Track has gone down on the new S&NE

 Some negotiation has taken place with the Estate Manager (SWMBO) about how the new layout was going to work. I built it so that it would sit on the desk when in place and would split into two when not in use. The layout turned out to be a bit bigger for some reason. It was supposed to be 1600 x 350mm but , somehow , it ended up 1700x350mm. This didn't matter but I can't work out how it happened as it was all designed in Anyrail so I must have made a stupid mistake there.

OK, so SWMBO decided that I would never use it if I had to put it up and take it down. Good thinking. One of my other hobbies is making patchwork but I never get to do any as the sewing machine is stored in a cupboard in the bedroom so it never comes out. Her plan was very good. Next to my desk are two glass cabinets that contain my scale models plus my Camberwick Green collection. Currently, there is nothing in front of them. She suggested that I make it permanent by siting along in front of these cabinets. I can easily make legs for the board. I have a special cutter for foam core that cuts a V in a line so that the board can fold into a 90 degree bend. This makes a very strong leg. 

So what does it look like now that it has track and has been fixed into one unit.

All of the track on the main board is now in place. The line in the middle - the short one with a white dash below it - is where the turntable is to go. I was wondering how I was going to get a stepper motor on to  the turntable when there was only 2" clearance, Now that the layout is to be on legs, it won't matter as there will be clear air under it.

The next steps with the layout itself are to wire it up both for DCC and for the point motors. For the point meters, I use ESU SwitchPilots (four outputs on each). The outputs all have one DCCConcepts  DCD-SDC6 which converts the three way output of a SwitchPilot into a two way suitable for Kato point motors.  I have ordered some 22gauge solid wire for the track feeds. That should be here tomorrow. However, my first job is to make the legs for the board. More on that next time.

I am back with foam core and Kato

 So I am back in harness and buzzing with ideas. I have been down to Hobbycraft to pick up four sheets of 5mm foam core - they always have a deal 4 sheets for £10 - which I use for making lightweight railway boards. I also dashed down to our storage room (at StorageMart - bit of a dig as my son-in-law-manages  the local branch). I retrieved all my track and my ECos DCC controller.

I have spent a couple of days working on a layout design. I have hovered between keeping the Kato track or going to Peco. Financially, there isn't much in it so long as I don't go the route I have always done in the past and used the DCC Concepts point motors. Finally, I decided that I would stay with Kato Unitrack.

First step was to make the boards. The tops are firstly supported by a double layer of foam core making it 10mm. Of course, the lengthwise strength of the boards is much greater than they are side ways.

I have built the base in two halves so the railway can be leant against the bookcase next to my desk when not in use. The two halves, when put together, are held by a couple of clips made, yet again, out of 5mm foam core.

Finally, with the board built, it sits nicely on the dining room table. 

This won't be its normal home. I am expecting to clear the front of my desk as this will support the boards completely. Next job is to lay some track. I have just placed an order with N Scale American Trains for the track that I don't have. Hopefully, that will come in the next couple of days and then I can get on with building the layout properly. Once I have the basic track laid, I will be able to build the storage road board. This will be 1000mm long and about 110mm wide and have a couple of yards of Peco track on it. Mixing Peco with Kato is not difficult. The reason for this is that I have about 4 yards of Peco already so that will save some of the expense.

This is the first plan. However, you know what Generals say about a battle plan? No battle plan ever get survives first contact with the enemy. Hence, I don't expect the following plan to end up the final version.

Am I back or am I dreaming?

 Well, its nearly two years since I last posted and all my model railroad stuff has been in our storage unit all that time. I have had a lot of fun building scale plastic models see Gentle Scale Models. I have also taught myself to play the Tin Whistle and am now struggling with a soprano saxophone! One thing we don't have under ordinary circumstances is a television. We are one of those strange couples who can live without one. We did succumb almost at the same time as the railroad went. We even took out a subscription to Sky satellite feed - for 18 months. Well, the 18 months was up about a month ago and guess what, we don't have a TV again!

Our evenings are nice and quiet or we are listening to our superb Naim Uniti-Atom hi-fi. Being old fashioned, I love paying vinyl records of the jazz I grew up with. However, reading from 7 pm to 10pm can get a bit boring and, at 77 years old, I get tired in the evenings. I get too tired to make scale models and no-one wants me playing a sax in the evenings. I got to thinking and realised that, if I had a model railroad, I could spend some evenings running trains. So, we are off again.

Here is my desk.

You might wonder how I can get a railroad on here. Well, you see, it just has to sit here when I am using it. I make my railroad benchwork from 5mm foam core, which, when properly structured, is plenty strong for an N scale pike (to use an old expression). The plan is to build a base that is 1600mm long and 350mm wide.  When not it use, it will stand vertically next to the desk - when we move the bookcase that is just 400mm across. Fortunately, there is sufficient space. This will be the main board. In addition there will be a dismountable storage yard of about 800mm x 80mm coming off to provide a destination. This is the first pass.

The plan is supposed to represent a branch line terminus with a small freight yard and an engine facility. I have a whole pile of Kato Unitrack left over from my previous desktop layout so that is what this is using. I like Unitrack because I don't have to ballast the track (OK maybe I should but...). Also, I like the way that the points (switches) are all set up with motors and only require a two wire connection to work with my ECoS 50210 DCC controller. It is a bit of a fiddle getting all the track lengths correct so that it goes together properly. I have to admit that there are a couple of tiny gaps that will probably be OK with little bit of fettling.

Back to the layout. Well, there is a lot wrong with this. Firstly, a small terminus in the USA wouldn't require double track.  It is there because I have a Unitrack double crossover which I would like to use. I did think of making it a through station but then a small engine terminal wouldn't look right. I would like a turntable as I dislike having low hood locos running in "reverse". I know that they do but... As it happens, the turntable is very expensive - circa £270 - so I may have to forego that and put a bit more yard and industry track work in. We shall see.

The river is there because, from my last layout, I have both a single and a double track girder bridge and it seems silly not to use them. This is as far as I have got. I am hoping that a regular annual payment from the USA will be agreed in December - I do some programming work for them and this is an annual retainer. If that is agreed, the turntable will not be an issue but we are waiting.

My Model Railroad - reality

 When mother-in-law came to live with us, I traded my hobby room for some space at the end of our bedroom. Our flat has some really decent sized rooms. That's when I shifted to Maerklin 3-rail and had a ball. One day she says to me (she being my wife and known as SWMBO) "Can I have my bedroom back?" Up came the railroad and the bedroom got tidied up. SWMBO offered me some space in the living room so that is when the desk was put in place. First up, I built a little N scale switching layout but replaced that with a Kato Uni-track round-roundy which was coming along nicely. Then SWMBO says to me "Can I have my living room back?". 

Well, as SWMBO wanted her bedroom back and her living room back, I wasn't left with much space to move so all of the railroad stuff got packed away and the desk was put down the end of the bedroom. This took up much less space than the original railroad so SWMBO seemed to be happy. At least I had somewhere where I could do some modelling even though the railroad was out.

Guess what happened next? "Can I have my bedroom back?"  So, we sorted out the living room and brought the desk back into the same space as it left. However, this time it is purely the modelling desk from the bedroom so I am busy making lots of scale plastic models - See my "Gentle Scale Models" blog.

There is a future where I get my model room back but we don't discuss that for fairly obvious reasons. Even so, when I get it back, SWMBO wants some space for her Jigsaw puzzle activity so my railroad may be a bit constrained. I am trying to give a small amount of thought to it but it is difficult to get serious when I don't know when and I don't know how much room.

That's it for now. Keep checking Gentle Scale Models to keep up with that. I am shortly to start a new photography blog as I have recovered that hobby by obtaining a really nice Canon 90D DSLR. More later.

Kato track a reality

 I am amazed that times has flown whilst we were locked down. Getting free at the end of August still seems like a non-event as I am pretty much locked in still. I get out to go to the supermarket and the model railway shop. However, even the supermarket is now gone as our favourite store started online on 1st September. So, it is just the model railway store - oh dear. I did go elsewhere just once a few days ago but that trip will get its own blog entry.

The board was built, as usual, using 5mm foam core which works really well for me. I am fortunate to have a desk that is 1.6m x 0.8m, height adjustable, so this is a really firm base and the board is so light that I can pick it up. Also, I can match the desk height to that of the dining room table so I can spin the whole lot round and support it that way when I need to get to particular areas of the board.

Since then, I have laid a grass mat over the board. This didn't go too well as I used double sided tape to hold it down and it got stuck in folds a few times. Peeling off and starting again still left some little ones so I left them, on the basis that they will probably be covered by scenery as I go along! 

Right, so, I bought all the Kato track and laid it out as shown the the Amhurst layout. I made one change - I added an interchange track on the fron of the layout so that I could b ring new stock on and take old stock off. The Kato track needed little in the way of wiring and everything went down as expected. All the points come with a built in point motor so all I had to do was to add some DCC accessory decoders. As I had some ESU SwitchPilot boxes to hand, there came into play and worked really well except for two problems - the built in wiring and the four point crossover. Kato points work from two wires, not three like most UK motors. Instead of being given a pulse from separate polarity wires, the Kato units need a change in polarity on the two wires for the point to switch. To change the SwitchPilots over to thise means of operation required each point feed to have a DCC Concepts DCD-SDC in the line. This converts the three wire SwitchPilot output to the required two wire. These come in handy 6 packs and weren't expensive. Now, we come to the crossover. Kato kindly wire this as a single unit so there are only two wires coming from it. Following my experience with SwitchPilot units when trying to power SEEP twin solenoid motors (the units failed to make the switch on about 8 out of 10 tries), I pulled out one of the Train Tech units that I had bought to solve this issue. These Train-Tech accessory decoders provide four outlets the same as the ESU units but have a capacitor discharge unit built in so get a bigger bang for the buck! I put one of these on the crossover and everything worked fine.

I then cut into the baseboard to make the river that flows under the two girder bridges. I made the river come down the hill from the backscene. The river was made using Woodlands Scenics Realistic Water. This came out very well but I had to use about five layers to get the depth and effects that I wanted.

OK, so lets have a look at where we are and where we have been.

First off we have Jacobs corn and feed mill. This was built from plans in a Model Trains book that I have had since the 1950s. It is scratch built using Evergreen corrugated Iron sheet. Next to it is the tank farm which was built using toliet paper inner rolls coated with strips of printer paper. The signs on the tanks were printed on the computer but the sign on the feed mill is a computer printed  decal which nestles down nicely into the corrugations.

The sacks on the deck were made by rolling DAS clay out into a thin snake and cutting in where needed. The cut pressure makes the pieces look like sacks.

Blums Lumber gets its name from  my book my Frank Ellison. It is an industry on his Delta Lines and, again comes from a book that I have had since the 1950s. It is scratch built out of plastic card with the wood coming from Hobbycraft matchsticks. Again, the name on the roof is a printed decal. I would like to say that it was purposely non-straight but it ended up like that and I couldn't correct it so I left it!

This is Schmidt's coal yard. Again, built from plans in the 1950s book.

Here is the exit to the lumber yard. The trucks are 3D printed in China and bought off EBay. Four trucks for $9 including shipping! The lake is made using Realistic Water.

This is the stream that feeds the lake. The girder bridge is, yet again, made from plastic card but to my own design. The decals is another home made one.

This is the tunnel that feeds into the interchange track. It doesn't go anywhere so there is about 6" of track and then a bumper!

Well, how about a little video of the whole thing in its current state?

And again and again

I am fated never to get a railway together. When ballasting the current switching layout, I managed to glue three points together so hard that they would not come apart to work. I could, of course, replace all three points but there is an issue with that. As I use foam core for my baseboard, pulling up a point that is stuck down will be catastrophic for the surface of the board. The strength of the foam core comes, not from the 5 mm of foam but the extremely thin layer of paper on both sides. Take some paper away and the board is ruined.

I now had to contemplate what to do and the answer, as always, was to "start again"! I was discussing the situation wit my wife when she asked why I hadn't been using the railway up to the point of the glue disaster. We talked about it and, as usual, Valerie had seen a flaw in the current arrangements. It seemed a good idea to have a small switching layout along the back of the desk but, in fact, it was difficult to use there and, as I have found before, once something is difficult to use, it never gets used!

I had been having thoughts about my Marklin set up against my current N scale and one thing had come to light. I really liked the use of Marklin C-Track. This is like Hornby/Bachmann track where you can put it together and take it apart easily. In fact, many Marklin fans have what they call "Carpetbahn" layouts - a muddle German for "Carpet railway". They put the track down for a few days and run some trains. Then, later, they take it up only to be put down again in the future in a different layout. I really liked being able to click the track together and then, when extending the layout, click some more on. There is one track system in N Scale that allows this - Kato Unitrack. I have seen boxes of it when visiting Scograil but never thought of using it before.

I searched around for some ideas and found out that there was a change in the way that points are operated using Unitrack. Each point comes with a built in point motor, so that is good, but the motor operates differently from most in that it is 2 wire, rather than 3. It seems that the point switches polarity when it changes so only two wires are required. I had a chat with Kevin at Coastal DCC about this. I now have a DCC Concepts DCD-SDC6 pack that contains 6 little units that convert the output of three wires from my ESU Switch Pilots into the required 2 wire operation. So, that is the techy bit sorted. Now, I have to learn a bit more about the track itself, and the use of these with an actual point.

Kato make a lot of combination boxes to extend the basic oval that comes with their sets. I have ordered a box that contains two points and some straights to make up a set of sidings.

It took me a while to realise that you don't get the oval in this box, just the sidings  - and £92 later, I have a set coming! Unitrack isn't cheap when compared to Peco but is similar to Marklin in cost so I should be used to it. Mind you, I don't have a friendly seller that offers me points, etc. at knockdown prices as I did with Adrian.

Valerie suggested that I forget about using the desk for my laptop, etc. and keep the top clear for the railway in a similar way to when it was in the bedroom. However, I am going to keep to the fixed dimensions of the desk and not extend outwards - 63" x 32". This should be ample for a nice N scale layout. I have searched the internet for track plans and found a nice one on the Kato web site. The one I liked is called Amhurst 2005. Now Amhurst is the huge model railroad show up the road from my friend Dan who lives in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. It takes place once a year and I would love to visit but... I entered the plan into Anyrail so that I could price it up.

 Valerie asked if I could print it out to see how it went. Just as well that I had entered it into Anyrail as it is easy to print out the track at 100%. It needs pasting together but it works very well.

The right hand loop is designed to be elevated and there are two bridges across the back with a river running under that finishes in a lake. I have taken the opportunity to extend the right hand loop out by one straight. Valerie would like me to put a fun fair in there as I did with my original Marklin layout. Faller make some nice sets so that's in the plan. I have also added a spur out the front as an interchange track where I can insert trains and remove them.

As you can see from the list there are quite a few items needed so this isn't going to be cheap, especially as the scissors crossover is £52 on its own (plus the single Switch pilot and four of the three to two wire units!). Fortunately, Valerie's mum gave me some money and I have been selling off my Marklin stuff so I have the available funds - close to £350! Fortunately, I have the ECos controller and mobile hand set plus 3 locos and 20 odd freight cars. There are two changes that I might make. I might put the scissors crossover at the back which will cut down the reverse running on the double track for trains from the interchange track. In fact, as I have the funds, I might put an extra crossover there so that trains can move between the two tracks on either side of the layout.

The V3 set comes on Tuesday and I will set it up to test the track and to get the points working with my ECoS. If that works well, then I will buy the rest. Happy days!

N Scale Sunset and North Eastern startup

Now I have it up and running I can give a fuller description of what is going on.

The layout is definitely 5' long by 10" wide with a 27" x 4"  extension for storage. All the track is laid and the point motors installed.

I tried the NCE system but had forgotten how pedestrian these controllers are. After my ECoS, everything seemed so difficult to select. Want to switch a point? Select Accessory, press a number corresponding to the point, press enter and then either 1 or 2 depending on the switch direction. On the ECoS - see the point you want (with an extended description), touch the point and see it move with a visual indication of the direction! No contest. I packaged the NCE up and sold it on EBay. It sold in 30 minutes of putting it up.

I decided that, as the layout was close at hand and quite small, I would like to have a hand controller and purchased the ECoS Mobile Station. This is like a mobile phone except it has a big speed control know fitted. I know that I could have used my phone using Engine Driver software but that would require my computer to be running JMRI and I wouldn't have the knob.

I decided, after spending some time with the SEEP point motors, that I could live with them. There seemed little point in shelling out £200 for 8 Cobalt motors. The TrainTec boxes work the motors nicely. I don't like the clunk that you get every time one moves but I can live with that.

I sorted out my loco situation. N Scale American Trains shipped me an Atlas Alco S2 switcher along with a 6 pin Digitrax decoder. It turned out that I hadn't fried the GP7 Digitrax decoder - just not connected it up correctly. Now I have two working DCC locos. I have bought a third one - an Atlas GP35 - from Rails of Sheffield and Coastal DCC have delivered yet another Digitrax decoder ready to go inside.

I have amassed 20 freight cars and 2 passenger coaches and have a caboose coming. This little(!) collection enables be to run some local freights, some short unit trains of gondolas and some short passenger trains. All of these are constructed by my Car Card software, of which more later.

OK, now some photos to bring you up to speed. Firstly, the basic desk.

Now, the desk with the railroad board in place. As you can see the desk is plenty big enough for the railroad and still have a usable desk.

Now the storage extension.

As you can see, the extension fits across the top of the printer. The printer is on a set of craft drawers that are on wheels so can be wheeled out from underneath as the track is self supporting. Everything is strong enough for me to lift the railway up and over to place it at the front of the desk for close working.

I was waiting for the Cobalt motors to come back into stock before I ballasted the track - I was going to have to lift each point to remove the spring. However, now I am staying with the SEEP motors, I can get on with the work. In the meantime, I started on some buildings. I realise the Exxon is too late for my railroad and should be ESSO or Texaco but Exxon was the only tank car I could get so it made sense to work with what I have. Rule 1 applies here (Rule 1. It is my railroad!). 

The two tanks are made from the inside core of a roll of toilet paper (if you are from the UK - think Blue Peter:-). The office is from a book called Easy-to-build Model Railroad Structures - a Kalmbach book from the 1950s that cost me $1 when I was a lad. The next structure is from a downloaded file that I printed onto an A4 sticky label before mounting on some foam core. The plant name and message were created in Inkscape and stuck on over the originals (a furniture factory).

The third industry that I have built to date is "Blum's Lumber Co.". This is a name that I stole from Frank Ellison, whose book 'On Model Railroads' has been a bible to me ever since I started at 10 years old.

This is all constructed of 40mm matchsticks (I bought a bag of 5,000 from Amazon for little money).  The roof is Evergreen corrugated plastic. The office was designed by me as a typical type of building - again out of Evergreen sheets.

Lastly, I am currently fitting a roof to the layout so that I can install some LED lighting. The roof is removable so that I can get to the back. It should light up really nicely.

The bits of paper that you can see are where the other industries are going. The sticky notes are to remind me which is which!