Ready to move forward

Working on the railroad has had to take a back seat for most of this year to finishing the basement room that will become my office/train room.  After many months of working on the drywall, ceiling, and flooring as time allowed, the room was finally completed and moved into this past weekend.  Here's what it looked like prior to moving my office furniture in (and a whole lot of Ikea Lack shelves to hold my railway book collection):

What I've got is a relatively spacious 14.5' x 11.5' room with the walls painted a sky grey.  The room adjoins my furnace/workshop on one side and a roughed-in bathroom on the other.   The workshop is ready-made for staging, and I plan on leaving a connection through the bathroom to the main living area available for future expansion.

With this wonderful space now available, the question becomes what to do with it.  When we moved in a year ago plans were soon drawn up for the room to contain the terminus of the Waterloo Spur in HO, specifically the town of Elmira, ON.  In the meantime a 12' long set of modules recreating CN's Pine Street Spur in St. Catharines have been started, also in HO, as well as a good amount of O scale rolling stock collected for a P48 rendition of the current industrial spurs on the north side of Guelph, ON (joint operation between GEXR and OSR's Guelph Junction Railway).  Focus is not one of my strengths, obviously.

So which railroad will end up in the room?  I spent some considerable time trying to bend one of the industrial leads in Guelph (See link to Google maps below) into the room.  The desire for large radii, even in P48, and having come up with a track plan I like that fits the O scale rendition into my workshop, has opened up the office for HO scale trains.  The dilemma is that I have modules for both the Waterloo and Pine Street spurs already started.  Which one to go with?  Or is there a third alternative?

Having had the pleasure of operating on Bob Fallowfield's rendition of CP Rail's operations around Woodstock, ON, I've come to a better understanding of what I find enjoyable in operating, namely something featuring a small yard with mainline power moving through, but also plenty of realistically-scaled industries.  Throw in some late-80's mainline & branch motive power, and a relatively low train frequency that would support operation by 1-4 operators, and I find I'm drawn back to thinking seriously of modelling CN's Guelph sub in & around Kitchener, ON.

What to do, what to do?  Do I finish what I have started, or start on something new?  Seeing these words on the screen leads me to think that in consideration of my pocket book, limited modelling time, and overall enjoyment level, I would be better served by getting trains running sooner rather than later.  The quickest route would be to bring the three modules comprising the Pine Street spur to a level of scenicked and operational completion that would allow for operations, and give myself time to decide whether a larger HO scale railroad scratches my itch.

Perhaps I can gain sufficient satisfaction from operating on friends' layouts to allow myself the luxury of multiple, smaller layouts of my own.  I could with relatively little further outlay construct a one- or two-switch P48 layout in the workshop that will allow me the pleasure of working in the larger scale as a change of pace to the HO models.  Who knows what the future brings?

(https://www.google.com/maps/place/Guelph,+ON,+Canada/@43.5490546,-80.2914006,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x882b9ad0c3a9fb6b:0x5037b28c7231b60!6m1!1e1)

Hmmm, Proto:48

I've been bitten by the urge to go bigger.  Without having seen any P48 models in person, and with only the memory of the impressive physical heft and aural magnificence of an O scale modular layout at the Springfield train show a couple of years ago, I think I'm going to give P48 a try.  Dip my toes in the water, so to speak.

First order of business is of course obtaining a locomotive.  Browsing the web, in particular the P48 Yahoo group, I quickly settled on a Red Caboose GP9 model.  It's seems to be the perfect candidate for a kitbash/detail upgrade into either a CN or CP rebuild.  After some research the angled face of the CN GP9rm is perhaps more than I'm willing to bite off for a first try, so something along the lines of Ontario Southland's ex-Chessie GP9 #175 or ex-CP 8235 look more feasible.

The Red Caboose model as sold by Des Plaines Hobbies is the plastic body only, lacking trucks or a drive train.  That will be taken care of with Des Plaines' brass trucks and can motor drive kit.  My first goal is to complete the locomotive in standard O scale, testing it on a few lengths of flex track.  If the bug takes, I'll upgrade it to P48 with the kit from Protocraft and build a switching layout.

In fact, I've already determined that a good representation of Elmira, ON in P48 could fit along the side wall of my basement.  It's so hard to pick something and stick to it, there are temptations all over in model railroading!

Well, this summer will be about collecting those parts, building some models of the Fraser mill on my HO scale Pine Street Spur modules, and perhaps even getting out to watch some trains during our roadtrip vacation to Florida.

Mobile storage

I've been reading a number of blog posts recently, primarily on mrhmag.com, where people have detailed the various solutions they have come up with for carting around the flotsam & jetsam associated with building a layout.  There's electrical, tracklaying, scenery, and layout construction equipment that is useful at this end of the layout one minute, and down at the other end of the room the next.  There are some very creative ideas out there, and it spurred some thought as to how I might want to tackle this in my own basement.

So it was no surprise that as I found myself wandering the lower levels of our closest Target store a few weeks ago, I viewed the store shelving and racking that was up for disposal (Target is closing their Canadian stores) with my model railroading eye.  And I liked what I saw.  Here were some heavy-duty, mobile units with adjustable shelves fairly screaming out to me regarding their usefulness for my modelling needs.  After a quick internal debate, I rolled out the front doors of the Target with a 2 foot wide, double-sided mobile unit sporting six height-adjustable shelves.  The price was right at the time, and with the closing dates fast approaching my wife tells me the units are now going for half of what I paid.

Once the shelf unit was in my basement, the question became one of how do I best utilize what it had to offer.  Drawing on some of what I'd read and seen others doing, I purchased some pegboard and slid that down the middle in order to have a place to hang tools. I also cut a piece of plywood to fit on the base, upon which were placed several plastic drawer units that have been occupying various spots in my workshop, but never all in the same, handy spot.  Now I could have them all next to my workbench or roll them out to whichever portion of the layout I would be working on.

  

This is about as far as I've gotten so far.  How to best utilize the shelves, especially with respect to not having things slide off of them as I roll through the basement, is one item still to be addressed.  I should note that the rolling qualities of the shelf unit are not the best on the varying carpet surfaces I have loosely laid down in the basement until the walls are finished, and the unit is quite heavy without a good fixed handle to maneuver by.  A smooth, hard floor would work best.

Having said that, I now am one step closer to having the model-building tools I need at hand without having to search throughout the basement for where I last put them down.  A place for everything, and everything in its place, as they say!

Getting it going again

Reading blogs is addictive, don't you find?  Find a good blog and you go back just about every day hoping that there will be new content for consumption.  Read it, then go on to the next one.  How often does the content make you stop and think before going into your favourites tab and click on the next destination?

I surf for new blogs, mostly model railroad related, all the time.  There are relatively few thoughtful, interesting pages out there.  I think I know why.  It's quite difficult to write something new and refreshing on a regular basis.  This must be what journalists go through, having to come up with tomorrow's story today, day after day.

There are actually many things that pop into my head to write about all the time, but how many are worth keeping for posterity?  And if I took the time to document them all, well, I wouldn't end up doing much modelling, would I?

Actually, keeping my phone handy may just be the right thing to do.  You see, if I'm trying something out, perhaps writing about it will keep me focused enough to see the job to completion.  To meet my editor's deadline, so to speak.

And I say phone because the iPhone 6 Plus I picked up today is practically a tablet, and with built in HD video and camera, I have everything I need to out a blog out regularly.  Isn't that the idea of technology, to enable us to do more?

So tomorrow, when I put together a battery slug locomotive and switch some cars on Pine Street, perhaps I'll see it through to completion and there will be some documentation of it on my blog that just might be useful or interesting to someone else out there.  And that little act will help me to get the modelling going again.

First Model Railroading Clinic

It's funny how small, seemingly innocuous things can open up whole new experiences.  You never know what's around the corner.

Barry Silverthorn, producer of Trainmasters.tv, reached out via one of the Yahoo groups I belong to looking for someone willing to give a clinic or two on short notice, as he'd had a cancellation.  Despite never having given a model railroading clinic before, it took me about half a second to decide that I should respond to him and offer my services.

I've had so much fun, and learnt such a great deal, in creating the Pine Street Spur modules as well as implementing Dead Rail, that I couldn't pass up the opportunity to share it with others.

Barry was gracious enough to take a flier on me, so I had three days to prepare my modules and models for the Quinte train show.  Walking through the genesis of the Pine Street Spur would be easy, and I quickly cut some wood to be able to demonstrate the various stages of building the lightweight, "waffle"-type benchwork that I had used.

The second clinic was to be an introduction to battery-operated, wireless control of my locomotives, also known as Dead Rail.  Being the perfectionist that I am, I decided to improve my battery car, but as things always seem to go, I also managed to short out my receiver.  It just stopped working.  Naturally, there was not enough time to get a replacement from Litchfield Station.  Nothing like a little stress test before the big day.

In the end, despite Duncan McCree's best long-distance troubleshooting efforts (thank you, Duncan!), we could not get trains moving before the clinic, so we ended up just having an audience discussion, with plans to go back to the Trainmasters studio once I've installed the replacement receiver.  I'm very much looking forward to it!

The show itself was everything I had hoped it would be.  It was an eye-opening experience to watch Barry orchestrate the taping, and a true pleasure to meet some of the folks in the hobby that I've admired, learnt from, and enjoyed listening to.  It was just plain fun to talk about what I'd created, how it had come to take it's present form, and to answer questions based on the experiences I've had building the Pine Street Spur.

If you ever have the opportunity, I would whole-heartedly recommend sharing your particular skills or accomplishments with others.  In fact, make sure you seek out the opportunities.  Getting out there amongst your friends and peers is the best way to improve your own modelling, help others, and experience that wonderful feeling that sharing with others gives.  You know it from when you help someone in need, or give a present to a child, and it's really not that different when you stand in front of other model railroaders and talk about how to weather, build, detail, or conceptualize a portion of this great hobby that you are comfortable with.  You don't have to be the best, because the simple fact of sharing raises everybody's game.  So get out there!

Now I have two spurs

It didn't take too long after moving in to our new home before plans were hatched on how to fit the Waterloo spur into the basement.  Not just part of the basement, all of the basement.  But one has to be reasonable and work in achievable chunks, so I started with preparing the pre-studded 14' x 12' room with electrical outlets, lighting, and drywall.  This would be where the end of the branch, Elmira, will be located.

I couldn't get too excited about mudding the drywall, so the spur was hung up and I now knew where I needed to cut in bridge pieces required because the existing modules were not an exact fit into the new space.

Next up, organizing all those magazines and hanging up the last couple of modules.  Once they're all set, I'll stack them in the middle of the room and finish the walls.  This will involve coving the upper portion of the corners and then completing the mudding and painting.  I also have to figure out the layout lighting, valance, and ceiling tiles.  This should keep me busy for a while.

A more difficult project will be going back to each module and re-laying the rail.  I've found that ACC does not do a great job of holding the rail securely.  There are stretches where the rail has completely popped out of the tie strips.  I'm going to give Pliobond a try, perhaps reinforced with PC board ties at regular intervals.  Certainly the turnouts are all going to be rebuilt the Joe Fugate hybrid way.  And I think I will add PC board ties epoxied to wood risers at the module joints, based on my experience with the Pine Street spur.

Ah yes, the other "Spur" in my basement.  It has found a home in the room on the other side of the wall from Elmira.  I built supports to hold the Pine Street modules over a bookshelf that I had built to hold my model railroading magazines.  Plans are to hang a stretch of drywall from the ceiling to form a backdrop, and to add lighting.  More details will be forthcoming in a separate post later. 

Starting up again - new home, second layout, Dead Rail experiment

It's been a while since I posted an entry, quite a while.  Once we decided in January 2014 that we would move this year, all work on the layout effectively ended.  Now we're in a new home in the model railroad mecca of Beamsville, ON (no, really, we have a fantastic hobby shop in town and some of the best modellers around), and work has resumed.

When we left our home, I had installed all the modules in our family room on a metal shelf bracket system and laid the track through most of Elmira.  A lighting valance hiding T5 fluorescent bulbs was also installed.  It looked very promising, as shown in this in-progress view:

However, I ran into problems with the trackwork, primarily related to the rail popping off the CV ties strips.  We'll get into that issue in another post.

We moved into a home with an unfinished basement, so naturally I was paralyzed again reconsidering how to best adapt the track plan to my new space, even my choice of prototype was up for grabs.  Over the summer I did make a set of three very lightweight modules to build a scale model of CN's Pine Street spur following an inspiration in Trevor Marshall's Achievable Layouts blog (http://themodelrailwayshow.com/LayoutDesign/?p=2070).  Three turnouts in 12 ft and I could model the mill complex in exact scale length.

I'm still undecided on whether to complete that concept, but with a Tam Valley DRS receiver and transmitter expected any day now, I can always lay the track down held together only with rail joiners and a few tacks, and operate and experiment to my heart's content.  I may still build this as something to take to shows, as Trevor suggested, if only to demonstrate the battery operation to the masses.

For now I'm putting up the drywall in the first basement room to be finished.  Nominally it will be a guest room, but practically speaking it will become the home of Elmira, ON on the CNR ca. 1988.  As it should be.  Questions abound as to layout height (I'm thinking high, i.e. 60"), room & layout lighting (LED strip vs. T5), duckunders, how much to intrude into the room space (i.e. along three walls or go for all four) and the aforementioned question of reliable track laying.  And I suppose also of whether to wire the layout for conventional DCC operation.  All things to be considered in due time.  If you have any thoughts and experiences to share regarding the above, I'd love to hear about and discuss them with you.

ttfn