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

[Scottl]

I'd come for a weekend to help, if only to see it all in person.

[C855B]

A "ROFL" from Robyn, Scott. She walked out of the office laughing, but offering the guest house for your stay. Be aware that it will be renamed "Hotel California", however.

[Scottl]

LOL, never know when I will be out that way, but I'll be sure to let you know.

[chuck geiger]

Have you seen a picture of that 8-1/2 miles of track?   The guys laying the ties weren't puttin' up with the slackers driving the materials wagons. Maybe every fifth tie was actually a tie - the rest were found wood. While the construction trains tippie-toed through there, that section was redone before it was put into service.

I would expect roughly the same result. 

Hell On Wheels - Not just a name of the mini-series, they had to bust a hustle with gaming, hookers, selling land to pay for those every 5th tie.

[Missaberoad]

Have you seen a picture of that 8-1/2 miles of track?   The guys laying the ties weren't puttin' up with the slackers driving the materials wagons. Maybe every fifth tie was actually a tie - the rest were found wood. While the construction trains tippie-toed through there, that section was redone before it was put into service.

I would expect roughly the same result. 

...and they laid out everything along the way beforehand, the whole thing was a stunt more then anything...
Van horn had much more efficient crews when he built CP with essentially the same technology, and came close to beating that record without "cheating" 

Not Sure it would be wise for Mike and Robyn to use the same payment system that the pioneer roads used, a case of beer for every 33ft of track would bring all sorts of volunteers but..... 

[C855B]

Fitting in just a skosh of layout work this insanely busy week, I managed to get a 23" touch-screen monitor working on the Raspberry Pi JMRI system. It was not trivial, as the Pi's firmware has issues with downstream USB 3.0 hubs. That was an unpleasant and time-consuming issue, to say the least.



Anyway, it works. The lone toggle you see on the simulated US&S panel does actually control a switch when you touch it. With proof-of-concept out of the way, now comes more unpleasantness, building a JMRI panel that emulates 1:1. I may end-up like so many others have evidently done, creating their own graphics. Problem with the US&S graphics that come with JMRI is you can't have indicator lights without sensors. Yeah, yeah, I know - that's how it works in real life. If you want turnout indicators without sensors, you go through a jyphon script nightmare to emulate sensor logic. No thanks. My solution is a graphic showing the indicator "on" with lever position. That's all I want.

[C855B]

It turns out ("turnout"... get it? ) that I was partly wrong about the sensor issue with lighting-up the switch indicators on the US&S panel. The primary servo controller I use has position feedback, although the switch controlled in the proof-of-concept test does not. I mostly need to get smarter about this stuff.

On behalf of the GC&W, I keep wanting to comment in the Back to DC thread, but, really, I don't have a dog in that hunt, even though I have LOTS of DC experience. DCC here, period. I could not enjoy this layout even in its relative infancy on DC. My view, of course, is clouded by the scope of what I'm doing, at this point with 70 feet of operable double-track main that is NOT a loop. With DC, that "70 feet" is key. I am nowhere close to having feeder bus(es) run, operating entirely with temporary "get something running" wiring. Heck - frogs aren't even powered yet (though some of that might change today). There's one 20-foot 12AWG jumper between the command station and roughly the 1/3 point, and that's it, power is through the rails, with feeder-to-feeder jumpers across block boundaries. It runs great on DCC. DC would be (and is, I tested) one huge voltage drop under this arrangement, although it certainly wouldn't break me to run another temporary quasi-bus to the 2/3 point. DCC works great and even visiting HOers marvel at how smoothly everything runs.

Best point? Dispatcherless operation. If I want to sit back and let a couple of trains run while I railfan 'em or go off and fiddle with something else, I can do that. Any DC version of this would need a power dispatcher. But, yeah, it's the scope of the layout. I know that. Another big plus? Consisting dissimilar locos. I love that.

One thing that bugs me about the "Back to DC" discussion is the inference (and direct complaining) about the complexity of DCC. I'll agree that installing decoders isn't the most pleasant (or inexpensive) of chores, but with moderately-recent power it's not that big a deal. Wiring is NOT an issue until you get big enough to need boosters, and, so what, cut a block, put in the booster, done. However, when it comes to the hand-wringing about hiccups, I'm going to stick my neck out here and assert that most of the recent DCC operating complaints are related to sound. Sound takes more power to operate and even program, which has vexed more than a few... even me. And it's sound that is making DCC complicated, not motor or light control. I'm firmly in the "no sound" camp for a cook's list of reasons, but in mostly a surprise to me, bubbling to the top are the impediments to smooth operation that seem to be the present issue. It may improve with things like keep-alive circuits, but that, yes, adds installation complexity and has its own pitfalls. Still, no sound here, I swap the decoders out whenever one of 'em crosses my bench.

FWIW.

[nuno81291]

As a n to ho convert I can agree with you that DCC if anything is simpler then blocked out versions of previous dc layouts of mine. You say a pair of feeders works and that’s great, I have run feeders to every track and other than they DCC lets me control trains not blocks.... how anyone can make the complexity argument reverse loops and all seems to miss how simple DCC can be. One pair of feeders would work on the majority of the switching layouts I view but we all need every stick of track and every frog wired right? Get to the scenery already 

[Santa Fe Guy]

I am a staunce believer in DCC having cut my teeth on DC back in 1969. When my SFRSD went full Duplex DCC in 2007 (took a month to make the change over) one of my mates and operators said during the first full DCC session "Rodney we are doing things on your RR that we could never do before" then I knew we had a winner.
Would never consider going back.
Rod.

[C855B]

An actual progress report! It's not much in the grand scheme of things, but this last little bit of track at Colton Tower was the only thing standing between me and starting work on... OMG... scenery on this end of the layout:



There was nothing really complicated about it nor anything I hadn't done before, there was just an unexplainable mental block. Next on the list is painting track at this location.

Other areas of the layout are getting attention now that the mind fog is clearing up and distractions have been dealt with. Not that the overall vision was lost, but momentum had faded and I was running in circles trying to get something... anything... done. Today's success hopefully breaks the logjam. Also did a major bit of cleanup in the space this afternoon, clearing the way towards finishing the Phase 0 benchwork.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

I HATE when I get like that. I know exactly what you mean.

I'm glad your log jam has cleared.

[SirTainly]

Sometimes you just have to get stuck into any task and then you're motivated by that success to tackle others - at least that's how I seem to be. Looking forward to seeing scenery.

[C855B]

Yup, apparently the log jam has abated. Since I had to fit layout work around social activities yesterday afternoon, instead making a mess with paints I decided to get medieval with some pink foam for terraforming. I was surprised and pleased that the sabre saw did a respectable job with the baseplate set for 45° using the magic foam blade - on 2" foam, no less. I managed to build a basic freeway embankment profile for the scene around Colton Tower, where I-10 figures prominently. Need to make two or three more cuts to shape it for the overpass and then I'll take a pic.

Also been playing around with ideas converting Google Street views to background horizon views for the section of road to fade into the distance:



I captured the corresponding view of the eastbound lanes as well. Primary challenge is melding the two sides together for the horizon view which should be doable in Photoshop (perspective and blur tools are your friends). The sign will be modeled.

The labeling you see part of is "Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway" or some such BS. Get real, Google - everyone knows it as "I-10" or "the San Bernardino Freeway". Who comes up with this claptrap?

[C855B]

For reference, here's a 2011 view of the diamonds from the eastbound lanes:



Those electrical cabinets in the southeast corner are where the tower stood, razed in 1980 or '81. The "2011" is important - UP (the right-to-left tracks) built an overpass in 2014, mostly eliminating the at-grade crossing; one track was preserved as a transfer lead between West Colton and the old Colton yard.

EDIT: Interesting view. Ballast is sort of everywhere around the crossing. Good to know.

[Specter3]

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