What's up GEC.
I usually buy RTR b/c, well, it's avalable and pretty darn cheap for me. Of course, there's only one pre-assembled structure on my layout (N scale bachmann farmhouse). Not to many N scale kits out there that are easy to find (not saying they aren't out there, but when you can get a boxcar RTR for about $7 or $8 bucks (w/o shipping though), that's a pretty good deal). I figure when my 4x8 is done I'll probably either start building more kits or working on the extension I have planned (if the space is there to do it).
Sawyer Berry
Clemson University c/o 2018
Building a protolanced industrial park layout
I don't think anything I run is straight out of the box. They all have details, have been repainted, or have some kind of altercation. High Five for being different Chris!
Alex
Well, the MoPac Bulkead is OOS, and the D&H Gon is back. I salvaged the trucks from the Bulkhead, and with a bit of glue and paper, got the Gon rolling... (Yeah, that's our fix for everything)
I added a little decking until I ran out.
Well I was out all day guys, I didn't get your photos!! I didn't plan on going out, but I have no control over grandparents. You kinda have to go do the corny things they ask you to do...
And it's a little dark to take them now, there's not enough light in the basement to get an ok shot. I'll take 'em in the morning, if I GG doesn't convince me to get on Skype. (in other words, that means I'm not going to be there GG!)
Welcome green_elite_cab! I like your equipment roster, especially the PL42AC and the GP15-1.
Jordan, hope you get those parts soon!
GG, the gon looks good. Are those pencil shavings?
Sawdust. I plan on sawing lots of wood, and sharpening lots of pencils, and airbrushing them with aluminum and shades of rust, to make a shredded metal load.
Well instead of Skype, I got up and took some photos before I leave for the day...
Here is the overview:
The lighting, I use two 60 watt bulbs:
Inside the booth: There is a filter:
Behind that you have the mini furnace fan. The paint can never come in contact with the motor:
Side view:
And here is the fan. The air goes out the duct for the dryer, I just make sure the dryer is plugged back in when I'm done, or it gets pretty humid!
(and you don't need to tell me the basement is a mess, and that theres mold on the ground... I know that, I know the basement isn't finished, that would be why I don't have a huge layout down there!)
RailfanAlex, that reminds me I need to get some sort of ventilation system down here.
I went down to the LHS today with some of my Christmas money. I got 2 Erie & Lackawanna Proto 2K drop-end gondola kits and 2 somewhat messed-up BNSF Accurail hoppers. The hoppers need some work, and then I'm going to patch all of them for the Wisconsin and Southern.
I'll second that, Alex! On one Accurail boxcar of mine, I replaced both of them with screws after one of them snapped, dropping...oh wait. This would sound better as a story...
*Ahem*
On one dark and stormy night, an Eastbound work train was heading up a steep mountain grade. The engineer was having trouble with wheelslip, as his train was hauling two hoppers filled with heavy gravel with only an under-weighted GP35 for power. One Accurail boxcar had the shell literally filled with metal weight (it weighed several pounds!) for reasons unknown... (It wasn't me!) As he finally reached the summit, his train was late, and risked delaying the hotshot. He headed downgrade faster than he should, attempting to beat the hotshot to the West end of double track at Dooley, where the hotshot would have to stop if the work train wasn't clear.
Suddenly, the GP35 lurched, derailing. The heavy freightcars surged forward, propelled by the heavy hoppers and the over-weighted boxcar. The locomotive was pushed aside by the snowplow behind it, and the rest of the train surged downgrade.
The dispatcher and engineer of the Westbound hotshot was alerted by the work train engineer, uninjured in a ditch beside the track in the GP35, and were able to route the hotshot onto the diverging track, giving the runaway work train a straight path - except for the sharp curve in Dooley!
The runaway train took the curve, and seemed as if it would make it unscathed, to roll to a stop on the long siding. Then the heavy boxcar's weight snapped one of the Accurail truck pins, derailing the car and jamming one end under the roof of an Atlas Station. The other end was hit by the gravel hoppers, which proceeded to derail and spill gravel all over the lumberyard and residential house's yard and pool nearby. They kept going, bowling over a tree and ending up in the pool in a strange parody of the Pink Panther... The plow, ahead of the boxcar, kept rolling on the rails. The crew survived. The rest of the cars, behind the gravel hoppers, created a massive pile-up in the lumberyard.
Damage:
The Atlas station had it's roof almost ripped off, and took several days to repair. The boxcar was repaired (with 2-56 screws!), put back into service (without the weights!), and later sold to a friend. Both hoppers survived and are awaiting a repaint, and the rest of the cars are still in work train service. The GP35 survived in perfect shape, and is soon to be sold for an unrelated reason, and the engineer was fired immediately. (I won't say who that was to protect myself the guilty...)
Here's a photo of the scene a few months before The Atlas station is barely visible above the roof of the boxcar. That pine tree is the one the hoppers hit. It's still there, but it's never been glued back down...
Nowadays all those buildings by the backdrop are gone, replaced by an open lot. There's just been too many runaways that have derailed there... I removed them to protect the cars that derail there. Now they just derail onto dirt, gound foam, and lichen, no hard plastic buildings... Nothing is quite heavy enough to destroy the buildings anymore...
And THAT's the story of the snapped truck pins! That was one of the worst operating sessions (well, not really a whole session, I only had one other operator) ever, second only to the time the Zephyr fried in the middle of it... And it was the same operator too... Neither time was his fault of course...
Anyway, now I'm off to go solder a couple hundred rail joints...
That's Epic! But I see no pictures!
Funny thing about the Accurail cars... I got them super-used at the shop for $1 apiece. The trucks and stuff were replaced by a guy who did his own thing. I have to fix truck mounted hook-horn couplers and screws that are about 3x too big for model railroading. Here's a picture:
All right, I fixed the photo. Thanks for the heads up!
I just got done soldering a couple dozen rail joints. I fixed up the whole Stude crossover dead area (BOTH mainlines were dead for at least 2 1/2 feet!) and I was in the middle of a power feed in the West end of WRJ yard when I was called up for dinner.
I learned something about safety while soldering today too... I was bending down low to the tracks (wearing safety goggles), trying to get that feeder wire to stick , when one of our cats jumped up on the layout barely a foot from my head. I was taken by surprise and put the soldering iron down on it's rest to get the cat down...but not all the way on... As I put the cat down on the floor, I bumped the soldering iron wire, and it fell off the layout, brushed my shoulder, and fell onto the floor. I managed to remember someone's advice here not to try to catch a falling soldering iron () and ducked away. The iron fell on the carpet, which started to smoke... I picked up the iron, stomped on the carpet to put it out, and wiped the iron on the damp sponge.
If I hadn't been wearing a hat and a fleece, I'd have a pretty nasty burn on my arm right now! Of course, that wasn't exactly planning ahead for safety... It's just really cold in the unheated basement!
If you've never soldered before, PLEASE don't take this that soldering is dangerous and you shouldn't do it unless completely necessary! I've been soldering for over 6 years now, and this is the only time I've even come close to burning myself. As long as you're careful, a soldering iron is no more dangerous than a toaster, for example. I've burnt myself on a toaster oven (I touched the top, not expecting it to be hot, when I was 9) but not on a soldering iron!
Next I have the whole yard to do... Better get busy!
Carpet Smoke just smells soooooooo fragrant.
I need to resolder the decoder into my S4... Yayyyy non-fun-ness...
BTW, has anyone other than Jordan considered what Tri-Centennial Locomotives will look like?
Tri-Centennial? Not exactly... I probably won't be around long enough to see them. I'll bet you $10 that there probably won't be any SD45s painted in that scheme like the Bi-Centennial though!
I'd have to agree with Tyler.
This is what I've been working on recently:
The CP is MDC, the N&W and B&O are P1K, and the DT&I and NP are Accurail (not 100% on that). The coal loads I made usning the leftovers from when I did 25 hoppers at once. I could proably do another 20 or so with what's still leftover. Pretty darned good for 8 bucks to be able to do over 50 cars.
I'm going to P-coal again tommorow, maybe I'll get some more cars. I've decided to use my gift card to get parts for my U30C and C424s. Dunno if $25 will be enough for everything though.
Vincent
Wants: 1. high-quality, sound equipped, SD40-2s, C636s, C30-7s, and F-units in BN. As for ones that don't cost an arm and a leg, that's out of the question....
2. An end to the limited-production and other crap that makes models harder to get and more expensive.
Oh the joy of maintaining rolling stock!
Glad you don't catch soldering irons Ty!
Maintaining rolling stock can be a pain, especailly when you have piles of stuff that need something. Luckily for me it's just weathering, except it's on over 30 cars.....
Anyone use the cheap acrylic paints through an airbrush before? I though about doing a thinned coat of a dirty black color (close to grimy black, which I have) to speed up weathering my coal hoppers. I have some garbage equipment to test on it's just I haven't bothered to go out and see if my airbrush works. Maybe tommorow I will try that.
BTW, I ordered new C424 shells off of Atlas, along with some stuff for my U30C.
lol, i've done dumb things with a soldering iron. You have to watch what you're doing, i once reached for the soldering iron, but reached just ahead of the handle and held it in my hand before i realize it was burning into my thumb. You would never notice, but that was painful. Now i keep an eye on my hands at all times, lol.
Modeling Conrail, Amtrak and NJ DOT under the wires in New Jersey, July 1979.
I worked till 10 last night, then got up at 6:30 this morning to finish the soldering. The whole layout is soldered and I installed one new feeder as well.
Next project: Fix the trackwork... I have a few bad joints that need filing and some switch points need it too. Now I just need to get a needle file...
After that I have to buy and install metal wheels on 6-8 cars, and install decoders in three locos. Then I have a whole bunch of locos to repaint...
In case you haven't guessed, I'm trying to get my layout ready for April Vacation when I hope to hold an operating session... And actually ready this time; all my previous sessions were basically complete disasters because of dirty track and derailments... Alex knows how bad it was! WRS should've stood for "Worst Railroad Service" back then...
A list of inprovements since then:
See what a nice person I am! I contributed!
New intermodel track - 6 cars
Old intermodel track (ripped up when new one was built) - 3 cars
Caboose track - 5 cars, but only 2 without blocking intermodel track switch
A/D 2 - 4 cars
A/D 1 - 6 cars; train frequently extended all the way off the East ladder into the staging yard...
Classification 3 (local delivery) - 4 cars
Classification 2 - 5 cars
Classification 1 - 6 cars
Mainline
It was a pretty sad yard...it had mainline style ballast, and the tracks were of course way too short...
The new yard has this arrangement. I don't know the exact car count per track because I haven't yet filled any of them to that point! Back to front again:
Classification 3 (local delivery) - 10-15 cars
Classification 2 - 10-15 cars
Classification 1 - 10-15 cars
Through/Runaround track
A/D 2 - 15-20 cars
A/D 1 - 15-20 cars
Yeah, a big improvement... (no sarcasm intended) Now I can actually fit all the cars in the track they're supposed to go in!
The staging yard was pretty small too. They had a capacity each of about 7 cars plus two locomotives. By comparison, it fit in the space taken up just by my engine terminal! It was a great space saver, but the throats were all #4s and full of sharp S-curves. It was a nightmare running anything larger than a U23B on it, and that includes the Montrealer with a P40 and three Amfleets!
Now I stage my trains at crew-change points between sessions. There are two on the layout: on the double track between Dooley and Stude, and in the yard. Trains headed Westbound out of the yard or Eastbound out of West Formanek and Stude "wrap around" to the other end of the mainline. A train headed West out of the yard towards White River Junction proper (the yard is a couple miles East) appears as a train from Concord headed to the yard, and a train headed towards Concord through Stude and West Formanek appears as a train from White River Junction headed into the yard.
I haven't actually operated a session like that with it, as I haven't had a session since last summer, IIRC. I tore up the yard and replaced it (changing the operating scheme then too) when I was very frustrated with my layout and wanting to start over. Since then, I've made a lot of improvements to get the layout working a lot more reliably, as listed above. I have seen for myself how much better it is though.
Hopefully I can convince my crew to come back in April, after they were most likely met with disapointment at their first session. I have two first time visitors, and one session went okay, the other was a complete fiasco. I know one is still interested though. Alex is actually the second-most frequent operator, behind me.
For the April session I know of three people who would most likely be interested (assuming they're not busy), one operator who has operated before and his friend, one who I have no idea if he's into operation at all, and one other who really isn't into operation, and who has enough trouble remembering how to change the loco's direction. I don't think giving him waybills, an actual job to do, and the neccesity to obtain track and time is such a good idea... He might make a good brakeman or engineer if paired with another operator.
TrainManTyYou mean suggesting that I scrap the staging and classification yard and build a better yard there? That was definetely one of the best improvements the layout went through....
Yeah that, and the fact that your new yard is almost entirely built with MNER rail.
I like operating. Hopefully next time I'm there I'll have a CCRR S4 to play with, and a NEN 70 Tonner for you to find something to do with.
Oh yeah...forgot about that! Let me tell you, 3 foot long sections of flextrack are a whole lot easier to solder than 9 inch straight sections and accompanying less-than-two-inch filler sections! There were a lot of joints to solder in the old yard...took me a whole weekend to do. The new yard took an hour.
Now I want a bigger shop area... I have a ton of equipment that I can store or "repair" in the shop area, and the actual shop track will only fit two or three cars if I hope to be able to service active locomotives... Here's a short roster of cars that I can shop...some of them actually need work done on them...
Hey guys.
I went all out and spent nearly 200 bucks on speakers, enclosures and a Tsunami TSU-1000 EMD 567. Remember, I still have the Alco V12 251 on order as well!!
I worked all day, and I just got 5 more decoder installs to do, on top of the other two I still need to do!!!
Pictures coming later tonight mostlikely.
TrainManTy Oh yeah...forgot about that! Let me tell you, 3 foot long sections of flextrack are a whole lot easier to solder than 9 inch straight sections and accompanying less-than-two-inch filler sections! There were a lot of joints to solder in the old yard...took me a whole weekend to do. The new yard took an hour. Now I want a bigger shop area... I have a ton of equipment that I can store or "repair" in the shop area, and the actual shop track will only fit two or three cars if I hope to be able to service active locomotives... Here's a short roster of cars that I can shop...some of them actually need work done on them... NH F7A ex-CN FP7 0-6-0 on flatcar and accompanying tender 1 section of an Impack on shop trucks Business car that needs repainting "Restored" 40' MOW boxcar* 40' bulkhead flatcar 2 gravel hoppers (the same ones in the epic runaway) 40' boxcar Wooden combine Snowplow Sadly, I have no room for these on the shop track, so they all sit on a track at the back of the yard where nobody can see them well. The only one that's in the shop is the ex-CN FP7.*The only reason the 40' boxcar is "Restored" and not falling apart with age (anyone who has seen how dirty I like my freight cars will know how dirty this would be) is that the car belongs to my little brother (4 in February) and he likes it clean... I showed him another identical car that was highly weathered and he seemed horrified that I'd do that to his car that he got at the Marlborough train show... I've got to teach him that the dirtier a car is, the better...
Sadly, I have no room for these on the shop track, so they all sit on a track at the back of the yard where nobody can see them well. The only one that's in the shop is the ex-CN FP7.*The only reason the 40' boxcar is "Restored" and not falling apart with age (anyone who has seen how dirty I like my freight cars will know how dirty this would be) is that the car belongs to my little brother (4 in February) and he likes it clean... I showed him another identical car that was highly weathered and he seemed horrified that I'd do that to his car that he got at the Marlborough train show... I've got to teach him that the dirtier a car is, the better...
TrainManTy, do you think you could do a layout update? Also, you liked that Eastbound Surpise vid, I uploaded another like it, it's only a 5 engine lashup I think, but with a whole lot more cars, and also some weird dude that walked in front of the shot. LOL Anyway, I was running the train station that day, so I thought I would ask: Does anybody work their local train station some days? (Real, not models ) also could you teach my dad the dirter the better thing, he always says, "You sure you want to weather that engine, you can't get it back to normal!)
So here's what I've been up to lately
Working on building Magic Pan Bakeries, which I got for Christmas. Main building, office, and transfer building complete. Working on finishing silos and piping. Making and planting trees. I got scenery completely done in the corner. I'm almost out of trees, and I'm not sure when I can get more. Lots of time running trains w/ my new EZ Command. Not the greatest DCC system out there, but it sure beats DC by far.
No pictures yet, because the camera isnt working :(
I've done alot, despite my busy schedule. Hockey everyday really kills vacation. As most of you already know, I tried to have some fun by going railfanning yesterday, but it didn't go too well and I don't feel like going into details.
Maybe I'll get pictures tomorrow, if I'm not working on my term paper all day and if my dad has the other camera here.
My Model Railroad: Tri State RailMy Photos on Flickr: FlickrMy Videos on Youtube: YoutubeMy Photos on RRPA: RR Picture Archives
TrainManTyI've got to teach him that the dirtier a car is, the better...
I've got to teach him that the dirtier a car is, the better...
Don't forget about locomotives as well.
Well looks like my parts haven't come yet. Tomorrow or Friday they should be here, so maybe I won't be able to get the conductors side hood for my SDL done by Friday; we'll see.
Tyler, you should do some "rail fanning" on your layout during on OP session
My Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/JR7582 My Flickr Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wcfan/
Besides the decoder installs, I doubt I will do any modeling before school starts...
I'm swamped in projects I left last minute, and midterms are coming up. Should be busy to say the least!
Packers#1TrainManTyI've got to teach him that the dirtier a car is, the better... Don't forget about locomotives as well.
Yes, they do tend to get rather grimy...
Demonwolf, what do you mean by a layout update? Like a fly-over video of the whole layout? I probably will do that once I get the camcorder fixed.
Jordan, do you mean video or photos? I have done some videography during sessions (see this playlist: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F770B58ABB40831A) but photos are considerably more difficult. Also, if this is a full session, I'll have my hands full assisting the operators and/or operating a train myself. Only Alex can really be called an experianced operator on the WRS, and even he hasn't operated it since I've totally changed the operating scheme.
My younger brother Andy and I operated a bit today in the yard. He wanted to run the snowplow back and forth in the yard, so I helped him pull out the cabooses on the caboose/MOW/storage track in the yard to get to the plow. Then we pulled out the plow, shoved the cabooses back, and I let him run the plow back and forth in the yard. All of this was done with U23B #2306. Then we ran it over the whole layout and back into the yard. This offered me an insight into the op. session: