hon30critter .....could see that the carpeted floor needed to be cleaned. It was covered in sawdust. Dave
.....could see that the carpeted floor needed to be cleaned. It was covered in sawdust. Dave
If you have carpeted floor you had better utilize large size casters on that under-layout cart
Brian
My Layout Plan
Interesting new Plan Consideration
Hi Randy,
Great advice as usual!
I was aware of the minimal impact of crossing wires at 90 degrees, but I want to better understand what you mean by not running low voltage and higher voltage wires through the same holes. We have separated our Loconet communication wires from our main power bus wires by 12" in all but a couple of situations where they may be 10" apart for a foot or so. We still need to run our accessory buses for the signals, layout lighting and the tortoises. I take it that we should not run those close to the main power bus or the Loconet bus. Correct? Can we run all three of those accessory buses through the same holes assuming that the holes will be distanced from the main power bus and the Loconet bus? If so, how far away from the other buses do they need to be?
Thanks Randy,
Dave
P.S. You may not be aware, but I am suffering from hair loss as do many seniors. However, I never associated it with being a railway modeller until I got elected as the V.P. of the club!
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
Another way to get a scooter cheap is go to a junk yard and get a seat out of a car, bolt it to plywood with caster bolted on. No welding needed.
Pulling the wire isn't too difficult if you use stranded waire and you make a spool rack - some sort of support where you cna put a pipe through the spools of wire and hold them in place, while someone pulls the far end through all the holes. Stranded even easily makes it around curves, even in heavy sizes like #12.
You don;t want low voltage and high voltage lines in parallel over long distances, but there is also a distance factor. One line at the rear of a 2 foot wide section of benchwork and another parellel to it but at the front edge won't be a problem. Both of them running through the same set of holes is bad. When lines need to cross - as close to a 90 degree angle is optimal.There is very little induced signal when they cross at 90
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
gmpullmanhttps://www.amazon.com/Pro-Lift-C-3001-Pneumatic-Chair-Capacity/dp/B0009EUA0M/ref=lp_15707971_1_5?s=automotive&ie=UTF8&qid=1511952972&sr=1-5
That's kind of like what we have already, but without the pneumatic lift.
Thanks for the suggestions.
gmpullmanSounds like you have a real cast of characters there
We certainly have a group of individuals! Henk said to me after last Tuesday's meeting that he felt like we were herding cats! Henk and I are both retired managers and we are both glad to be out of it, but we now find ourselves right back in the thick of having to massage a bunch of peoples' egos all at the same time. I keep asking him if we are having fun yet? I won't go into the details, except to say that we look each other in the eye every so often and ask ourselves why we are doing this?!? The answer, of course, is that we are having a lot of fun bringing a previously somewhat decaying club back up to snuff.
On Tuesday night we ran into a problem which we had tried to address before, and that is how to keep everyone who shows up at the meetings engaged in the construction process. Henk and I concluded that we will have to spend some additional time preparing lists of things to do so that we can say at the beginning of the regular Tuesday night meetings that "this is what we have to do tonight" and then line up people to do the work. Many of the members don't seem to be able to identify what needs to be done, which I guess is a natural human condition. Last night Henk ended up on the end of a vaccuum hose because apparently none of the members who were sitting around the lounge table shooting the breeze could see that the carpeted floor needed to be cleaned. It was covered in sawdust. I have to say that I was rather disappointed. Henk is spending many hours per week working on club business including building the layout, but since nobody else volunteered to vacuum the floor, Henk is going to go to the club house today to do it himself. I'd go there too, except I don't have a vehicle during the day. OK, I signed up to lead the herd! Now I will have to put my 'Nice Guy' cap on and then grab a few guys by their boot laces and tell them to get their rear ends in gear, in the nicest possible way of course!
Thanks for letting me vent my spleen! I feel much better now!!
As always, Cheers guys!!
Hey, Dave.
Thanks for the compliments I'm just passing on "pearls of wisdom" that I've picked up along the road to... where are we headed, anyway?
I just made the back support out of welded angle since that was my stock-in-trade for so many years. I'm sure a good quality wood would work every bit as well. I angled the seat part a bit and, in hindsight, I probably could have made it a little shorter. The rest of it is just 1 x 4 and plywood.
Another scooter I have is made out of a fishing boat seat. Something like this:
http://www.basspro.com/shop/en/bass-pro-shops-tourney-special-pro-butt-seat
(Butt seat? Um, what else would go there?) Again, mine is welded but a good quality wood would work too.
https://www.amazon.com/Pro-Lift-C-3001-Pneumatic-Chair-Capacity/dp/B0009EUA0M/ref=lp_15707971_1_5?s=automotive&ie=UTF8&qid=1511952972&sr=1-5
Even Something like this, maybe?
http://www.acehardware.com/product/index.jsp?productId=117117646&clickid=body_rv_img
Ya' gotta get comfortable on the job! First thing I learned at GE
Regards, Ed
Hey Ed!
That is a nice little under-layout 'scooter'. I will share it with the club members. I don't know if anyone has any welding equipment but I will certainly bring the concept up before the Layout Committee. By the looks of it, it could be made out of wood fairly easily, especially if we were to do away with the adjustable back. For now we have a little stool on wheels which is about 12" high. It works great for our portable layout, but the portable layout is about 10 1/2" taller than the new layout, so it might not work as well under the new layout.
Thanks again Ed for your support! You are a great model railroader in all aspects of the hobby including sharing your expertise!
Cheers!!
Hi, Dave
Thanks for the update! Sounds like you have a real cast of characters there
hon30critterHenk, the President, insisted that he will have no problem getting underneath the layout to pull wires.
When I was involved with "our" club, I built a roll-around scooter to access the underpinnings of the layout. When the club disbanded I graciously adopted the little guy, and am I glad I did!
Scooter_x1 by Edmund, on Flickr
I use it pretty frequently on my own layout. It is especially nice now that I have installed continuous carpeting and the little guy scoots around very nicely.
You see I made a little trough in front to hold wire ties, tools and such. Really comes in handy. I rarely use the adjuster in back as it is best when leaned back all the way but maybe someone of smaller stature might want the back a little more upright.
Scooter X2 by Edmund, on Flickr
As far as the Loconet cable goes, I was really concerned when I ran mine over fifteen years ago. I have lots of parallel runs with the Loconet running alongside the power buss and even some 115 VAC mains in a few places.
Never a problem (insert knock-on-wood emoji here) Just sayin, you don't have to get over-concerned about it.
Cheers! Ed
Just a brief update:
The layout is coming along nicely. Tuesday night we drilled the holes for the power bus and the Loconet bus. Actually, we had already drilled some holes for the buses but after re-reading Allan Gartner's advice on DCC wiring we realized that the advice that we had been given by one of our club members re DCC wiring was a recipe for disaster! Back to the drawing board! The phrase "It works on my layout" doesn't cut it!
After drilling the new bus holes we installed the first two of many sheets of plywood sub-roadbed. They were glued and screwed so heaven help us if something has to be changed! I didn't want to install the plywood until after we had pulled the main power bus wires at least, but Henk, the President, insisted that he will have no problem getting underneath the layout to pull wires. HA! We shall see how his back is feeling after squatting under the layout for a couple of hours! I have tried several times to get him to leave the plywood off until most of the wiring is in place but he is a Dutchman - as stubborn as they come!! Apologies to all good Netherlanders out there, I'm just kidding! Henk is a really great guy and he is totally devoted to the club and to getting the new layout up and running ASAP.
Stay tuned!
RobertSchuknechtI would also suggest a club facebook page.
Hi Robert:
We do have a facebook page but I don't think there is anything on it yet! We had a wee bit of a challenge setting up the facebook account because nobody, repeat nobody, in the club is a facebook user! (All dinosaurs and old farts eh!) The gentleman who runs our website (until recently nobody knew how to set up a website either so Peter had to learn that from scratch too) has volunteered to take on facebook as well, but because he is still learning how to do the website thing he hasn't had a chance to spent any real time on facebook.
The website is coming along nicely but it still has a ways to go. Facebook will come along eventually too. We have just had a fellow join the club who owns two website development companies. We have asked our original website manager to stay on and we have asked the new member to help him out a bit.
hon30critter Actually we do have a club website.
Actually we do have a club website.
Hi again Carl:
I'm guessing that you are stapling the cardboard strips to the side of the plywood sub roadbed as opposed to on the top. Is that correct?
We haven't actually decided on the method(s) of scenery construction that we will use, but we decided to add the extra 1/2 inch for now so that we have lots of options.
However, I do appreciate your point about the narrower roadbed allowing for shallower slopes. Nothing has been installed yet so we can still change the width of the roadbed. I will bring the point up at the club. Thanks for your input.
hon30critterExtending the plywood beyond the Homasote gives us a more substantial surface to attach the scenery to
I use cardboard web based hardshell. I stapled the strips of cardboard to the edges of the plywood and was able to make whatever contour I wanted for ditches.
I've always felt that keeping the subroadbed as narrow as possible allowed for the most flexibility in scenery construction. I've always done mountain railroads too so maybe the flexibility is more important to me than it is to you.
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.
Hi Carl425,
Extending the plywood beyond the Homasote gives us a more substantial surface to attach the scenery to, and it also provides support for the ditches which will be built along most of the trackage. The Homasote will eventually be cut at a 45 degree angle to form one side of the ditch. The exposed plywood sub roadbed gives us something to attach the other side of the ditch and the scenery beyond it to. At least, that's the theory!!
We debated just leaving the ditches at the depth of the cork roadbed, but we decided to make them deeper so they have more visual effect, and they will also be more prototypical, especially on the mainlines. The ditches don't have to be as deep as the Homasote. We can make them shallower simply by filling them in a bit.
hon30critterWe want the plywood sub roadbed to be 1/2" wider than the Homasote on either side.
Why?
What I have found is real life and plans are two different things, even in the 1-1 world. Also trying to layer things like you are just magnifys this effect.
What you need is a small stick, or a piece of fairly stiff sheet metal - something you can bend easily enough but not so soft the slightest pressure would bend it. Wrap around a pencil, then leave some stick out, and 1/2" from the pensil, bend down a flat guide edge. Boom, 1/2" lines from the edge of the homasote just by tracing. Or use a small block of wood and drill a hole for the pencil 1/2" from one edge.
20 years a surveyor and still having issues? Maybe you should label all the curves in degrees instead of radius to help him out. It's truly the same thing, just on a scale of inches instead of chains (66 feet)
More attempts to draw the track centerlines last night. Still much confusion. Yesterday I added colour to the track diagrams to show where the curves and easements start and stop. Red for easements and green for constant radii. Straight track is still pencilled lines. However, we still had a devil of a time distinguishing between the dimensions shown on the plans. We kept confusing the grid position indicators with the track radii numbers. To solve that problem I will colour the track radii numbers in green to match the diagram colours.
To give you an idea of how complex the transfer of the drawings to the plywood and Homasote has been, the person who has been reading most of the numbers from the plans spent the first 20 years of his career as a surveyor, and even he is having a hard time transcribing the track positions from the plans to the Homasote. The real problem is that we have decided to cut the Homasote first and then lay those cuttings on top of the plywood to draw the plywood cut lines. Easier said than done. We want the plywood sub roadbed to be 1/2" wider than the Homasote on either side. Then we are having to deal with track spacing transitions from straight track to curved track!!
Let's put it simply - either the process is extremely taxing for an average brain, or the process is extremely simple but all of us have below average brains! Guess where I'm putting my money?!?
Eventually we will get it right - I promise!!
Cheers all!!
Saturday morning I got together with two other club members to draw out cutting patterns on plywood and Homasote. I have spent many hours drawing up detailed cutting patterns for all the bits and pieces of the layout. I have plotted every curve and every turnout. There are 34 pages in the plans. Well, the first drawing was a disaster!! It was about 1 1/2" off where the cut should be. Needless to say I was upset! We managed to correct the drawing but we could only speculate as to the reasons for the discrepancy. Fortunately the track position on the second drawing was spot on, but we had a devil of a time figuring out the cutting profile for the Homasote. I now know why that happened but it was certainly frustrating while we figured out what we were doing wrong. We did eventually figure things out, but I really hope that we have learned from that experience. Draw the track center lines first and then calculate the cut lines for the Homasote and plywood. Sounds obvious, right, and it was obvious to us, that is after about an hour of mucking around. Part of the problem was that I was letting our President take the lead, but he didn't fully understand my drawings. I am not being critical. Henk is a great guy, but next time I will take the lead. No damage done. We all still love each other!
hon30critter rrinker Anyone in the club have even rudimentary experience as web site creation? Consider a club web page, which would allow you to share progress and information with the public. Hosting and a domain are cheap. Hi Randy: Actually we do have a club website. It has been around for a while but it was sadly neglected for quite some time. However, we now have a couple of new members, one of whom owns a website design company, who have taken on responsibility for the site and have made numerous improvements in the last few weeks. It is still a work in progress: http://barm.ca/ Dave
rrinker Anyone in the club have even rudimentary experience as web site creation? Consider a club web page, which would allow you to share progress and information with the public. Hosting and a domain are cheap.
Hi Randy:
Actually we do have a club website. It has been around for a while but it was sadly neglected for quite some time. However, we now have a couple of new members, one of whom owns a website design company, who have taken on responsibility for the site and have made numerous improvements in the last few weeks. It is still a work in progress:
http://barm.ca/
Somehow I missed this one, but there you go, for club-related postings you can just upload a photo to the club web site and then link it here. It looks like they are using a slide show plugin for the ones that are there on the post about the first night and cutting the first board but those photos are likely directly accessible.
In fact they are...
I was just sent this notice about an open house. I clicked on the 'virtual tour button' and got this pretty nice (and simply) presentation for their club,...http://www.nvmr.org/tour.html
rrinker ...posted copywrite images...is grounds for a lawsuit. Best to just stay out of it. --Randy
...posted copywrite images...is grounds for a lawsuit. Best to just stay out of it.
Ah yes, the REAL expense. Good point.
T e d
If you are still allowing copyright material on your website, even if not directly posted on your forum, if there is a liability, it still exists. Liability generaly exists when someone knows something and dose nothing (but caselaw is still ongoing).
That would require them to get a lot more storage and bandwidth, but that's not the main issue. They'd ALSO need full-time moderation to make sure no one posted copywrite images, and to remove them if found. In today's society, even if the offending image was remove as soon as someone was awake and working in Wisconsin, the fact that it was up for a few hours while everyone was asleep is still grounds for a lawsuit. Best to just stay out of it and not allow direct image uploads. Enough complaints from people who had their photos used without permission and they might as well just get out of the whole forum business to avoid hassles. By not going there in the first place, the pros of supporting this forum outweigh the cons and so here we are.
tedteddersonthis is a great thread.
Thanks Ted!
tedteddersonI think it would be great if model railroader decided to make life easier for members (subscribers?) by allowing posting of pictures directly on the forum considering linking to photo hosting sites has become so annoying. I know this would be an added expense but maybe it would attract subscribers.
I think Steven has said in the past that the cost of doing so is prohibitive.
I think it would be great if model railroader decided to make life easier for members (subscribers?) by allowing posting of pictures directly on the forum considering linking to photo hosting sites has become so annoying. I know this would be an added expense but maybe it would attract subscribers...maybe. Anyway, that's off topic.
On topic, this is a great thread. I'm lurking in the background but it's very educational. Very cool process. Thanks for posting.
rrinker If you want to know more, PM me, so we don't keep hijacking Dave's thread. --Randy
I don't mind Randy. It is good information.
Perhaps what we should do is ask Steven if he will transfer or copy the posts related to setting up your own website to the sticky on how to post pictures. I'm sure a lot of people would be interested especially after the Photobucket fiasco.
rrebellNot only that but as a club, I am sure you have members who just like to watch trains run and those that like to switch ect., you kinda have to apeal to the broadest number of people to expand membership.
In the past there have been almost no operations conducted at all. Everyone seemed to only be interested in running trains round and round. The new layout has been designed for operations and we think we can get six or eight operators on the layout at once, not all on the main line of course. We are also going to set up an operating schedule so that everyone will have a chance to run trains. In the past it has been first come, first served with the result that a few members were doing most of the running and some weren't doing any.
One of the decisions we have made is to install a lot of throttle plugs so people won't get tangled up in each others' cables. We have decided to not go with radio control at this time simply because of the expense, and we already own a bunch of throttles. We are going to spend the money on Digitrax components instead of trying to wire up our own control bus using telephone jacks etc. Some of you will cringe at the money "being wasted" but we want reliable and straight forward, not cheap.
Right now we are in the process of designing the power bus. Three of us have been diligently studying Alan Gartner's Wiring for DCC so we get thing right the first time. Some of the advice we have been given by supposedly knowledgable members has turned out to be faulty according to Gartner and we are not buying into the "...it works for me..." trap. We said from the beginning that we are not going to cut corners. I seem to be saying that a lot recently, especially at the club!
railandsail rrinker Easiest way for me remains my personal web page. The URL I paste here or on any forum is the same URL I can view in my browser - not like Photobucket or others where if you just copy the URL from the browser, it's your personal account page, not a public version of the image. Upload is easy enough, there's a 1 time setup of an FTP client, after that you just click connect, select the fiels you want to upload, and click upload. (I know, I keep saying the same thing - but that's because it WORKS and avoids every single hassle there's been with each different photo hosting site. And I am at no one's mercy because I registered my own domain name. If my host service goes belly up, I can move to anyone I want and my old posts will still work because despite the photos now being on a different server, perhaps in an entirely different part of the country, the URL remains the same) --Randy What does it cost to maintain your own webpage like yours? Is this true that if you move things around the URL's remain the same??I was on one RR forum that made some sort of modification to the their software, and all my older photos that had been posted DISAPPEARED. I think that was likely a result of a wholesale change in URL's, but I'm not sure as I am nowhere near a computer guru....ha...ha
rrinker Easiest way for me remains my personal web page. The URL I paste here or on any forum is the same URL I can view in my browser - not like Photobucket or others where if you just copy the URL from the browser, it's your personal account page, not a public version of the image. Upload is easy enough, there's a 1 time setup of an FTP client, after that you just click connect, select the fiels you want to upload, and click upload. (I know, I keep saying the same thing - but that's because it WORKS and avoids every single hassle there's been with each different photo hosting site. And I am at no one's mercy because I registered my own domain name. If my host service goes belly up, I can move to anyone I want and my old posts will still work because despite the photos now being on a different server, perhaps in an entirely different part of the country, the URL remains the same) --Randy
Easiest way for me remains my personal web page. The URL I paste here or on any forum is the same URL I can view in my browser - not like Photobucket or others where if you just copy the URL from the browser, it's your personal account page, not a public version of the image. Upload is easy enough, there's a 1 time setup of an FTP client, after that you just click connect, select the fiels you want to upload, and click upload.
(I know, I keep saying the same thing - but that's because it WORKS and avoids every single hassle there's been with each different photo hosting site. And I am at no one's mercy because I registered my own domain name. If my host service goes belly up, I can move to anyone I want and my old posts will still work because despite the photos now being on a different server, perhaps in an entirely different part of the country, the URL remains the same)
What does it cost to maintain your own webpage like yours?
Is this true that if you move things around the URL's remain the same??I was on one RR forum that made some sort of modification to the their software, and all my older photos that had been posted DISAPPEARED.
I think that was likely a result of a wholesale change in URL's, but I'm not sure as I am nowhere near a computer guru....ha...ha
Costs me $5/mo for my web provider for the server space and bandwidth, and depending on how ICANN is feeling, between $15 and $20 a year to own the domain name. Other domains are cheaper - .com for my web page and the .net I have for my personal email are sometimes higher. For simply a place to host pictures, you cna get whatever you want, whatever is cheapest.
Things will remain the same across providers IF you use your own domain name (for a good example, note in the Electronics section I posted Rob Paisley's new web site with his circuits. Unfortunately, he is not using a purchased domain name, so if he has to switch providers again, the links to his pages will again all change, just like they did this time. I own the domain readingeastpenn.com. Say I have a picture that has a url of http://readingeastpenn.com/images/picture1.jpg. (The forum automatically makes what looks like a URL into a link - but this one will fail, I don;t have a file with that name on my page). No matter who I have actually host my web site, the url will always be the same. I could set up a web server on my home server and point my domain to it, and the URL will look exactly the same.
Like I said, there is some initial setup - you have to buy a domain name, and you have to set up with a hosting provider, and you have to set up some method of transferring files. But you do that once, after it's set up you only ever have to change something if you change providers. Or you change your password or something.
If you want to know more, PM me, so we don't keep hijacking Dave's thread.
hon30critter rrebell seems to be a good plan for a club, a little bit of something for everyone which is what a club needs rrebell: Thank you for recognizing that. One of our more vociferous club members pointed out several times that "there is a lot of track". Yes! How else do you get as many operators as possible on to a layout that it built in a limited space? Cheers!! Dave
rrebell seems to be a good plan for a club, a little bit of something for everyone which is what a club needs
rrebell:
Thank you for recognizing that. One of our more vociferous club members pointed out several times that "there is a lot of track". Yes! How else do you get as many operators as possible on to a layout that it built in a limited space?