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.

A Paper Train Part 2

So in case you missed it I built a paper Acella a while back, and today while I was looking around the web I found another very cool paper train paper. a paper GG1 over at a place called Creative Park. Below is a picture of theirs. Once I put one together I'll take pictures and put them up here. In the meantime why don't you head on over and make one yourself.

Toy Trains and Nuclear Fusion

In a really neat way some researches have found a great way to use a normal everyday item for a lot of us in a whole new way. The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory used a model train engine with some californium-252 on it to test their neutron sensors in their fusion reactor. Being a train enthusiast who has a Bachelors in Applies Physics I find this doubly interesting.

Check out the full artical at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/science/29train.html?_r=3&ref=science.

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 Layout: Scenery

So it has really been ages since I made a decent post about things. I think I will rectify that today. I'd like to post a bit about all the scenery I have been working on for my little module. Since this is now complete I'm going to go over it rather quickly in just one post. First I'll start with a quick picture of my test fit of all the structures I planned to use. I used some miscelaeous items to stand in for trees and some buildings are just pieces leaning together to help me plan out the space. Honestly I think I redid this process several times as the buildings took shape and I began to have better understanding of how to utilize the space. Next time I'll probably make cardboard cutouts of the footprint of each building to start with as that would have been easy to keep taped to the foam while I was working on the track.

Once the celluclay goop mixture was good and dry I began adding paint and ground foam to the layout. I think I did this step too early actually, some of the buildings weren't ready yet, and in all honesty the track needed a lot of work still, but that's another post. Here are two shots, one of the church area and one of the whole module with it's ground foam in place.

The ground foam is a mixture of Wood Scenics and Life Like greens and dry/dead grass with some sifted sand mixed in in some areas. The still unfinished road way is actually cardstock that I printed on my printer and glued to the layout. It came from http://www.scalescenes.com a site that I highly recommend. Even if you don't want to use card stock buildings (which you should consider using anyway) The add ons like interior carpet and paintings are worth it.

Finally here is a picture taken after the trees were added to the hill and station area. This is looking down from the hillside onto the rest of the layout. The tree bases are not yet sceniced, I'll probably paint them and put some additional ground foam around them to conceal them a bit more. That's about it for today, I'll try and get some more up soon. On a side note I did have this module out and running this Christmas. I didn't have it under the tree it actually sat on a cabinet on the far side of my fireplace, but looking back at last years post about "Being Happy with what you have/an N-Scale under the tree" I felt it important to note that West Forge itself was my families Christmas tree train display. The kids enjoyed it quite a bit as did I.

West Forge Layout: Hillside

So work has been progressing on my layout even though I haven't made a post in ages. I was working on improving the hill and cut that I built into the original foam layout. The hill was covered with Celluclay and latex paint originally. It always seemed too flat and lacking something. I used the ground goop I created before to add more texture to the hill and area on top of it. I did a lot of pulling away with sticky fingers on the slope to add a rocky look to it and just some texture to the top.


Once it dried I painted it brown, then washed black over that and washed raw sienna over that. The top of the hill was painted plain raw sienna. I really liked the color of the top. Might be a bit too golden looking for Western PA, but it was much better thant he light tan I originally used. I think I'll look for a color closer to that for any future projects I work on. Finally I did a good bit of dry brushing grays and browns accross the front slope and sides and added some shadows to the nooks and crannies. Admitedlly the whole thing had a very "prehistoric" look to it which I was worried about but the next step really blended it all together better.


The final step was ground foam. I used 4 different foams on the hill, bright green, dark green, dried grass and earth. In addition to that I used some fine sand I had left over from the ground goop for added texture. The whole mass was sprayed down with Wet Water (using rubbing alcohol not soap) and then doused with a good layer of watered down glue. Any foam that was "run off" from the top and settled on the slopes I left in place and hit with the watered down glue. I added some additional foam to the slope to enhance that by putting full strength glue and sprinkling sand and various greens onto it.

I was very happy with the end result. It did retain a bit of the big fake hill look, but a lot of the road cuts in south western PA where I grew up look a lot like this. So with that I called this part of the project a success and prepared to move onto installing the road through the town.

West Forge Layout: Beginning Terrain

So I've decided that I need to start getting the terrain laid out on my layout so that I have a better idea how the structures and trees will fit in. I opted to use a variation of Lou Sassi's Ground Goop mainly because I had the needed supplies on hand. I mixed the goop up as follows:

1 part Celluclay
1 part latex paint
1 Part tube sand
1 cap Lysol
Water to thin as needed
Acrylic Art paints to darken the color
*in this case 1 part = 1 cup

Like I said I had this stuff on had. The tube sand came from my truck, it was an old tube that is falling apart so I scavenged a few scoops of the sand from the ripped bag. It was a bit on the course side. I think next time I might screen it a bit to get the large stones out first as they made the goop a bit more rocky in some areas than I wanted. The latex paint was the left over light tan I used to cover the blue foam. I felt it was too light so I put a few older watered down tubes of brown and black acrylic paint to try and darken it. It made things more gray rather than more brown. Next time I'll get a darker latex for my base. Closer to Raw Sienna I think

Here is the results.



Over all I'm please. I need to clean up the areas where the structures will go, but this has tuned my flat sheet of foam board into something a bit more natural and earthly looking.

Next will be ground foam, some asphalt for the street and I think I'm going to repaint the rail head and ties to be a better color. I'm really not sure why I did such a red color for that.