The Far Yonder Hills

Just a quick update to show you the completed hills, tunnel portal and blending of the highway; although after taking the picture I notices a couple of gaps I need to fill. Obviously applying paint and other scenic materials are yet to be done, that will come a bit later once the ballasting of this module is complete.

Right now I am installing the missing 2 switch motors, wiring up the last of the signals and thinking about where and what lighting to install; which I think will consist of a few yard lights and a couple of lights on the station platform. In between all of this procrastination I am now also applying track ballast...I will post some updated pictures once this is complete. As an aside, next to wiring, applying ballast is my least favorite part of model railroading! It is a long tedious and laborious job and will take me weeks to complete...ugh!

Rock Making 101

Here's a quick and dirty post on how to built rocks using a cheap and easy technique.

In the past, I made rocks from Woodlands scenics rock molds, and simply cast them using plaster of paris. However since I don't have the molds anymore, I balked at spending $20 per mold and after doing a bit of research decided that a bit of trial an error was called for.

You will need the following.

1. Some rocks! Don't use smooth pebbles, you want something with some obvious definition. Tree bark could also work for this.
2. Plain old aluminium foil.
3. Plaster for the casting, I use whatever I have handy.

So as you can see, the only outlay is for the plaster and the foil, which is free if you pinch it from the kitchen when no one is looking.

Firstly, grab your rock and wrap it nice and tight in the foil, you want to try and smooth the foil out as much as possible and as tightly as possible.

Once that's done, it's a matter of releasing the rock from the foil as gently as possible, this can take a bit of wrangling and messing about and it will lose some shape, but you can easily squish the foil back when done.

Lay your molds on a flat surface, depending on the rock they may not sit straight, so you might need to support the molds with something; using the rocks just released from your molds should do the the trick, although I didn't find I had to.

Mix up your plaster so it's fairly runny and pours easily and gently fill the molds. If you've done it right, they will self level.

Let them sit for a few hours and then peel off the foil.

As you can see, they look pretty rockish, and once painted will be as good as what you would get from the Woodlands Scenics molds. I had no problems with the foil sticking and in fact was able to reuse it multiple times.

The real advantage of this method is that the variety of rocks you can create is limited to only how many rocks you can collect!

Highway Overpass

One of the problems I knew I would have to deal with building a long skinny shelf layout was how to handle the termination of the layout. The mainline at Silver Springs just ends, and I wanted this to be disguised.

After a lot of tooing and froing I had decided to disguise it with a highway overpass, specifically the one sold by Rix. However this kit set has a couple of limitations.

1.The price and since I would need 2 to make a double lane highway and a 3rd to increase the length, I was looking at well in excess of US$100 for a few pieces of styrene.
2.It is straight and I really needed my overpass to curve across the section of track that one day will extend to a staging yard.

So with these limitations in my mind I decided that I would attempt my first scratch built structure.

While I don't have an exhaustive list of supplies, I can tell you that basically my overpass consists of about 90% Evergreen styrene of various types with the remaining being the highway railings from Rix which they supply separately. The street lights came from somewhere in China and cost me the ridiculously low price of $4 and were freight free to boot. A quick and dirty calculation tells me that all up I spend about US$50, so a significant savings to create something that I think looks better than the packaged one.

All up the project took about 4 weeks to complete and I am very happy with how it turned out! If you want any further details feel free to post a comment.

I have to say this; if scratch building is something that scares you (like it did me) find something simple to build and have a go. Yes you will make mistakes, but the feeling of satisfaction when you have finished is far greater than building something from a kit.

If you notice closely the picture gives a bit of a clue as to the geographic location of my layout location. It's not for any particular reason that I chose this area other than I once (briefly) lived not far from it. I am not, repeat not, trying to replicate this part of the world.

The next part of this project is to add the hills around the fake tunnel portal so it all blends together nicely...oh, and add some vehicles!

Wiring Module One - Turnout Control

My initial intention was to not wire my turnouts at all and to use manual throws, since the width of the modules meant the turnouts were all within easy reach. That changed once I saw my first N Scale manual throw; way, way out of scale! One of the reasons I chose to use Code 55 was because of the more realistic profile and the turnout throws were just going to ruin the effect!

Tortoise slow motion switch control motors were my first choice, but the price bothered me. To purchase a single motor in NZ was going to set me back close to $40. Way, way too expensive for my taste. So after researching for awhile, I found an alternative motor made by an Australian company called DCC Concepts (their link is in the resources pages on this blog.). Their Cobalt Blue motors come in a few different flavors, including ones with DCC Decoders already built into them. I came close to going this route, but after mulling it over, realized changing turnout direction using my handheld throttle would just be a pain in the backside.

I eventually settled on a cheaper version, which has a cost of about $24, and meets all of my needs. DCC Concepts also supply all of the parts necessary to make a control panel, and so I bought a bunch of switches and LEDs, and then popped into a local engineering company and had them cut me some sheet metal plates for mounting everything too.

Installing the motors under the bench was relatively simple to do, and with the neat spring clips, there is no soldering required either; just pop the appropriate wire into the clearly labelled hole. I have 5 wires going to each switch motor. Power from the control panel, dcc bus power and the wire from the turnout frog (the green wire in the picture).

By far and away the most difficult, fiddly and time consuming part was wiring up the panel. I bought LEDs and switches from DCC Concepts also; the switches are great, each DPDT switch has a circuit board attached making power and led connection simple. The LEDs, well let's just say I dumped the lot and bought some cheaper dual color LEDs from my local electronic shop. The main issue with them is that they are far too bright for a control panel. I want them to be an indicator, not an INDICATOR!!!!! I also found them way too easy to blow; whereas the cheaper, not as bright alternatives seem a lot more stable. I'll put that last issue down to my electrical ineptitude that I have mentioned before.

The panel come up really well (other than the scratches which I have to repaint), it is easy to understand and functions exactly as is required.

The last step of this project is really just the detailing of the turnouts. I am going to use non functioning switch stands, but I will be doing that way off in the future...other projects call first!

Layout Update

So back to my haphazard posting!

Several months have passed and while I haven't made massive progress, I have made some. The first structures are now placed, the first one is my depot, passenger and freight, followed by a large industrial building which I have heavily modified to be a low profile background building.

All of these buildings have their lighting installed as you see below. I am really pleased with how they look, obviously there is no detailing done yet, but that sort of thing is the stuff that I like to do bit by bit.

You  might have noticed the signal light in the bottom picture! It's a model power signal which I picked up off of ebay (not sure if they are still in production), there are actually 3 on the layout now. I have them wired through the switch motors and they indicate whether the main line is cleared. I thought about wiring up block detection, then did the maths and thought about it again; way to expensive and way to complicated. This looks ok, and adds a bit more interest to the scene.

Also completed is my first road, which will eventually lead to a fuel loading depot. I'll get into that a bit more in my next post, along with my method for creating roads. I am currently working on creating a highway overpass which will span the entire width of the layout. I was going to purchase the Rix overpass, but after looking at the price and what I would get for my money (approx $100) I decided I didn't like to get royally ripped off, so I am scratch building my own. It's an evening project and I don't have much to show yet, so will hold off on posting any pictures until I have the supports all finished at least.

Wiring Module One - The Basics

It seems to me, that if there's one thing most model railroaders don't enjoy, it's wiring! I'm no exception, although I have to admit to feeling a certain amount of satisfaction when you flick that switch and electricity goes to the right place!

To date, wiring the module has been the most lengthy, and complicated task I have undertaken so far. It still isn't finished and is probably a good 6 to 8 weeks for being so. As I mentioned in a previous post, the Cricket World Cup has started and that has most of my attention at the moment.

I am going to break this post into two parts. This part will cover off the basic steps I followed and the the second post will cover off the switch motors and control panel, which was the most labor intensive of the two stages.

I read an enormous amount about DCC and the correct way to wire; so I tried my best to follow the guidelines suggested by others. First of all I am going to admit to a cardinal sin. I did not solder all of my track joints. I am going to simply justify it by saying I am not a sadist and couldn't think of anything worse. Yes it may cause me problems down the line, but I tried to mitigate the decision by soldering way more feeder wires than necessary.

Feeder wires, if I am correct, are the key to DCC success. The more of those going to the track the better. The rule of thumb is one per track section, and while I didn't quite go to that extreme, mainly because of the amount of sectional track I used (thanks Atlas), I have made sure that there are plenty of feeders nonetheless. My module has some 36 pairs of feeders, I think it will be more than ample. I have been running trains for a few weeks and so far no problems.

I also decided that all of my turnouts would have their frogs wired also, so that's another 8 pairs of feeders for those. I'll detail that a little more in my next post.

The pictures below shows the wiring (unfinished) under the module, there's a bit of tidy up needed, but hopefully you get the gist. The homemade bus bars (just terminal blocks with jumpers across them) worked as well as I could have hoped and I avoided the ridiculous expense of proper bus bars! My multi-meter and I have spent numerous hours on the floor checking every connection and thankfully (and to my surprise) they all worked!

Under table Wiring

DCC Panel and Switch Panel Wiring

As my layout is designed to be relatively easy to move, there are simple plugs which connect the various wiring between modules. One connection for track bus, one for turnout power and another for lighting.

As of yet I have yet to wire in any lighting supply, but I intend on getting that provisioned for soon. All lighting will be LEDs and will be run from a seperate 5v power supply, which should be big enough to power half of the entire layout. While I don't intend on installing lighting just yet, I figure it's better to have it ready to go than try and mess about doing it when the layout is more or less complete; the less time spent on the floor the better and I couldn't think of a bigger disaster than banging my head and dislodging half of my layout!

On another note; I purchased an F3A Kato Loco from eBay, which supposedly came with a factory installed decoder. Unfortunately I was sent the wrong model. The seller offered me a partial refund which I used to buy a Digitrax DCC board and I spend a frustrating couple of hours trying to install it. Eventually I succeeded, but it will be the last time I ever do that! The instructions were simple enough, but boy was it fiddly. In future I will make sure any Loco I buy comes with the DCC board installed already.

OMG I'm Back!

Wow, almost 4 months later and time for another post!

A thousand apologies, but in between starting a new job in October, Christmas and New Years and my beloved game of Cricket (Go the Blackcaps) the limited time I have had available to me has been spent at the beach or actually working on my layout as opposed to writing about it!

Now, I'm not promising any future surge of blog updates, but I will get a few more out over the next couple of weeks catching everyone up on progress.

This first post back is just a quick update really and as you can see from the below post, there has been quite a bit of work done.

Completed Trackwork

All of the track work has been completed! Trains run! Woohoo!

Probably the biggest single achievement to date IMO. One small snag though, I discovered that 75% of my hoarded rolling stock will need to have the wheel-sets replaced with low profile wheels. Luckily I hadn't started converting couplers yet (I will be using knuckle as opposed to the rapido type which most of them have), so by replacing the entire truck assembly I can kill two birds with one stone. Long term project! I have enough that are fine to keep me happy for the moment.

Completed Track-work

I also attempted to DIY some under track decouplers using rare earth magnets as you can see in the bottom picture; while they aren't particularly obvious from the photo, basically the magnets are attached to a washer in opposite polarities. It's pretty hit and miss, and my advice to anyone thinking about doing it is don't bother. before I ballast, I will take them all out. It was a good experiment, but not a keeper.

DIY Under-track Decoupler

You may also notice the control panel on the fascia, which while wired and powered up, is not quite hooked up to the Cobalt Blue switch motors; I will detail that a little more in my next post, though suffice to say, while completely unnecessary, I have decided to install them on all of my turnouts, just because they are cool and because I hate the look of the manual ground throws for N Scale. If you're wondering what the wires poking out of the track-work are, those are the feeds for the turnout frogs that have not yet been connected to the switch machines.

Currently I am working on building the first few structures (i'll show those in another post), and will start ballasting in a couple of weeks.