Pokemonprime

17 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

In what part of Florida do you live? (I'm not asking for the city, just the general region.) Those prices seem exceedingly low for new construction in a state like Florida.

 

The median home in Miami-Dade is over $500k and Orlando is $300k though I see Jacksonville and Tampa Bay are around $280k. For comparison, Portland is over $540k. My suburb is over $600k. Burnaby, BC is around CA$1M (US$800k).

 

Portland real estate continues to be hot. We never had the sudden influx of Hong Kongers looking for a place to invest like Vancouver, BC experienced, but Portland metro has seen steady immigration from places like California which has continued to pump up the market. The challenge recently has been redevelopment of near suburban, early-mid 20th century bungalows with detached one-car garages into multiple units. Frankly this is necessary, but they are not all responsible regarding off-street parking.

 

There's a lot of drama over losing neighbourhood "character", fights over specific trees and erosion of affordable housing, particularly related to gentrification of what were at one point minority neighbourhoods - which have a long and rather distressing history. And of course as affordable housing evaporates, the homeless (now "unhoused") population is growing in what feels like an exponential rate.

18 hours ago, pH said:

Please do not take this personally - it’s just my reaction to the situation you describe.

 

Those prices would not get you a garden shed here, 20km from downtown  Vancouver. $300,000 US translates to a bit over $375,000 Canadian. A single-family 1800 square foot starter home in our area would be over $1 million. Our son has been house-hunting recently, looking one step above starter homes - prices started at about $1.4 million and went up from there.

 

Meanwhile, my brother-in-law just sold a 4 acre property, 4000 square foot house with large barn/workshop on a lake north of Houston for less than that!

This is in Brevard County, also known as the "Space Coast" of Florida. I admit and understand it's not anything awful compared to cities, especially ones up in the Pacific Northwest- people aren't moving here from the expensive states like New York for no reason. It's just a a jarring increase to see when houses here used to go for under $100k, and now foreclosures are pushing close to $200k, and new houses are $340k, with 30 year old houses not very far behind, and of course these prices look like they're going to keep increasing. I'm relatively lucky, but I can just see this area going down similar routes, though I don't think it'll ever get as bad as cities, just because we can basically sprawl out forever (even if it'll probably destroy our roads even more).

Here in Florida they build nothing but 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom single family homes. The headscratcher for me is a lot of the people moving here are either young professionals (no family, though may get one in the future), or older folk (whose kids have already grown up). You'd think there would be a high demand for cheaper, smaller apartments for individuals, or at least smaller houses! But I hardly ever see them built.

Housing prices just keep going up as well. New builds are well north of $200k, sometimes even $300k. Houses similar to mine run $180-$200k easily. My parents bought our house, admitably as a foreclosure but still, for $67k! Now empty lots go for half that. 

All of this for an area that, in my opinion, is rather drab and soulless- there's a small downtown the next city over, and there's beaches about a half an hour or more drive away, but this city itself is purely a sprawling bedroom community.

Everything I've found so far about scrap-hauling wagons on BR has been either 16T (later 21T) steel-bodied minerals, or later hopper bodied/later era wagons. (like HSA, I think?). I was curious if wood-bodied wagons (5-planks and 7-planks) ever got used in this service, but I haven't been able to find any evidence of such. A friend of mine said that by the time there was any notable scrap metal traffic, wooden opens would have already been phased out. 

So were wooden opens ever used on BR for scrap metal traffic, from 1948 to the early/mid 60s (when they'd all be retired)? Or was it always metal-bodied wagons? If anyone has any knowledge or even better, photographs, that'd be immensely helpful.

and here I thought I'd never like anything involving that new Basset-Lowke stuff. Wonderful and cheerful work.

Got my package from Hattons yesterday, and roughed out the foam core for the bed of the layout. Need to attach the two pieces together, fill the gaps, and then see if I can raise it enough for the dropaway. 

The two wagons are a Ratio 5-plank and a Dapol 7-plank, both need a little work, but they were cheap. Funniest to me is the weight in a 5-plank- it's just a metal hinge glued onto the floor

£7.90 to ship 4 DCC boards from Germany, and yet somehow it cost me £6.53 to get two wagons and two points shipped across the Atlantic, UK to America. I will never quite understand international shipping.

Would just like to point out that you've accidentally named your American layout after an American home improvement store. Thought it was going to be a layout built out of only hardware store materials, at first! heh.

34 minutes ago, TechnicArrow said:

Looks like it could be a good layout, and interesting if you can get the shed-dropping mechanism. Maybe a working crane would make the wagon-loading siding a little more dynamic; or at the very least pre-formed loads you can drop into the wagons, so they can be brought in empty and taken out full.

 

And I'm sure you're aware of it, but one of the most detailed scrapyard layouts I've seen around is Ruston's one, and there's 21 pages of it here on RMweb for inspiration:

I have seen Ruston's layout, and it is absolutely amazing. Some of his photos of real-life scrapyard workings, as well as his great modelling, serve as great inspiration for this project, though I'd had it in planning beforehand. 

I do have plans for a working crane, with some notebook sketch plans involving miniature electromagnets and hidden ball bearings. But that will come once the layout is farther along.

Finally gotten around, after many many failed proposals, to a micro layout that I think I'll be happy with. I recently cleared off a shelf that used to be home to some audio equipment, and in lieu of filling it with yet more brick a brack and clutter, I want to put a little layout there. 

The trackplan I drafted up in AnyRail should be attached, and most of the labels should be self explanatory. The "torch track" will be an interesting bit- my plan is that cars delivered for scrapping will be shunted down there, behind a fence and into a shed. In the shed I'll have some kind of elevator or similar, so that way I can drop cars beneath the layout instead of having to awkwardly shunt back out "scrapped" cars. Overall I hope to have some ability to shunt cars back and forth, though the real purpose of this layout is to exercise my detailing skills. 

The layout will have 1-2 locomotives- a Hattons Barclay, and a 0-4-0 Hudswell, which I plan to scratchbuild. 

Currently, I have some parts on order from Hattons that will take a few days to cross the Atlantic to the US. Hopefully I can get started quickly once those arrive.

Would love to see what the trackplan for this looks like, also working on some industrial layouts in a very limited space..

Over the past few days I've used my off time at school to model a basic approximation of a Ruston locomotive using Solidworks, and I got it printed today. This print didn't go too well, there was a small "shift" halfway through printing, and this print was done using some old filament. But I still think it came out fairly well.

The finished print, quickly painted and cleaned up more to kill time than anything as I'm not sure if I will use this particular print. It will eventually be fit to a Kato 11-103 chassis, meaning I'll likely have to carve out the bottom a bit. The finished model with also have etched RH plates, I might give it a name as well, not sure.

My primary inspirations when making this freelance creation were
https://www.flickr.com/photos/34938158@N02/13556116933/ RH 444208
and
https://www.flickr.com/photos/34938158@N02/13611427965/ RH 497760
 

Stunning work, especially for the space you had to deal with. Is the loco scratchbuilt or kitbashed? I quite like it.

I will get a picture when I get home, but I have made decent looking loose scrap out of almost anything, the key is just to get it down to a good small size. I've taken nearly everything, stripwood bits, bits of track, ties, 3d-printer support material, old rolling stock shells, even some electronic bits, and then cut them down to size, spray painted them silver, and then drybrushed them brown to make the finished scrap. 

Ah! Nice. I'm modelling a small Ruston-inspired diesel and wanted to know if I should include it on mine. Since it'll be a mine loco, I guess I should include it.

Very impressed with the No.6, I'm planning to make a similar loco for my layout. Might use a different mechanism though, I can't seem to find the "Boehler" online for a good price. 

What is the large black box/equipment on the back of the loco?

Really a beautifully detailed layout, I'm certainly taking notes on how to build my planned OO9 layout. I especially like the Code 75 rail used for fence posts, I wouldn't have realized they were rail unless I was told.