Eastdown Terminal Facilities

The last month or so has seen me pre-occupied with getting settled in the new house, but it has also seen me dive back into the Southern And Central with a vengeance. The below picture shows most of track down along with the Peco turntable well in position. Electrical will be next....ugh, my pet hate...again.

After being put back together and tested, module 1 was joined to the empty module 2 which then became the Eastdown Terminal Facilities.

While scaled back from my original design, there is still enough room for a smallish turntable, 3 bay roundhouse and engine maintenance building. I will try and squeeze a bit more in if I can, but for now that will be plenty. The turntable has been weathered, and almost completed (I haven't fitted it properly, nor motorised it yet). My next post will cover this in more detail.

Ballasting Completed

Time for a quick update.

This job, that of ballasting, has taken several months; done in between a bit of this and a bit of that.

As you can see, I went with a blended grey courtesy of Woodland Scenics. I researched this for quite awhile and in the end just went with what I liked the look of, rather than anything prototypical.

While I was doing this I also installed some street lights, ones which look much better than what I have on the overpass; so one of my next jobs is to replace them! Ugh...

Currently I am onto the next bit of track-work, which is painting the rails, something which I decided to do after taking some close up videos of moving trains.

The shiny silver look of the tracks looked completely unrealistic when viewed from that angle. You can see some of the track I have painted on the left and I think you will agree, it looks way better. So over the next couple of weeks I will do the rest.


All going to plan, my next post will include be a video of a loco actually moving.

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!

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.