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Gulf, Atlanta & Eastern - into the second decade


Barry Ten
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  • RMweb Gold

A "Sentient" camera?

 

Sounds almost like something from the realms of science fiction.... :rolleyes: ;)

 

I'll be PM'ing you about the setup of one of these for wildlife watching, though. I've been hearing a very adjacent Great Horned Owl recently!

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Those Bluford cars are quite nice. I have a couple of PRR and PC ones (and I keep looking at a PC green pair at my local shop).

 

I'm sure you need some ExactRail SCL Verta-Paks, though - every layout needs more yellow cars :rolleyes: . For those who don't know, think of big yellow boxes the size of the Bluford cars, but intended to carry 30 Chevy Vegas hanging vertically inside them.

 

Adrian

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  • RMweb Gold

Hope you spotted the Colonial Photo & Hobby business card, John! You're a very naughty man for telling me about that place...

 

I still get a pain in the wallet every time I see that card, Al! Try living in Orlando and resisting it's temptations...

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  • RMweb Gold

Those Bluford cars are quite nice. I have a couple of PRR and PC ones (and I keep looking at a PC green pair at my local shop).

 

I'm sure you need some ExactRail SCL Verta-Paks, though - every layout needs more yellow cars :rolleyes: . For those who don't know, think of big yellow boxes the size of the Bluford cars, but intended to carry 30 Chevy Vegas hanging vertically inside them.

 

Adrian

 

I really ought to get a couple of those Verta-Paks, indeed.

 

Just got a call from my DCC installer - he's managed to complete decoder installation in a few more locos of mine, so I think I now have the necessary critical mass to go DCC full-time, as opposed to just hooking up the Prodigy occasionally to test things out. Until now I've not really had enough decoder equipped locos to run a sufficiently varied service.

 

 

In the style of one of those boring stock lists Railway Modeller always used to publish in Railway of the Month, DCC locos now run to:

 

2x B23-7

 

2x SD24

 

2x SD35

 

1x E8 (BLI with onboard sound)

 

1 xRS3

 

1 x GP7 (central of Georgia)

 

1x GP18

 

1x RS11

 

3 x FT A/B units

 

1 x F3 A (central of Georgia)

 

Should be enough to keep me happy for a while, while I get the other locos chipped over a longer period

of time. The two problem cases are my two Lifelike SD7s, which my installer decided he couldn't tackle - too

delicate. They're widely regarded as tricky installations, since they don't have a conventional split frame

chassis. If I don't find a solution they may be relegated to a DC-only switching area or something. Shame

as they run like a treat...

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  • RMweb Gold

post-6720-128208219459_thumb.jpg

 

Goodbye analog, hello digital... we've gone DCC. Conversion of the layout took about ten minutes, max - I disconnected the Gaugemaster twin track controller, substituted a cheap Trix unit to operate the point motors, and plugged the Prodigy into one of the two cab control circuits. A couple of evenings of test running proved very satisfactory, and by the weekend I was feeling suitably smug. That, of course, was when things started to go wrong...

 

A couple of friends were visiting, neither of them with any interest in trains, but they got the layout tour regardless. All was going well, until I needed to back a train into one of the sidings to clear the main line. To my surprise it was dead, with the culprit quickly being identified as the electrofrog crossing, which was no longer feeding juice into two of the sidings leading off it. Cue much frustration and gnashing of teeth, as I tried to identify a loose wire or broken connection in the under board wiring. No joy. Not wanting to be a bad host I shut the layout down and went downstairs to do the entertaining, but it was weighing on my mind all night. In the morning I had another poke around, in the hope that the fault might have magically cleared itself overnight - this has happened before, so it's not a completely foolish wish. Not this time, though, and in the better light of morning I still couldn't see any loose connections. We spent the day out with our friends while my mind raced through worst event scenarios. If something had gone wrong in the internal wiring of that crossover, it was game over - I'd have to lift the ballasted unit, and I couldn't do that without damaging the four sidings leading off it, which - given that one of them has a road running across it - would in turn impact on scenery that had taken a lot of time to get right. In the back of my mind, I remembered some scare stories about the internal leads in Peco points not being able to withstand DCC voltage/currents - had that happened, I wondered?

 

Back home, I wasn't overly keen on poking around with the wiring while it carried DCC, but I needed to be able to test the track power. I dug out a multimeter - not my usual one, which I've mislaid - and couldn't get it to read a sensible voltage. I then decided to swap back to DC for exploratory purposes. Five minute job - no problems. I ran a loco up and down and the crossover was still dead. It wasn't some transient problem, then, or something esoteric related to DCC specifically. I then decided to get technical and give all the track feeds running into a crossover a good yank, for no other reason than I vaguely recalled something similar happening a year or two back, before I completed the ballasting. I did so, and thankfully my test loco roared into life. Some further running established that power was now flowing back into the previously dead sidings. I then converted back to DCC and things have been fine since then.

 

OK, it's not a very elegant solution - and something is obviously not quite 100% in that crossover wiring - but I'll have to live with this state of affairs, as unsatisfactory as it is. I'd rather accept the need to tweak the wiring every year or so, rather than rip up a year's worth of scenery and ballasting.

 

Other than that, it's been pretty stress free. I spent some time learning about speed curves, so I could tune my two SD35s to run together, and I did some more CV tweaking to get the F unit consists to run properly. I've dug into advanced consisting with only limited success - I can get my B23-7s to work as a consist, but not the SD35s or SD24s, for some strange reason, even though they should all support advanced consisting. For now I run these units together in pairs by assigning the same address to both locos. A mystery, but probably not unrelated to my general ignorance levels at this point. I have also identified and (hopefully cured) a couple of areas of dodgy wiring which gave only transient faults in DC.

 

Overall I am very happy and am enjoying the increased operational flexibility. The layout was already divided into enough blocks to allow all the movements I could envisage, but it did sometimes mean a long wait for a slow freight to clear the longest block. And while the slow speed running was good under DC, it's amazing under DCC.

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  • RMweb Gold

That ABBA set looks the biz, Al. Shows off N gauge to it's best advantage, the ability to run a full lash-up and (probably) a decent sized train behind it, and still have the scenery dominate, without needing a whole basement. Most satisfying, I'll bet.

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  • RMweb Gold

That ABBA set looks the biz, Al. Shows off N gauge to it's best advantage, the ability to run a full lash-up and (probably) a decent sized train behind it, and still have the scenery dominate, without needing a whole basement. Most satisfying, I'll bet.

 

Indeed, although one quickly gets very used to whatever one has - I want more mainline run now, more scenery, longer trains - never satisfied, eh... :rolleyes:

 

My recent photos have been a bit lacking in punch, by the way, but I'm getting to grips with a new camera (an SLR rather than the bridge camera I used for most of these shots) and er... still got some way to go!

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That ABBA set looks the biz, Al. Shows off N gauge to it's best advantage, the ability to run a full lash-up and (probably) a decent sized train behind it, and still have the scenery dominate, without needing a whole basement. Most satisfying, I'll bet.

Seconded, in all respects!!

If I couldn't have my O scale locos, I'd go right back to N scale. :) B)

 

This layout is a bad influence!!! :rolleyes: :lol: ;)

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Seconded, in all respects!!

If I couldn't have my O scale locos, I'd go right back to N scale. :) B)

 

This layout is a bad influence!!! :rolleyes: :lol: ;)

 

Swings and roundabouts, though, isn't? I look at some of the American O gauge stuff and marvel at its

sense of mass and solidity, something I don't think it's really possible to achieve in N. And I wouldn't

mind a bit of SOO stuff now and then either ;) I guess N gives you the possibility to go for the big

picture, but it's not really the scale for hands-on modelling of locos and rolling stock, which is something

I enjoy. I found an ad in an old MR yesterday for a conversion kit to adapt the Kato 2-8-2 into a Southern

prototype, but it's long out of production.

 

Maybe if there was a scale between N and 0, we'd all be happy!

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Strangely, (and it must just be me) I found HO the least satisfying of the three scales to work in.

It was a bit too big for the "wide open scenery" look, and needed all the detail you can omit in N scale, but the parts are so small & fiddley I found it much easier to do in O, which yes, does have a 'heft' and 'prescence' the smaller scales can only dream of...

Cue gratuitous O scale F-Unit picture... *sorry* :rolleyes: ;)

SooNew5.jpg

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  • 1 month later...
  • RMweb Gold

Not too much to report here, as I've been away from the layout a fair bit, and when I've been here, I've been quite happy just playing trains :lol:. Plus, I've been neglecting my S&D stuff, so there's been some snail-like progress on the 4mm side of things, keeping me away from matters North American.

 

One thing I have been tinkering with is static grass, using the Noch Grassmaster. I had some trepidation, fearing that the grass might end up looking overscale in N, but my feeling at the moment is that it's fine - little more than waist-high to one of the N scale figures, which doesn't seem unreasonable for long, unkempt grass such as one might find in the vicinity of an industrial area.

 

post-6720-074656600 1287091391_thumb.jpg

 

post-6720-041139600 1287091430_thumb.jpg

 

I've also been building up the scenery on the left side of the layout. Here's progress to date, showing the terrain rising steeply behind the tracks. This hill - or part of a hill - is a removable module, as per the earlier work on the layout. It sits over the hidden rear track, and (once more modules have been completed) will serve as a view-block concealing not only the storage yard throat, but also the wireless monitor camera.

 

post-6720-070059000 1287091571_thumb.jpg

 

Finally, one of the things I slightly miss in N is the potential for hands-on modelling of locomotives and rolling stock, but there is certainly scope for improving older models. These box cars were all cheapo models of indeterminate accuracy picked up at various points over the last eight or so years. Apart from the replacement of the original trucks with Micro-Trains versions, these have had their interior weights swapped for something non-magnetic, new roofboards (MTL mouldings) in place of the chunky originals, and etched stirrups and steps (BLMA) instead of the overscale cast-on versions. With some weathering, these no longer look out of place amid newer, higher-spec models. Quick and easy - one boxcar can be brought up to spec in half an hour - and very satisfying.

 

post-6720-014295700 1287091682_thumb.jpg

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  • 1 month later...
  • RMweb Gold

More snail-like development on the upper left of the industrial area:

 

post-6720-028268900 1290465355_thumb.jpg

 

post-6720-099835100 1290465380_thumb.jpg

 

The building in the immediate foreground - Ridgeway Paints - which has been in many previous shots, is made up from

DPM modulars components. The next one along, with the fire escape and angled frontage, is adapted from the Walthers

Geo. Roberts printing company kit. The flats along the rear backscene are more DPM - Hanson Pianos, I think - and the

as yet unfinished building on the retaining wall next to the tracks is from the Walthers Empire Leather and Tanning mega-kit,

suitably modified to give it an extra floor. At the extreme rear (as already mentioned) you can see the start of what will be a

steep, heavily foliaged hill, which acts as a viewbreak to conceal the storage yard and monitor camera. It looks a bit unnatural at

the moment, but I'm hoping it will fit into the overall scene once "greened" and extended.

 

That's it for now - I'm still trying to work out the best way to continue the layout's development in terms of shoe-ing in a

loco terminal, more industries and a small classification yard.

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Thanks, Trevor - I am enjoying it, which is the main thing. I made a lot of progress in the first 12 months of the layout and almost felt that it was going too quickly but it has slowed down considerably since then and I no longer feel in any danger of finishing it soon. I have also been casting a critical eye at some of the areas of the layout that were developed the earliest, and I can see room for some changes, if I ever feel bored.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • RMweb Gold

I've been doing a lot of head-scratching lately, concerning the best way to continue developing the layout. To some extent, I've become greedy: back when I started modelling in N, I'd have been content just to have a continuous run, a couple of sidings to shunt, a passing loop and a few fiddle yard tracks. Over the years, though, the layout has grown and not inconsequentially so has my pile of kits and items of rolling stock. Encouragingly, I've found that N works fine for slow speed operation and switching - but the downside of that is that I want more of it, not less.

 

A year ago I decided I fancied adding a locomotive servicing terminal, and my Christmas present 12 months ago was the Walthers turntable, plus a roundhouse and some add-on stalls. I have since acquired a couple more kits that fit in with this theme, and continued researching the topic. At the time my thoughts were simple: the terminal (let's call it an MPD) was going to fit on the peninsula that would project out into the room. Failing that, there was more room along the as yet undeveloped lower wall. There didn't seem to be any lack of space, so what was the problem?

 

Too much knowledge, that was what. The more I dug into MPDs in an American context, the less likely it looked that a modest passing point, with a few industries, would warrant a facility as big as the one I had in mind - a full on transition-era terminal with steam and diesel both being served, and a 9-stall roundhouse equipped with a turntable large enough to handle a Big Boy! An MPD like that would be much more appropriate situated by a division point, classification yard and/or major junction - somewhere where it would make sense to change locos and their crews, basically. I didn't want to create anything that looked toy-trainlike (it is a toy train, but I'd worked hard to keep a sense of spaciousness on the existing bits and I didn't want to blow that now). The problem had now become one of fitting in not just an MPD, therefore, but also a yard - and the yard was likely to take up at least as much space, if not more, than the original terminal.

 

Still - plenty of space, right? I thought so, but the more I tried to square the circle, the more the pieces refused to fit nicely. There was room for the yard and terminal on the peninsula - but the yard would need a through-road; real classification yards aren't dead-ends, and the peninsula didn't allow this.

 

There appeared to be plenty of room along the lower wall - a clear eight feet, surely more than enough? That was my fallback option but there were (are) problems that no amount of head-bashing has resolved. Shillingstone, my 4mm layout, runs all the way around the room, above the GA&E. On three of those four walls, the Shillingstone boards are light and narrow enough that they're supported by L-shaped brackets with no diagonal brace piece. However, the boards along the lower wall are wider, and I decided to go for fully braced brackets along this side. The downside of that is that the diagonal bit intrudes on the space above any putative extension to the GA&E. There's still room for it, but the backscene boards would need to be much lower - unacceptably so, in my view. I've considered various options such as spacing the backscenes out from the wall by five or six inches, and running a track behind them (with suitable access) but that then intrudes on the room available for foreground scenery. That may still be the way to go, but ...

 

A more radical option would be to accept that the lower wall, while providing useful shelf space for the layout, is not suitable for scenic development. In which case, it might make more sense to move the storage yards there - basically, flipping them through ninety degrees from their current position. The downside is that the storage sidings won't be any longer than those currently in use (which have an option to be extended by 12", say three cars per road) but that would not be too unacceptable a trade-off. The plus side would be unobstructed access to the roads, since I wouldn't be trying to screen them behind foreground scenery.

 

Even more of a plus, I'd then claw back 10 - 11 feet of existing layout footprint which could then be almost exclusively dedicated to the yard and MPD. That would mean the elimination of some work already done - not just relocating the storage roads, but also removing a couple of grades and re-aligning the existing trackwork. But that would not be too painful since nothing that has been ballasted would need to be touched, and to some extent one end of the storage roads could be transplanted with only minimal effort. Almost all the work seen in photos would be preserved.

 

So anyway - that's where I am with my current thinking. Of course in model railway land nothing's quite that simple - to even begin to extend the layout, I need to remove a bookcase from one corner of the room, and apart from finding space for all those books and mags currently sitting on it, I'd need to remove a shelf as well.

 

Apologies for the blather - any thoughts welcome, of course.

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Very impressive layout. Love the spaciousness, and in many of the photoographs, it doesn't actually look 'N' gauge. I noticed that you are using code 55 track. I have read of the problems with some manufacturers'stock falling foul of this code because of too deep wheel flanges. Have you had any problems with this?

 

Steve

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  • RMweb Gold

Thanks, Steve. No, I haven't had any problems with the trackwork. My oldest locos, two Lifelike SD7s, have the deepest flange profiles but they still run well. With the older rolling stock - old Bachmann and so on - I generally swap the trucks anyway, to get the right couplers on them.

 

I'd heard that some people have had difficulties with stock derailing through Peco X-crossings but again I've not had that happen.

 

I think I've mentioned elsewhere that if I was starting from scratch, and had ready access to it, I might consider using Atlas code 55 exclusively - it just looks more "Americany" - but I don't know how their Code 55 profile compares with Peco's.

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I know Nigel Burkin uses code 55 Atlas on his layout and it does look good:

http://nigelburkin.wordpress.com/2010/04/

 

Both being code 55 I suppose it could all depend on how far up the profile the spikes come. My knowledge of 'N' is virtually non-existent, although I understand that fitting decoders can be a problem and that trucks are often swopped. I don't even know if you can get Kadee couplers for 'N'!

 

Having seen some very impressive US themed 'N' layouts recently,however,it is very enticing:

http://genevasub.blogspot.com/

http://csxdixieline.blogspot.com/

http://www.mrlmodeler.com/MRL_Modeler.html

http://www.scarthbridge.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/index.html

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Peco code 55 isn't ...........true code 55 that is :O

 

the rail section is double webbed ...if you look at it end on, the depth to the outside is = to code 55...to the inside,IE where the wheel flange runs is = to code 80 ..

 

so visually is looks code 55 but running wise it is code 80 ...Simples !!

 

unfortunately I am not in at the shop today ...so I cannot post a photo but will tomorrow if road and rail ever work again !!!! :(

 

Regards Trevor .. :D

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