The S& N.E.s place in the world - and in my modelling room!

I have had some reactions to my plans for the new layout. This has caused me to restate the back story for the S&NE. Firstly, I decided to produce a better map, including the real B&M and New Haven.

Firstly, I have renamed Worcester to Sunset (just because I created this railroad name in 1970 for an N Scale layout I was building and it has stayed with me ever since!). As you can see, the B&M never came near Hartford and the New Haven had a long route east and north to get to Boston. The S&NE came into being because places along the actual route felt that they were missing out by not having a railroad. I have also assumed that, because the S&NE served Sunset, the two rail links from the B&M to the town (Worcester actually) were never built. I have left off any routes that aren't involved in this story (NH from New Haven to NY for instance)

Things went swimmingly until the Wall Street Crash. Up to that time, the S&NE ran regular freights and passenger trains from Hartford to Boston and did very well out of it. Following the crash, the passenger traffic fell of, leaving the railroad to finally close the line to passengers around 1933. The 2nd WW gave the freight traffic a big boost but the military personnel trains stayed on the New Haven/B&M route as they had the stock to carry the volumes.

This continued after the war until Budd produced their RDCs. The New Haven saw these as a way to provide a service directly to Boston so that their passengers didn't have to change at Springfield. They started out with three trains a day over the S&NE but slowly reduced it to 1 each way by the time we get to our scenario. You can read, in an earlier blog entry, how this affected the passenger facilities at Sunset.

As it provides a much quicker link between Boston and Hartford, the B&M runs a daily through freight in each direction. This also eliminates the need for switching at Springfield. It also runs a way freight through to Sunset. Both of these routes are headed up by a B&M RS-3.  The New Haven runs their RDC once a day to Boston. The S&NE runs a way freight each day in both directions and a through freight to Hartford.

This gives us the following trains:
B&M Through to Hartford (stops at Sunset for S&NE direct traffic to Hartford) (B&M RS-3).
B&M Return to Boston (stops at Sunset for S&NE direct traffic to Boston) (B&M RS-3).
B&M Way Freight to Sunset (B&M RS-3).
B&M Way Freight back to Boston (B&M RS-3).
S&NE Way Freight to Boston (SNE SW7).
S&NE Way Freight from Boston (SNE SW7).

S&NE Way Freight to Hartford (SNE SW7).
S&NE Way Freight from Hartford (SNE SW7).
S&NE Through Freight to Hartford  (SNE F3A).
S&NE Through Freight from Hartford  (SNE F3A).NH RDC from Hartford to Sunset and Boston (NH RDC)
NH RDC from Boston to Sunset and Hartford (NH RDC)

These, with the switching involved, provide a nice operating session for me.

Note: If I have the geography or the history wrong then I don't care. This story will do me.

Further thoughts on the new layout

I have been giving this some real thought as I can't face going through the whole EBay thing once again. I always end up having to put some money into the pot and I don't really have any at this time (having bought a new saxophone recently and changed all of our streaming speaker system). Additionally, I have an expensive DCC Heljan (Walthers) turntable that works but has a few bits broken which means that it would be a bit iffy to try and sell.

I am coming round to the thought that maybe I should give up on roundy/roundy and go for another terminus layout. The problem is that my fictional railroad has one end at Hartford CT and the other at Boston MA which leaves me struggling to create a terminus with any grounding in my "facts". My last layout was a for a small industrial yard which was easy to justify as being an offshoot of Sunset (which is, in itself, a through station). In the space I have now, I don't really want to make an industrial yard but neither do I want to build staging off both ends.

I could do the following but I would lose the Boston/Hartford B&M through freight - and I do like my B&M RS-3. The NH Budd would still work as it could just come into Sunset and out again.

Then my staging would be for both of the ultimate destinations although I could make the split on my board and have two tracks going into the staging.

I have mocked this up on the map. Maybe, now seeing this, the S&NE would have dropped the through leg of the wye to make everything come into Sunset. However, I would have thought that this would have worked against the B&M through freights as they might as well send them over their normal, more northerly routes.

Some thoughts on the way to go.

No sure what to do now.

I have been giving this some real thought as I can't face going through the whole EBay thing once again. I always end up having to put some money into the pot and I don't really have any at this time (having bought a new saxophone recently and changed all of our streaming speaker system). Additionally, I have an expensive DCC Heljan (Walthers) turntable that works but has a few bits broken which means that it would be a bit iffy to try and sell.

I am coming round to the thought that maybe I should give up on roundy/roundy and go for another terminus layout. The problem is that my fictional railroad has one end at Hartford CT and the other at Boston MA which leaves me struggling to create a terminus with any grounding in my "facts". My last layout was a for a small industrial yard which was easy to justify as being an offshoot of Sunset (which is, in itself, a through station). In the space I have now, I don't really want to make an industrial yard but neither do I want to build staging off both ends.

I could do the following but I would lose the Boston/Hartford B&M through freight - and I do like my B&M RS-3. The NH Budd would still work as it could just come into Sunset and out again.

Then my staging would be for both of the ultimate destinations although I could make the split on my board and have two tracks going into the staging.

This is what it would look like on the map.

I have put this out to the Model Railroad Hobbyist forums so I will see what they have to say.

It all ends up in the bin again!

It seems that I never get anywhere further than running a few trains. It doesn't help that, even after much thinking and planning, I still end up with a layout that doesn't work very well. However, the driver this time was that we were moving apartments. We didn't go very far - just down two floors but the new one had a bigger 2nd bedroom (aka David's Hobby Room). I had seen the room before in that my mother-in-law moved into an apartment with the same floor layout (but a mirror image) about 6 months before our move. I had always stood at the door of the room and thought what a great railroad I would get in there.

However, by the time I had set up my modelling desk, my studying desk (I am completing an Open University degree in Computer Science), two glass cabinets full of scale models, a shelving unit with my scale model kit stash and a 10' run of kitchen units holding the rest of my "stuff", the only place left for the railroad is on the top of the kitchen units.

I have a big pile of HO equipment and only a 2' wide shelf to build a railroad. Now, if I was to go back to making a switching layout then this would be fine but I have found that I miss trains running round.

I posed the problem on the forum of Model Railroad Hobbyist. I was asking if I could get a roundy-roundy layout on here, given that I only run short 1950s diesels and 40' freight cars. What has come out of that is a suggestion to try a tight curve (I have the track) and see how it works. Apart from that there are three real suggestions:

1. Fit removable wings on both ends of the worktop to enable wider curves.
2. Fit a shelf around the room behind the computer screens etc. with a lift out bridge at the door end.
3. Move to N Scale!

I don't like option 1 and 2 doesn't work as we rent the apartment and I don't really like fixing anything to the walls - the kitchen units you can see are actually free standing. This leaves option 3. If you go back to 2011 on this Blog you will see that I have been here before. In fact it was only when we moved in 2013 that I broke up this and moved to British OO (for a very short time before I came back to US outline!).

I quite like this idea for a few reasons. Firstly, it gives me the equivalent of 20' x 4' in HO without the complications of not being able to reach the back of the baseboard. Secondly, and strange to relate, I would be glad to get away from having sound on the locos. I found it hard in a small room to have three locos all puffing or whining away. I kept turning the sound off. This way I can move to a quieter world. Lastly, I can have my dream of a really good run for the trains whilst keeping a decent yard for switching. I think that I can get enough for my current stock, off EBay, to let me get the bulk of what I want and then to build up slowly after that.

Finally, I would be glad to have something a little bit more complicated because I am still developing "Old Bill's Switch List" which is my web based car routing software.

Sorting out the point display panel

As I have mentioned, I have a problem with arthritis which means that I cannot stand and work on the railroad if it is at certain heights. One of these heights happens to match the worktop in the hobby room. The construction of the railroad is intended to be as lightweight as possible so that I can move the individual boards into the living room so that I can work sitting down at the dining table.

The railroad is designed to be operated on the hobby room worktop with me sitting alongside. However, I cannot see how the points are set when sitting down.

Part of the reason for me getting the Cobalt switch machines was to enable an easy way of indicating the routes. The secondary feed from each machine was to be used to drive a couple of LEDs. as described in the Cobalt documentation. I realised that I could make the display simpler if I used a bi-coloured LED rather than individual red and green LEDs. However, I have had experience before in soldering up complex layouts before and there is a great scope for shorts, especially when using D-Sub plugs and sockets as the connections are extremely close together. This meant that I would need to be very careful in the construction of the panel if I wanted this to be in any way robust in a layout that would be taken down and erected with regularity. I, also, wanted to be able to change the wiring very simply. The reason behind this was that the polarity of the points was different depending on which way the frog was set. Rather than have to work all this out, I decided to put everything through a breadboard. Firstly, this would alleviate much of the comoplex wiring and make it simple to reconfigure the LED connections.

The best way to manage the wiring was to make all of the connecting wires to a similar specification to the jumper wires that are used on breadboards. I have some tinned copper wire and lots of heat shrink. This is what each of the LEDs looked like once I had wired them up.

As you can see, all of the connections to the LED have been sealed within heatshrink. Also, I have soldered a small amount of tinned copper wire to the end of each lean (again with heatshrink around) to make an effective plug to go into the breadboard. Once all of the LEDs were finished, I was able to hook everything together. Each LED has one outer leg fed from one side of the DCC bus and the other leg to the opposite side of the bus. The centre pin is connected, via a 1k resistor, to the frog feed of the Cobalt machine. These connections are very simple with the breadboard.

I was a bit hesitant about powering everything up as these things normally don't work first off and I didn't relish searching for the one dry joint! However, I needn't have worried. Putting the power in resulted in all of the switch machines carrying out their self centering action with every LED reacting to the changes. Finally, I made sure that I had each LED labelled up for its correct point.

I had already made a panel out of a sheet of printer paper that I had laminated and fitted to some foam core board with 2mm holes in the foam to accept each LED. However, I had punched holes in the paper. I realised, after reading on MRH about another LED panel, that the LEDs would shine through the white paper. This would make it much neater. Anyway, here is the final result.

I can now sit on my moveable office chair, control the locos and the points from my iPad (using WiThrottle and JMRI) and see the routes as currently set - all without standing up.

As you can see, I need to reconfigure some of the LEDs to match the point orientation. Then the LEDs will be the same as the WiThrottle indicators.

So that I can finish the track, I need to lay some scenery down

One of the features of the track layout is the sunken coal drops along the front. I have a Walthers Cornerstone National Fuel Depot kit.

As you can see, this comes with a berm leading up to some coal drops. I did plan to use this on my previous layout as I wasn't in a position to cut down into that. I was going to use it on this layout but a comment on the blog suggested that dropping the ground level would make it more interesting.

The good thing about foam board is that you can just cut away. So long as there is some adequate bracing in then everything stays nice and strong. So I cut away. This is where I got to.

I have cut away the base, built the trestle and the fuel tanks and got everything into place. I then gave all of the groundwork a covering of Sculptamold. Later this evening, I gave the fuel tanks a coat of Vallejo Aluminium, the wet and dry paper laid as a road a coat of german field grey and then used one of my airbrushes to spray a coat of brown all over the area.

Obviously, the wooden trestle and the fuel tanks won't stay like this and I haven't even started on the distribution building.I have lots of weathering pastels and washes to make it look as though it has been handling coal for years! The fuel depot will be used as a refuelling point for the SW7 as well.

Fitting Cobalt Point Motors - that was fun!

It took a lot of effort and time to get the point motors working. I completely misunderstood the way that these motors work. I got the switching working first time but getting the frog polarity sorted took a good deal of time. It all seemed very simple. I had the main power bus laid by the two stripes of copper tape laid earlier. As I had used red and black wires for the track power, I decided to use orange and blue to connect up the power to the motors.

I had made a template to help lay the points to get the  slot for the  motor fulcrum bar and for the hole to accept the wire for the frog polarity in the right places. I also made a template to fit each motor to the underside of the baseboard. Each motor was fitted using the supplied double sided pad. I did install the four mounting screws as well and they held quite well in the foam board. I was concerned that the motors may skew under whatever force was applied but, in fact, there was no pressure on the motor at all once firmly in place. The fulcrum bars were trimmed down to below rail level using a cut off disc in my Dremel. Lastly, I carefully ensured that the orange and blue wires were all installed with the same polarity.

It is very simple to configure up the motors with the correct DCC IDs. On each motor there is a small switch. Set it to the program position. Using the handset, you then send an accessory command to the chosen address. DCC Concepts recommend that you do this twice but I found that once works. Set the switch back to the run position and it is all done. I quickly set my points up using just 1 to 7 across the two boards.

I put the two baseboards together, connected the two using 9 way D Sub Connectors. It was then that I got a short across the tracks. It turned out that I had crossed the connection of one connector to its bus. How I put red to black and black to red defeats me! After sorting this out, I connected the NCE Power Cab to the bus. As I hadn't yet received my new Broadway SW7, I used my B&M RS3 as a test loco.

On connecting the NCE unit, all of the point motors carried out their self centering operation. On testing each one, they all operated as expected. I did have to adjust the slider on the fulcrum bar of a couple of the motors to ensure that the points actually closed with sufficient force to keep them in place. I then tried to run the loco and immediately got a short as it met the first frog. Two days of frustration followed. I put a posting up on RMWeb (one of the UK's big model railway forums) and got lots of ideas but nothing helped.

I built a test bed to have a clear idea what was going on but that worked correctly, so I was totally bemused. I then tried the loco through each point and found that it would go through some of them but not others. After a lot of head scratching and loss of sleep, I finally realised what was going on. When testing with a continuity tester, I found the following situation on the good points.

where the red line shows no short and the green indicates a short. This is what you expect and means that the frog is powered with the correct polarity. However, on some of the points, I found the following situation:

On these points, the frog was set to the wrong polarity. I had a bit of an epiphany when I saw that, from one perspective, all of the good points were in a facing position and all of the bad ones were trailing. Slowly, I realised that I had been thinking that the Cobalts were like the old Frog Juicers that I was using previously but they are not! The Frog Juicers start up in a random situation - so the polarity of the frog is indeterminate. This doesn't matter because, when the loco hits the point, the Juicer sorts out the polarity and puts it right if need be. The Cobalts, on the other hand, are switches that conform to the way that the logic says they should be. So, if a right hand point is set to the straight road on start up, the frog will be set the same way. This is based on the polarity of the power coming in, in the sense of which side of the bus is set to which connection. My realisation told me that a trailing point would see the polarity as opposite to a facing point and, thus, would power the frog with the opposite polarity. hence my shorts! This was quickly tested by switching the orange and blue wires on the trailing points to the opposite way to the facing and everything worked. It was pointed out, when I reported this on RMWeb, that this would also need to be done if the motor was fitted in the opposite way on a point - say because of a baseboard element being in the way. I have to say that I would have thought that this might have been indicated in the documentation but I can find no mention of the issue.