Gibbon, Cozad & Western - "The 100th Meridian Line"

[Ed Kapuscinski]

I like the patch, but do yourself a favor. Go into that hole with something to plug it up. In fact, do that everywhere!

I don't know how many places over the years I've had to jam a bunch of stuff in holes like that to keep the ballast from leaking out into the floor.

[C855B]

Point taken, I s'pose that problem was going to be discovered fairly soon. A dab of latex caulk? I dunno... something less glue-y?

[Ed Kapuscinski]

I went with hot glue. I think a combination of balling up some paper and adding it in there, then the hot glue, might do the job.

The other option is attacking it with tape from the bottom.

[C855B]

Not enough space for something like wadded-up paper. With #22 wire, especially given that I twist the pair, the hole is densely filled already, but I'm sure the ballast will find a path around the twist. Hot glue (or hot caulk sticks) makes sense, less messy, too. For grins I'll try the hot glue from underneath, but need to test that first given foam's low melting point.

In the thinking about it, hot glue/caulk underneath would serve another purpose - strain relief. Keep me or some other doofus from snagging wires and busting feeders.

[wazzou]

I'd just spread the ties apart again, and squirt a glob of White Glue in the hole.

[Chris333]

I always stick a piece of clump foliage in a feeder hole then a dab of glue.

[Dave V]

A small bit of cork works too.

[C855B]

Hmmm... just how big are y'all's feeder access holes?   The twisted pair is a tight fit.

After weighing the options, my solution is closest to Bryan's, a couple of drops of matte medium to create a gasket around the wires. Done. Same adhesive I use for ballast.

[Chris333]

I was going through 2" of foam and a hollow door. So I used a 1/8" round file for a bit. I did a separate hole for each wire on each side of the track though.

[Santa Fe Guy]

Take a small piece of Blue Tack roll it and then stuff that in the hole. You can ballast right over it and it will no move, ask me how I know. You can even use it in screw holes that were drilled in the wrong spot.
Rod.

[C855B]

Modeling Roads on the GC&W?

With some areas of the layout operable I am starting to seriously plan for scenery. Given that the target locale for this part of the Phase 0 plan is Southern California, roads and particularly freeways would likely need to be represented, even considering the 1965-1975 time frame. It doesn't hurt that I've been in and out of roadway engineering in my career, the most recent being my "last", pre-retirement job. So I have a relatively good sense of what it would take to realistically model roads.

The quandary, however, comes in two areas. First is the poor availability of RTR motor vehicles reflecting the target period and region (i.e., no Euro models, please). Yes, thanks to Shapeways, etc., there are reasonable period cars available, but I'm not interested in taking up another hobby of painting car models. IOW, the "make or buy" decision is strictly "buy" in this case. The other aspect that concerns me is putting static cars on the roads. The trains move, the lights blink on and off, but motor vehicles (and people) are jarring still-lifes that look great in photos but, well, break the in-person dynamic ambiance.

On the plus side is roads and especially overpasses help break-up the model-railroady compression, and create dividers for scene changes. So I'm struggling with the idea putting up a somewhat-accurately modeled bit of freeway, but devoid of traffic. The best I can seem to muster with the concept are short segments, two to three feet, cutting diagonally across a scene, with a vehicle pulled over on the shoulder. Maybe even a CHP cruiser behind a semi ("Duel" tanker?) or something like that, provided I can find a model of a late-60's Plymouth four-door* (that I would paint). Three feet represents only 500 feet of roadway, and it seems to me it would be reasonable that a given 500-foot hunk of roadway would probably have no cars on it at certain moments.

* - "madaboutcars" on Shapeways has the exact Dodge Polara I need to do this.

Or I could represent a typical SoCal rush hour traffic jam, but I'm not interested in wiring up hundreds of LED brake lights.

Isolated stretches in the desert are no problem. It's the in-town representations that make me think, "Do I want to go there?"

[Cajonpassfan]

Mike, you make a very good point. I have a long stretch of Route 66 paralleling the mainline just like the prototype, and the static cars do bother me (especially when the same orange truck shows in every photo). The scene looks fine, until a train goes by and then the lack of motion on the highway becomes obvious. Of course some of the cars can be removed, or parked on the side of the road for my circa 1950 setting, or placed in the scene for still photography.
Given your setting, nothing says SoCal like a freeway, so maybe a very short stretch, an overpass, or even one under construction? Much more than that is not going to look right without cars....
Good luck,
Otto K.

[pdx1955]

One of my pet peeves about modeled roadways is that people tend to put way too many vehicles on them. Being in the traffic engineering field now, I'm a bit more sensitive to it . If you put a number of vehicles on a rural roadway,a few vehicle lengths apart, this would be representing near capacity conditions which means passing is about impossible and turning on/or off of the roadway is very difficult. You could get away with very few vehicles on a highway - in this case, rural stretches would have only a few vehicles (maybe a few more following a truck) .

For your time period, you could easily have a freeway overpass/section under construction maybe with one-half of a overpass completed but not yet open (with barriers for effect) and one half with abutments and a few concrete (or steel) beams in place. Also think about the roadways that you do model - if you model the major roadways in a community (i.e US66) then a lot more vehicles will be expected then if you model the nearby industrial local  streets . A lot of these local streets have lots of parked cars/trucks, trucks/trailers at loading docks and very few on the roadways themselves. If you want to model a downtown then you could have lots of parked cars, cars stopped at intersections, and not have too many "static" on-road ones to simulate a more busy environment.

[Lemosteam]

Point taken, I s'pose that problem was going to be discovered fairly soon. A dab of latex caulk? I dunno... something less glue-y?

A couple drops of gorilla poly glue will expand unitl nothing can get int. then just trim the head that expands up...

[C855B]

Mikey's been busy. The layout is almost a full-time job now, as initially intended, but, clearly, that plan was rent asunder with distractions. Anyway, I've been spending 5-6 hours a day tinkering for the past couple of weeks.

For grins and grimaces, here is a glimpse of what it is taking to get JMRI and the electronics in order:



Page 1 of 3, and this is just the first peninsula, and nowhere near the complexity of the two yard districts.

There is lots more progress to report, and as soon as several major bits are done enough to be photo-worthy I'll post.