Musings on a New Garden Layout

[eric220]

So with the arrival of this:



The idea of a garden railroad is becoming more serious. This will be my first experience building a railroad on anything other than plywood. I’m researching different ideas for construction and operation, so I thought I might share some of my musings.

First, as of the arrival of the TenMile, my rolling stock consists of a DSP&P combine and coach and two DSP&P Tiffany reefers, all LGB. I’m in the process of adding a couple of boxcars and maybe a flatcar. I also need to source a way car (caboose). The plan is to have two trains: a passenger train for the TenMile, and a freight pulled by either a venerable LGB mogul or an Aristocraft C16. Of course, one of the first things that needs to be addressed is couplers. The LGB hook and loops need to go. After a little searching I made an interesting discovery: LGB makes drop-in replacement link and pin couplers! Given that I’m modeling 1884/1885, link and pin would be correct for freight and locomotives. I was intrigued, but even in G scale, that’s an awful lot of tiny fiddly bits. At $25 for six couplers and given that they can be replaced with one screw, I decided to give them a try.



Those things are SOLID. Built to German tolerances, it’s effectively a drawbar connection. The pins sit snugly in the pockets, and there is VERY little slack in the connection. I‘ve described them as prototypically obnoxious to connect, minus the danger of losing fingers or worse. They would get annoying very quickly in an operations-oriented environment, but for roundy-rounding, they would virtually eliminate any danger of unwanted uncoupling. I’m inclined to use them for this project, but needs may dictate differently later.

[Hawghead]

So with the arrival of this:



The idea of a garden railroad is becoming more serious. This will be my first experience building a railroad on anything other than plywood. I’m researching different ideas for construction and operation, so I thought I might share some of my musings.

First, as of the arrival of the TenMile, my rolling stock consists of a DSP&P combine and coach and two DSP&P Tiffany reefers, all LGB. I’m in the process of adding a couple of boxcars and maybe a flatcar. I also need to source a way car (caboose). The plan is to have two trains: a passenger train for the TenMile, and a freight pulled by either a venerable LGB mogul or an Aristocraft C16. Of course, one of the first things that needs to be addressed is couplers. The LGB hook and loops need to go. After a little searching I made an interesting discovery: LGB makes drop-in replacement link and pin couplers! Given that I’m modeling 1884/1885, link and pin would be correct for freight and locomotives. I was intrigued, but even in G scale, that’s an awful lot of tiny fiddly bits. At $25 for six couplers and given that they can be replaced with one screw, I decided to give them a try.



Those things are SOLID. Built to German tolerances, it’s effectively a drawbar connection. The pins sit snugly in the pockets, and there is VERY little slack in the connection. I‘ve described them as prototypically obnoxious to connect, minus the danger of losing fingers or worse. They would get annoying very quickly in an operations-oriented environment, but for roundy-rounding, they would virtually eliminate any danger of unwanted uncoupling. I’m inclined to use them for this project, but needs may dictate differently later.

Nice looking engine.  I'm never going to do a garden railroad as A. I don't have a big enough back yard and B. I don't want to have to do that much bending over.    On the link and pin couplers: are the pins metal?  If so, perhaps you could use a very small magnet on the end of a thin dowel to pull the pins without having to get your fingers in there.

Scott

[Chris333]

There was a guy on FB who took Bachmann On30 Forneys and redetailed them to look just like Mason Bogies, even gave them fancy paint jobs.

[eric220]

On the link and pin couplers: are the pins metal?  If so, perhaps you could use a very small magnet on the end of a thin dowel to pull the pins without having to get your fingers in there.

The links, pins, and pockets are all plastic.  The current thought would be to store the trains in cuts of cars so that I only have to make a couple of connections to get a prototypically long 6 car train going.  I'm not inclined at this point to try to work in a shed or other on-line storage, so setting up or taking down means bringing trains between the layout and the house.