The Very Last White River and Northern Railroad

[davefoxx]

I think 99.9% of the people won't be able to tell those aren't "brewery vents".

Lord knows I've committed way worse sins on my layout.

DFF

[Van Horne]

Are brewery vents shaped like beer bottles??

Dave

[Chris333]

Plus most of those brewery photos look much older than the 1950's. So they upgraded the ventilation 

[DKS]

I think 99.9% of the people won't be able to tell those aren't "brewery vents".

But I can, and I have to live with it...

[dem34]

But I can, and I have to live with it...

I'll try to see if I can find any on my adventures, but I swear I've seen identical vents used on some of the small brewers around Belmar and Asbury.

[DKS]

Spent quite a bit of time this week rebuilding the working crossing gate mechanism. The first one was a large, complex linear device:



On 28 May I tore out the linear drive because I installed the turbine vents in the brewery, since the factory building for which they were originally built was removed from the layout during a building reshuffle. Also, the old drive was quite noisy. The new rotary drive (below) is a about one third the size of the linear drive, is quieter, and can be operated by a single pushbutton (just like the enginehouse doors).



The large gear has two index pins on the underside, one twice as long as the other. The longer pin trips two microswitches simultaneously, and the shorter pin only trips one. The microswitch that's tripped twice with each rotation stops the drive at the raised and lowered positions; the microswitch that's only tripped once turns the flashers on and off, so they remain on while the gates are down. The mechanism was designed so that the lights come on a short time before the gates start to move, just as it happens in life—a bonus, as this wasn't possible with the linear drive. Another bonus is that there was room for the flasher circuit (below, center right), even with the turbine vent mechanism.



Note that I built a new slider, too: the old styrene one was in the way of the turbine vents motor. Made from brass tubing, the new one works more smoothly, and is adjustable since the levers that actuate the gates are moved by wires which can be bent, as opposed to fixed squares of styrene.

[peteski]

As the saying goes: necessity is the mother if invention. Looks good David!

Questions about the flasher (I'm familiar with the 555 timer).  I see there are 2 timer circuits and the green LEDs on the board seemed not to be in-sync.  But the crossing gate LEDs were alternating in-sync. Are you using those (DPST?) relays to drive the LEDs?  And why 2 complete timer circuits?

[DKS]

Questions about the flasher (I'm familiar with the 555 timer).  I see there are 2 timer circuits and the green LEDs on the board seemed not to be in-sync.  But the crossing gate LEDs were alternating in-sync. Are you using those (DPST?) relays to drive the LEDs?  And why 2 complete timer circuits?

Two separate timer circuits (and two DPDT reed relays) for two different crossings. Since the crossings are close enough together to be seen at once, I didn't want the lights for both to be in perfect sync.

[DKS]

Late entry for the weekend... Somebody in town has to be watching the boob tube, and of course it would be in black and white (there were color TVs in the 50s, but they were for rich folk). The idea here is not to see the TV itself, but instead see the light it casts on the room. I discovered that connecting a flicker LED in series with a white fading (so-called "breathing") LED produces a nice randomized TV-like glow. I chose Josh's house for the effect since it has two nice big living room windows in which to see the light show.

I installed it on 27 May 2020. I sealed the red flickering LED in shrink wrap to keep it from appearing there was a kitchen fire. The only other ingredient was one of my slip-on connectors so the structure could be removed from the foundation.



Then I assembled a rudimentary living room from micro-ply around the TV LED to control which windows would have the effect. These windows will get translucent curtains ("sheers"—see the reference image) so you can't see directly inside, and also to catch more light from the TV LED.



Reference image:

[Vince P]

Now that's a neat feature not many people do the TV thing in modeling.

[Point353]

Have you decided on an antenna?
https://www.earlytelevision.org/antennas_1950.html
https://www.earlytelevision.org/pdf/rtvn_12-53_antenna_ads.pdf

[CRL]

As a little kid on our block in Phoenix, I could see 📺 lights flashing through the curtains as I walked by. The two houses on our block that had color 📺 were really obvious because people would turn the color level up real high so their front window glowed in technicolor. They did this so everyone would know they had color 📺.

[DKS]

OK, so "better modeling through peer pressure" had me chewing on the police car light problem. I had to build it wrong because I only had 0402 red SMD LEDs, and only one of those would fit in the dome. And red was the only color I didn't have in 0201s. So I finally bit the bullet and ordered red 0201s from Germany, so I could cram two of them back-to-back inside the dome.

[Vince P]

Cool looking lights where did you find the 201's.

Digging this revolver.

[DKS]

Cool looking lights where did you find the 201's.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/S1138-10-Piece-SMD-Leds-0201-Red-with-Wire-Enamelled-Copper-Wire-Micro-Mini/382332712049