Weekend Update 1/16/11

[ednadolski]

That's some really fantastic work Steve!!   

Ed

[Chris333]

I decided to purposely slow down on my big layout. So I worked on the last project started at my old place. It is a little Nn3 layout clone of my HOn30 layout.


DKS helped with the backdrop. The layout is 9 x 16 inches. Just something to play with and work on scenery. I shot video, but there is a jerky motion in the video every 2 sec?

[MEC_FAN]

Nice work everyone. Here are a couple Kato RS-2's I painted uo last winter. I also painted up 10 Shurtleff hoppers, Highball Graphics did the decals for me and are available in N and HO. Shurtleff rostered 7 of each type of car. I used a BLMA and an Exact Rail  PS-4000 to stand in for a 4427 and after doing 3 of them MT announced they are doing a 4427 so I'm wating to get some before I do any more.

[bbussey]

Finished the basement reconstruction.  All pics below are taken from the same vantage point on the south wall.



Looking west into the layout room.



Looking into the northwest corner of the layout room.



Looking northeast into the workshop lounge.  The door leads to upstairs through the furnace room, which had its common wall with the stairwell removed.  The workbench will be against the north wall in the corner.



Looking east into the workshop lounge.  The new workbench remains to be assembled, the paint booth will be mounted in the southeast corner, and a six-foot-wide floor-to-ceiling bookcase will occupy the east wall to store all of the railroad equipment in their little boxes.  The next step will be pulling back everything from the garage and reorganizing.

Have to build up the funds again before proceeding with prepping the environment for the layout, most likely in March.

[seusscaboose]

continued working on ballasting the Yard... in the meantime, added the latest Lowell Smith / Disney Carolwood Pacific release to accompany the previously released boxcar.



EP

[nscalesteve]

Steve:

Can you elaborate on how the handrails were done ?

I did use soft wood (Balsa wood ?) to pinch the stanchions in (used the original handrails as the pattern), bent the phosphor bronce wire, put it in place with masking tape and soldered it on the stanchions.



does it fit ? - it did...



after they were glued to the sill some stanchions have had to be adjusted a bit (that's the good thing with solder them instead to glue them to the brass wire)

[nscalesteve]

Steve:

or provide a link to where you saw how to do it?

found the link but unfortunately all the pictures are gone...  http://therailwire.net/forum/index.php/topic,12462.0.html

[Day One]

Since my layout is still dismantled I've been spending my time working on other layouts around town in our round robin work group.

Most recently I've been working on La Grande Yard, installing Blue Points and all the linkages and wiring needed to make the turnouts DCC friendly.

These are shot with my iphone in less than ideal lighting so bear with me.

Here's the underside showing the Blue Points, linkages, and wiring.


And the topside and fascia showing the yard ladder and knobs to actuate the switches.

[sizemore]

Now that we're in the post-season I've reclaimed my Sundays from my couch, TV and NFL. I'm prepping for the WWII reenactors "season opener" called the GAP, this means getting a few "to-do" items on the GPW (Jeep) finished. The biggest, today I was able to correct some of Bubba's CF that was the tranmission cover. Unfortunately I don't have a before picture so you'll just have to take my word for it. ;D



And in relation to trains I was able to finish some artwork for suesscaboose and will get it off to my decal printer later this week. On the layout I was able to get a little scenery done with the crossings and finallized a few things with my 4-6-0 tender swap.





The S.

[dwyaneward]

Kitbashed this Heljan Kit





Into a loading platform





For this structure

[Puddington]

For this structure



[/quote]

That's sweet ! - Is that a kit or a scratchbuild ?

[train1]

A bit of a snowstorm yesterday which gave me the excuse to work on nothing too mind numbing on the workbench..EOT in a Centerbeam






I agree with you here Steve4... these Dash 9 units you did for me a long while are still better than the Atlas Dash 8's


And I won't even mention the Swoosh Demonstrators !

[Mark5]

Was down in Frigid Florida last week, got back in town late last nite ...

Did catch this WM survivor just south of Baldwin FL:

[Philip H]

No pics this week, but I managed to get the last of the of the boxes out of the train room from Christmas, and so I got back to work.  I installed and NCE Auto-SW module in my PowerCab system, which acts as an automatic main line shut-off when switching to programming mode.  So now I have a legitimate programming track.

Keeping up the DCC theme, I installed a TCS decoder in my FVM GEVO, bringing to 6 the total number of DCC equipped locos in the stable.

[MichaelT]

Sorry no pics yet, but it was quite a busy weekend.

Yesterday my railroad buddy helped me finish getting the feeders connected on the HCD layout, and today after church I put in a small three track yard. Two tracks have end of track bumpers, the third will go "off layout" as an interchange for the branch. Feeder'd them up and then ran a number of DC engines with small consists (3-5 cars) to test the track.

Then I got intuitive so I went ahead and hooked up the Digitrax buss and ran one of my DCC engines for a bit, worked well with it also.

Tonight after services, I had a little time so I separated my N'ventory box to ready to run cars, kits/bad order cars/ and cars that have rapido couplers that I need to convert. Using my excel spreadsheet, I came up with 17 cars that need conversions from rapido couplers to MT couplers, and 52 kit/bad order cars that need trucks, couplers, wheels, details, etc. Most of these came from an old high school buddy I reconnected with after many years. He had a box of N scale equipment in his attic that a friend had given him and he didn't want them, so he sent them to me last year. Cars are mostly Atlas and Roundhouse, with a few Roco and Kadee cars thrown in for good measure.

So now they're all inventoried and ready to be worked on as time and funds permit. That's 70 something cars that I'll need to install MT couplers and FV wheels on...(gonna have to setup some yard sales I see!!).

So, the weekend was productive to say the least. I'll try to snap some pictures of the layouts current state of things tomorrow as time permits. I'm going to have my grand-daughter tomorrow as she's out of school for the holiday, and I'm the only one off work tomorrow between the Mrs., and Cori's mom and dad...lucky me!!