I decided I wanted to try DCC, and having helped film the BRM DVD for the Select I knew what I was in for if I bought that. I got one and wired it up and having got over the initial problems I suffered (compatability issues with Bachmann decoders) it worked reasonably well though it sometimes crashes if you get it too confused!
One thing I had been wondering about was what to do around my loco spur. Its quite an expanse of board space to fill up and I couldn't decide what to do with it. N
I have obviously now got quite a lot of stock for what is really not a very large layout. I also got a bit irratated by the fact I could only have two complete trains on the layout at one time. So I knocked up a small fiddle yard that sits on the end of the layout. It has no legs (mainly so I can pile junk under it!) and is supported by a strut that comes out from the main layout legs. Add this to the bolts holding it in position and it becomes very solid. I mean you wouldn't want to lean o
I've finally caught up with myself. After the last entry I've been playing trains, and just generally enjoying my layout. I've also been building locos, with two new locos taking up residence.
The first one is number 6. This was a Bachmann Forney that I bought but discovered it was too long to go round my curves without derailing whatever it was towing. What to do? I thought about selling it, but its a nice model and I rather liked it, so I elected to buy the Backwoods conversion kit to
For Christmas 08 my family very kindly bought me a Bachmann inside frame 4-4-0 locomotive. This loco runs well and is well detailed, but I wasn't quite sold on it initially. It looked too low when viewed from the front. It wasn't long before I weathered it and this seemed to make it change shape, and it is now one of my favourite locos. As it comes it has lots of additional detail parts to give some variation, and I used some of these. The changes included changing the front bogie to one wi
I was browsing ebay US at this point and discovered a massive job lot of On30 bits from someones railway in the States. There were a lot of interesting bits, including a pair of scratchbuilt Forney locos, built on old RTR chassis. As well as those there were about 8 box cars and a ice scraping caboose. I decided not to go for the locos as they were sold as non working and as they were on old american chassis I wasn't sure about getting spares should I need them. I decided the boxcars were wo
I started some scenery soon afterwards. This was initially limited to some scatter material at the front around the passing loop. Nothing special, just Woodlands Scenics on wood glue. I had managed to get hold of a D&RG passenger coach at this point and this was soon weathered, simply by breaking up some coal dust and running into the wood plank detail, just like the real thing. It looked passable from a foot and I was happy!
I got round to ballasting the goods yard, this had to look
of course at this point I only had the one locomotive. Add the fact that it only had a rear coupling on the tender and operation became a bit limited. It could only face and travel in one direction if it were to be able to do any shunting. I therefore had to get another loco to address these problems. As I was still fairly new to On30 I decided to get the ubiquitous Bachmann Porter 0-4-0 as the next loco. This was mainly because it was small, allegedly ran well, and was also very cheap (a cr
well at this point I finally figured out what I wanted to do with the track layout. Once again the list of parameters came into effect:
1) It had to have a means of running locos round.
2) It had to have sidings to do some shunting.
3) It had to have at least a loco siding. Narrow gauge US tends to have uncovered loco yards on logging lines, and I wanted somewhere to display locos not running.
4) I had to be able to store more than one complete train on the layout at one time.
5) NO Ho
well christmas 07 came and went, and left me with a bright yellow Bachmann Mogul and matching Rio Grande wagons, and a lovely set of mine tippers. The whole lot was sent belting round an oval of track loosely laid on the board and a lot of fun was had.
The loco is actually not a D&RGW (Denver & Rio Grande Western) loco but is the generic loco Bachmann use in their sets. Its actually a pretty accurate model of a Colorado and Southern mogul with a few bits altered to make it more lik
well hello there, my names Matt, a 20 year old modeller from the South near London. I noted a distinct lack of On30 type stuff on the forum (or at least I haven't stumbled onto it yet!) and thought I would rectify the situation. As a lot of my layout is already built, I shall cheat a bit and let you have snippits of info at a time to keep things interesting. Fortunately I take pictures of everything as I do things so I shall have plenty of archive to fall back on. As its twenty to one at nig
