Just working the rails

I've actually had some good time to work on the trains this past week and weekend.  Got a ton of track put down.  Feeling good but, of course, my lovely wife has thrown a huge wrench into the gears with a change of plans on where the layout can go!  More on that later.

So my progress report -

Screwed down the KW side of the layout.  Which sounds easy, but was a bit mental fight as I have the electronics drawer underneath it.  Access going forward is limited to the front two thirds.  Which, if I planned correctly should be fine.  The back third of the drawer is power distro, the Digitrax chief, my PR-3 and a bit of the TC-64.  There's no looking back now !

With the help of my 3 year old son, got a lot done.  He enjoyed using the tweezers to pick up small objects, not so much with the actual help.  Small steps, small steps !

I completed the entire KW yard, and Waterloo is connected to it.  Picture is above.  Added a couple notes about what's going where, possibly.  The only definite is the KW Station in the yard.  This will service GO Transit and VIA Rail.

Notice my mainline is elevated from the spurs and yard.  Got this idea from everyone else...

KW yard to the left, storage and roundabout tracks to the right

Connection from Waterloo to KW is the middle line, the engine is on  the Elmira spur

Of course with all the track work down it allowed me to test it out.  Have to add a few more power feeders, less than I thought actually.  It all seemed to work pretty well.   Next step is to wire up all the servo's and then watch for derailments with my most finicky cars.

Next blog will go into the big change of plans !

Track work and Electronics

So I'm using a proto freelanced approach to Southern Ontario on the CP Rail lines.  Its difficult for me to actually nail down what Cities I want to model... and they'll be more representational than prototypical.   Of course most of what I'm choosing to model are actually on CN Rail lines but... well, I like CP more.  Though I might try to have a bit of CN traffic later... they do have some really nice models..

On my list - for this week - are

• Kitchener Yard and Via/GO Station, with a couple industries (maybe could be Cambridge for the factories?)
• Waterloo industry; really just wanted to get The Brick Brewery and Seagrams !
• Vaughn Inter-modal and general yard.  CP's major inter-modal is the Vaughn but I wanted other general stuff too. 
• Maple Via/GO station - I needed a station after Vaughn, so chose Maple.  No reason really, its at least got a bit of history to it.  
• St Thomas - can't do anything train related without a mention of it.  'sides the kids love Thomas and the travelling show comes here.

I flip flop on KW (Kitchener Waterloo) or using Brampton and Mississauga.  There's a nice small yard near work here for CP Rail in Mississauga, and Brampton is where I live and has some interesting industries which includes Bacardi Rum.  You might notice the number and importance of brewers in my model rail road.  Coincidence I think.  

That's the planning part - which is sort of independent of the trackplan.  I know it shouldn't be but that would be the freelanced aspect of my approach!  

Here's the track plan with a few cities on it so far.  I'll be detailing it up a bit more as I make up my mind on what's where.

That's all the planning and what not.  Here's what I've worked on.  Did the track area from St. Thomas to Waterloo, and then all the spurs in Waterloo. 

Put in the servo's for the switches on a Tam Valley Quad.  Wired up and worked it out.  There's a few ways for servo's to be mounted now, but I tried out the brass tube method.  First one was easy easy easy.  Damned if the next ones made me almost resort to my old methods!  what a pita (pain in the ass) installation.  But I persevered and finished them - except one but it has its own challenges.  That particular one is resting on a support so things have to be moved and will take a bit more thought.  

In my previous layout I discovered that the Quad could get out of sync with JMRI's control panel.  That is to say, when you pressed the physical panel button it didn't update JMRI's panel with that info.  Naturally the question is - how would it?  the Quad could put it out on the DCC bus but I don't believe that's allowed, and it doesn't use the Loconet.  So I originally thought of using the Tower Controller 64 for this purpose, that and getting sensors on the Loconet as well.  The TC-64 has 64 input/outputs that can send / receive info.  The Quad can put out TTL levels on its expansion pins (one of the reasons I like the Quad so much) that the TC-64 can interpret and then pass that info to JMRI.

So I tested it out, finally.  It worked.  Here's the incredible easy how - and at about $8 bucks per Quad its very inexpensive.

So now I have my JMRI panel switches being updated by the Quads, via the TC-64.  With some fuzzy logic, sensors and this info I can probably figure out what tracks are occupied without sensors everywhere.  I'm using the light sensors from Rob P as mentioned in my past posts.  They're inexpensive and awesome.  Not as polished a product as Tam Valley but, then again, not the same price tag either.

So that's what I've been working on for the past couple weeks! 

Continued Fun

Finding time to work on the trains seems to be difficult this season.  The kids, 3 years old, both want to help... yes twins, boy and girl, if you're stuck on the why 1 age...  but don't really contribute too much except a lot of excitement (some unwanted when they get interested in things they shouldn't)

So not making too much progress but here's what's happened these last couple weeks -

Because every layout needs a comfy chair !

More bench work construction.  Putting in the small pieces for hidden track. Ran power cables, re-used the old stuff.  Labelled it better this time around.

Found some junk server rails at work so I re-purposed them to make a slide out drawer.  Figure these can hold, oh, about 150 to 200 lb's extended to 3 feet, so probably *ok* for me leaning on it.  Learned a lot about drawers and being square.  yikes.  But it works, maybe not as smoothly as I'd like but its pretty good.   I'm going to use this as my "backwall" in Telco speak.  So all the electronics will feed in and out of here.  Except the Tam Valley Quad's that need to be near to their panels... or do they?!  they do because of the allowable cable distance for the button.  I'm going to see if I can't Macgyver something so I can put the quad's on the drawer.

Note the planned booster positions.  Track power is above

Power to left, sensors to the right

Note the use of some old BIX blocks on the right (like AT&T 110 blocks but the Nortel / Canadian version) for my sensors connections to the TC-64 loconet converter.  I'm using some photo sensors in serial, so 3 or 4 per detection section.  Each has two leads, 1 goes to a common, the other to an input on the detection board.  With currently 16 sections, that's a possible 64 little wires inter-connected.  A real mess... then one day as I was punching down dial tone at work, I had a eureka moment.  I use telephone wire (24 awg) to all the sensors, so this would be a perfect solution to keep it organized and neat.  Also changes are a breeze.

Due to the sheer number of Quad's to drive servers, I'm anticipating two boosters.  I've got one from Tam Valley and its beautiful.  Very professional, like all of the Tam Valley stuff.

I also have a DCC specialties PSX-AC that some day, I'm sure, I'll use.  That would go here as well.

Yeehaw !  first track down !

Managed to get some track installed.  This would be the hidden loop that will be underneath things.  So had to get it completed first.  Wired up with power.

Which, really, was just an excuse to test it.  Meaning I could runs trains for the first time in 6 months!

Another New beginning

Recent zoning changes within the house have relegated the trains to the newly vacated basement apartment.  Mixed feelings on the big change at the time - but now I'm just excited to re build with all the lessons learned fresh in my head.

This happened back around January, so its been some months of dismantling, storing and now, rebuilding.

What's been done so far -

Total tear down, clean up and salvaging (if possible) of the old room

Storage of trains and rolling stock (which is heartbreaking looking at them in their boxes, so lonely and sad !) .  How long until they run again !?!?

all wiring coiled and stored

all electrical components stored.

first level of the new bench work is almost complete, working on a double level layout so its a little more complicated than I've ever tried before.

Running the Trains

As mentioned, I'm in a dreaded transitional phase of the train project; moving from one room to an unknown room.  This is where, I think, its easy to lose your momentum and call the whole thing off and be done with it.  While this would be easy, I'd always be nagged internally with my train bug.  What I'm trying to say is - I have to keep my interest levels up while its determined where my trains will reside next in the house.

I'm running trains.  Got some new stuff in the mail, a box of goodies! I've started going into the inter modal scene, since let's face it, that's the way of trains now.  That and my new design calls for a harbour full of fun inter modal cranes and ships.  Oh, and a couple KATO AC4400 Beaver logo locomotives. 

 If you look at the picture to the left you'll probably think I like 7up.  I don't.  For the nosy - yes, that is my work cube and my shoes.

Naturally I tried to install the decoders into the loco's that night.  So a couple things...  apparently Digitrax changed the decoder type that's recommended for this KATO unit.  Although it says clearly in their documentation (web, instructions etc etc ) that it doesn't need a shell modification to fit, IT DOES.  Digitrax mentioned that - after when I asked them.  Great service response time though!  anyway, they were helpful with a suggestion - file down the back LED or mod the case.  I chose the filing method.  Worked great.  FOR THE FIRST ONE !!!  Of course it couldn't be easy after that.  no, that's not how life works.  The second decoder only ran in 1 direction.  Lights worked great.  ran great backwards.  nada forwards.  *sigh*

Of course Digitrax says send it back - its Friday, and I'm leaving for a course in Denver the next day so everything has to wait until I get back.  Realistically it's been a week and the decoder is still sitting on my desk waiting.

Aside from that, got my two FVM GEVO's speed sync'ed.  Or at least I thought I did.  A couple tweaks are still needed, as they're out to lunch with each other on the low speeds.  Cool feature in JMRI is their speedometer, which tells scale speeds based on my detectors.  Set the high speed to 90 mph and then worked down.

Local hobby store (http://www.cvrco.com/) had a sale this weekend, and last time I was there noticed that they've got the scarce BLMA 53' spine cars.  At full price, 89.99 its a bit much, but they had a great sale (21% off), so I got their last one.  oh yeah! 

So I ran my new KATO, my consisted GEVO's with 9 inter modal cars and associated random containers.  Sweetness. 

The nice thing about running trains is I've learned things for the next layout.  Like the importance of perfect trackwork and switches in the yard.  The BLMA's had a tendency to walk over some of the switches, thought I'd fixed 'em all perfect but apparently these cars are a bit fussier.

Had fun anyway.

More grass Man, more grass

Okay so the title is bit misleading - this isn't actually about the effects of marijuana. Maybe though, it gets me some cheap web hits ... if that's the case, sorry but thanks for visiting.  This is actually a continuation of the use of the new Grassinator on my N scale model train.  Dude - don't judge, you're looking up web references for marijuana !!   Anyway, I also tried my hand at building a rural road. Mixed results. Definitely mixed results, by that I mean the road stinks, the grass is pretty good.  Again, no weed ref intended.

The road was made with plaster of Paris tinted with grey. Mistakes

 1. should have used black not grey.
 2. was the plaster of Paris itself not runny enough I think.  
 3.Lines were painted - too thick a brush and I shake.  Tried, halfheartedly, to make a stencil but that failed too.

Grassassinator and the wonders of static electricity

My efforts for getting the short escarpment area continue... slowly.  I'm a bit mixed in thoughts on if I should finish or not.  The Zoning controller has deemed the train room to be re-zoned back to residential use.  In English that means my Wife has decided that I should clean out the garage and move into that so she can have the spare room back.

This presents some great opportunities for me to re-design, and re-build a BETTER, STRONGER, FASTER layout.  but all the work done thus far on the current layout would be trashed.  The cliffs have turned out great so it will hurt somewhat to tear them down, but I'm confident I can redo them again and make them better.  Lessons are being learned !  and in that viewpoint, I'm going to proceed a bit and finish this small section.  But the new train room is beckoning..

So my father built me a fantastic static grass applicator using a $5 dollar ionizer thingy from the internet.  The most expensive part of the build was actually a transformer to make it safe if it didn't ground properly - its electronic talk that went over my head, but amounted to if someone bypassed the grounding pin when plugging it into the wall (or extension cord) it could fry a whole lot of electronics in the house.  So that was $17 well spent I think.  Certainly a far cry from the 200 dollars the Germans want for theirs.  Although, lets face it, theirs is probably pretty cool too.  Not sure if its more powerful though.

Anyway, we tried it out at my nephews birthday party.  Very cool stuff watching the grass stand up.  Feels like fur when the glue dries.   Anyway, here's some shots from my new iPhone 4. The first two shots are kinda artsy and look great, the first with shadows from surrounding things or clouds but then again I'm biased.  The other shots show more of the grass.  The hill is covered in 'vegetation" not grass. It will have trees all over it when its complete, so that will be the forest floor.  I'm going more for a bit of different colour and texture.  I'm going to do some more passes with different coloured grasses to make it thicker and more like a field between the tracks.

My weakness seems to be ballast.  Sure the line that's done is an old line, that's supposed to look kind of crappy and used (with the grass growing in it) but it looks really bad. Maybe it will dry better and I'll be happy.  Or I'll just fix it up as best as I can.  Of course, there's the fact that it will all be destroyed with the new train room move !