The Very Last White River and Northern Railroad

[Chris333]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Boston-Maine-RR-Hillsboro-NH-covered-bridge-aerial-view-1966-/201115169761
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Boston-Maine-RR-Hillsboro-NH-covered-bridge-aerial-view-1966-x-4x6-photo-/191355222809

[Dave V]

I'll be watching @DKS closely as he scratchbuilds his trestle as I'm getting ready to do the same for the CMRy.

[MDW]

I can’t decide if I more admire @DKS’ fine modeling skills or the balls he has to rip out said fine modeling work and start over if it doesn’t feel right.   Love watching & learning in either case......
Michel

[CRL]

I can’t decide if I more admire @DKS’ fine modeling skills or the balls he has to rip out said fine modeling work and start over if it doesn’t feel right.   Love watching & learning in either case......
Michel

Like the old song says... “You can’t have one without the other”.

[DKS]

So this morning I decided to tackle the open grid deck pony truss road bridge, mostly because the whole scene with the abandoned stone arch bridge had me lathered up. My starting point was a Vollmer railroad truss bridge kit (below). Several years ago, I'd gotten a whole bunch of incomplete kits in a lot with no packaging or instructions, just the parts. It was a good investment, as I've used bits and pieces of them over time, and now I was making the best use of them yet.



I began by removing the vertical members from the truss parts, then assembling them per normal.



With the trusses done, I fabricated a simple deck frame from Evergreen styrene I-beams and plain strip stock.



It's not a "proper" deck by any means, as I didn't see the need: the grid decking would hide a multitude of sins, and it's not a key foreground structure to begin with.



After painting the structure, I'll attach the grid decking (which is not at hand, so the project stops here for the time being).



Total time invested so far: about three hours.

[amato1969]

Sweet!  That's great work for a three hour lightning round!

  Frank

[DKS]

And now for a layout within a layout: the kiddie train ride.

It all started yesterday when I received an email from a modeling friend in the UK. He was beginning a new N Scale layout that was to feature an amusement ride, and he wanted to pick my brain about T Gauge. I replied that I'd been out of the scale since 2013, and forwarded a few links to some key resources.

Then I sat thinking for a bit. My friend had unknowingly planted a seed. Granted, it was a tiny one: I only had a 3" x 6" space for a loop of track, which made for some darned tight curves! That would automatically eliminate any rolling stock with two trucks—T Gauge trucks don't swivel nearly enough to handle 1.5" radius curves!



After making a paper template of the space for the loop, I began bending flex. I'd wanted the loop to be a single piece of flex, but I found it nearly impossible to achieve the right shape in one shot. After three tries, I extracted the two best pieces, and joined them together using T Gauge rail joiners.

I imagine the train might look something like any of the following.

[wm3798]

Okay, so we have swingin' jazz emanating from Phil's Bayou Another, a field of twinkling fireflies...  How will you model sticky seats and the smell of stale cotton candy and feet?

[DKS]

How will you model sticky seats and the smell of stale cotton candy and feet?

Rubber cement should take care of the sticky seats nicely. As for the smell-o-rama effects, I'd just wrap a Peeps from last year in an old sock.

Moving on...



After soldering the joiners and attaching feeder wires, I installed the loop of track on the layout permanently with CA. Then I painted the track, which completed the easy part. The really, really tough part will be making a functional locomotive. The advantage I had was that it didn't have to look like anything real, much less anything at 1:450. As for a mechanism, I'd leverage a chance discovery: the threads of an 0-80 screw mesh surprisingly well with the gears on T Gauge drive wheels. That should allow me to engineer a double-worm reduction drive. We'll see...

[CRL]

Your prototype begins at 0:27 in the video.

[DKS]

Your prototype begins at 0:27 in the video.

Sure does! Perfect! Thanks!

[CRL]

Nondescript blob for a locomotive and 5th wheel coupling for the cars for only one set of wheels for each car seemed like it would work for your purposes.

Or there’s this:

[DKS]

Nondescript blob for a locomotive and 5th wheel coupling for the cars for only one set of wheels for each car seemed like it would work for your purposes.

I think it will indeed.

Pass on the school bus, tho.

[pdx1955]

Using a MTC F-unit style like in the second picture with cars as in the first picture, would recreate the classic MTC amusement train consist.

[CRL]

But I bet the school bus would make those tight radius curves...