all at once, and then in many cases we have to teach those tasks to the people who want to do them. Trying to delegate a bunch of different work projects to a bunch of different people, and explain how to do the work, all at the same time, is impossible!
I proposed a solution tonight which I hope will address that problem. I suggested that we ask a few knowledgeable individuals to form teams that will focus on the individual tasks. We will have a track laying team, a wiring team, a team for plotting track and turnout positions on the Homasote and plywood and a cutting team for the remaining roadbed sections. The theory is that the various team leaders will be able to take our basic instructions re what needs to be done next and proceed to do that work without needing intimate oversight. Henk and I would then be free to observe and support the work, and hopefully to catch any mistakes that are being made along the way, and more importantly, we would have some time to plan ahead. Heaven help us, but we might actually be able to sit down for a minute or two as well!
Thanks for your support everyone! Really, I am having fun!!
Cheers!!
Yes, exactly. My mind runs WAY faster than I can type.
rrinker If the accessory busses are all just power, it's probbaly ok to have them close. But if any of those is actualy a control signal, it should be a few inches away from any power carrying lines. Same with track power vs Loconet.
At this point we don't forsee any signals being transmitted along the accessory buses, but I will keep that in mind.
rrinker note that any sort of power bus where you will need to take taps off should be attached tight up against the underside,
I think you meant "should not be attached tight up against the underside...". We are going to use a few removable clips while we are pulling the wires just to prevent any deliberately slack spots from being pulled up tight. The Loconet bus and the main power bus will be about 12" apart.
Thanks as always Randy,
If the accessory busses are all just power, it's probbaly ok to have them close. But if any of those is actualy a control signal, it should be a few inches away from any power carrying lines. Same with track power vs Loconet.
No matter how you lay it out, track feeders from the bus will at some point have to cross the Loconet cable, and/or the other lines. But as those wires come out from the track bus under the layout, they will cross the other lines at close to 90 degrees so it won't be a problem. More so if one of those things is attached up tight against the underside and the other hangs down slightly - note that any sort of power bus where you will need to take taps off should be attached tight up against the underside, unless it's some easily released and reused method., but something like feeders that likely will never change once in place can be attached semi-permanently with things like cable staples and kept away from the bus lines. So not only do things cross at 90, they also have a couple of inches of air gap - it would take signals far beyond what we use for model trains to cause interference issues with that sort of arrangement.
Also, on the club sections, the DCC busses and the aux power actually are all bundled up, at least near the ends were the Power Poles are attached. There haven't been any issues.At the end of each section, all the various wire runs come together for about a foot long pigtail. A cup hook secures each one for transport, and they are long enough to easily plug them together without crawling around on the floor. The Loconet cables are NOT part of this bundle, in fact very few sections have permanent Loconet cables, those get wrapped up and stored in a plastic tote for travel, and get hooked up as needed for each show, since some places use a short setup and others we can set up all the sections. Some sections have no Loconet devices of any type on them, while others will have a block detector or an SE8C. There are a couple where we actually have to connect the 10 pin flat cables from the RR-CirKits detectors or drivers to the Tower Controllers because the controller is mounted on one section and there are some signals or detected blocks on the next section that run from that controller.
Only time we've ever had issues is when someone forgets to plug in one of the cables.
rrinker SO I wrote a really long explanation of induced voltage in parallel wire runs and all sorts of interesting stuff and - it got eaten. I'm not going to retype all that now.
Been there, done that! I don't blame you for not wanting to rewrite your post.
A couple of simple questions: How far should the accessory bus wires be from the main power bus and the Loconet bus? Can we run all three of the various accessory buses (i.e. lighting, signals, and tortoise power) through the same hole(s)?
Thanks,
SO I wrote a really long explanation of induced voltage in parallel wire runs and all sorts of interesting stuff and - it got eaten. I'm not going to retype all that now.
Bottom line - it's something to think about, but no so critical that you need to plan every wire run with millimeter precicions.
railandsailIf you have carpeted floor you had better utilize large size casters on that under-layout cart
Hi Brian,
Good point. The carpet isn't exactly plush but the ease of rolling around under the layout is still something that needs to be taken into account.