New projects

So lots of new projects going on lately. On the railroad front I have two major projects going on. First I'm working on an around the tree layout for Christmas. N scale of course. The track plan calls for nearly 30 feet of "mainline" that will loop around three times. I would like to be able to have one or two trains running on this at a time for display purposes only. It's meant to look good and not necessarily be realistic or operable.

On the operations side I'm still considering a point to point shelf layout for operations. I'm thinking of a proto-freelanced shelf based on Latrobe, PA and the mixture of the Ligoneer Valley Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad Latrobe/Unity/Hostetter branches and the West Penn Railways lines. This will be a big undertaking so I'm doing some experimenting on the around the tree layout for some additional practice.

I'm also working on converting some more engines to DCC and building a DCC sound car. I have some older life like locomotives that I like and work well and I would like to be able to run on my layout. Since my NCE Powercab doesn't have support for DC I needed to get some more equipment updated.

I'm going to work on some more write ups about all these and I'll be posting them with pictures and links sometime soon.

A Hobby Mash-Up (aka: You Never Forget Your First Doctor)

So admittedly I haven't done any modeling, railroad or otherwise recently. My little layout has been sitting in the corner mostly untouched for months, and my track sketches for a larger more robust layout have been sitting on a shelf or in my My Documents folder also for months. There are doubtless many reason for it, but a large one is likely that the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Holidays all just were here, and I have a nice new TV and Netflix account that I have been enjoying with the family.

One of the "new" things we have discovered on Netflix is Doctor Who. We started with the 2005 Series and have worked both forward and backward in the series. I think we've seen the first, second, third, fourth and ninth Doctors thus far.

Back on the model railroading front most of what I've done has been around operations. I joined OpSig this year in an effort to learn more about operations and maybe even find some local groups that I can guest operate with for a session or two to learn the ropes (if you know of any in Western PA please let me know). While learning operations and building a layout that allows me to run a good session is a goal I have to admit that Structure building really is what I enjoy the most about the hobby. So after breaking all the ice on the drive way and realizing that I was just too sore to do anymore around the house this weekend I thought about pulling out some card stock scratch building supplies and just messing around when I had a great idea. Why not build something that me and the kids would get a kick out of on the layout. Something we had been enjoying on TV currently, say an n-scale TARDIS.

Here is a picture of the mostly finished product on my layout. It's sitting under a tree near the train station. I can't help but think that this just might be the first time the Doctor has been in Pennsylvania. The base needs a bit of trimming and molding to the layout still, but that will come with time as I decide where to keep this piece at.

Here's a close up of the piece. The TARDIS itself came from a Deviant Art site, the sidewalk came from Scale Scenes, one of my favorite sources for card stock modeling products. The figures I bought online from a guy named Jens in a big multipack. They have been custom painted to match the scene as the Ninth Doctor and Rose. If you want to duplicate this Take the Image from Deviant Art and scale it to around 900 DPI. I did some simple math and a bit of trial and error to get that figure. If you want you can do what I did and rotate the page so that it's square to the TARDIS pattern and cut it down and then print it out to the right height. I found that somewhere around 1.6 in high for the pattern was pretty good to make the Doctor's head be at about the right height on the door.
All in all this was a quick project that I just threw together with the kids so that we weren't totally bored this weekend while my shoulder was healing from all the work around the house. It was pretty fun to watch the kids look for it on the layout after I installed it too. Even my four year old was able to find and it recognize it. While it's simple, made of paper and not the greatest it does look nice when viewed from the 2 foot rule. Now let's just hope some major disaster doesn't follow the Doctor to West Forge.

West Forge Layout: Operations!

First off Happy New Year everyone! I hope that everyone has a great holiday weekend.

Now onto the topic of my post. I have to admit that aside from playing with my kids Thomas train layout I've never really operated a layout of any type except for the ones that went in circles underneath Christmas trees. I do recall as kids my sister and I making the train or the trolly car go around a few times and then stopping it at certain spots that we decided were stations to pickup and drop off passengers. However, I've never done anything that I would really consider operations. The club I belong to doesn't do operations yet, and I don't seem to know anyone in the western PA area that does this at home. If you happen to be in Western PA and in need of crew member let me know.

Anyway, having never done this before and using a track plan from a book I was left with trying to figure all this out myself (aren't model railroading books great!). I have to say I was really hoping that I liked it after I went through all the work to build this stuff and get it running well. So today after watching a movie with the kids and my wife I sat down with a notebook, pencil and track plan and tried to figure out how to operate my little module. The very first thing I realized is that this module lacks anything that even resembles a run around. This was clearly another rookie mistake on my part that meant that all my switching moves had to be pre-planned and the cars positioned properly in the consist. Once I got over that problem I was able to come up with a 12 step operation plan that involved switching four locations: Nathan's Warehouse, C & E Hardware, The General Store/Railway Express Agency, and the Lumber Yard.

After my kids went to bed I decided that it was time to try this plan out. My original goal when I started planning this layout was to be able to operate the layout for 15 minutes with a crew of 1 person. I was pretty sure my plan would do that and maybe take even longer. In the end though the operation plan took just over 12 minutes to complete, but that time didn't include using the passenger station at all. I decided that I can either add passenger operations to this plan or change that siding to an additional small industry to add a few more minutes to the operations. Overall though I'm very pleased with the way things worked. I found a few small track issues I need to work on on the spurs, but aside from that I had a very pleasant 12 minutes running my trains in more than just a loop.

I do think that larger scale operations would be a great deal of fun, and look forward to trying those someday. All of this makes me happy as I have a better understanding of operations now, and that just became one more thing that I have learned from this little 2'x3' layout.

West Forge: My New Layout

So as I've said before I chose my new trackplan recently. The choice was influenced by a few factors.

1. I wanted a continuous loop for just running something around and around.
2. I wanted some spurs to have some type of switching action.
3. I wanted a passenger station, a signal/Interlock tower and an industry.
4. It needs to be a small table top layout that I can move around the house right now as we are still doing lots of work on the house (and will be for the foreseeable future).
5. It needs to be affordable, I am working on paying stuff off and just getting by. I had to dig into my savings account for the money for my GG1 and I don't' want to wipe out my savings on a layout (tempting as it may be).
   
6. Considering item #5 above if needed to use as much of the track, equipment and supplies that I already had on hand.
7. A layout that is somewhat expandable is a large bonus.
   

After all that I found a nice 2x3 layout on a site in my bookmarks. It fit the bill of giving me something small that I could pull out of a closet set up quickly on a table and run some trains either for myself or my kids. Here is the basic track plan:

The basic premise is that this is set near the town of West Forge, PA, a small rural part of Pennsylvania served by a branch of the PRR. The lower track is the branch line coming in from the PRR mainline it is where set outs will be made for any operations and it is where I hope to later expand this layout with a wraparound shelf that could go along a wall.

Over the next few days I will post additional pictures of the construction that has occurred until I get caught up with where I am now at.