Finally, the new windows and back door were installed in my apartment today. Not much mayhem, all things considered. Now I can get back to building my layout. What was interesting is that the grandfather of one of the workers was a model railroader! Apparently he had a massive collection of trains (don't ask me what scale - the guy didn't know) and was also into electronics as I am. He was also an RC airplane enthusiast, scratchbuilding his own planes (big ones) from drawings he ordered by mail. Now there's a guy I would have loved to sit down and have a beer with. I found a second LHS that's a little closer to home and seems to be well stocked in scenery elements. Likely this weekend, I'll pay them a visit at their new digs. A good thing, because once I have all the wiring done, it's going to be scenery and ballasting. I'll also check out their stock of structures and see if there's something that interests me. Otherwise I'll need to wait for the next train show and hunt for used stuff (other than my diesel fueling station, it's all used buildings). I did a little research on end-of-track bumpers, and found some inspiration for scratchbuilding my own. I have *lots* of old flextrack left over, and I'm sure that a minute fraction of that could be used for such things. More fun to come!
My visit to the new LHS (actually an older one in new, more spacious digs) was very fruitful. They will definitely get my business from now on - the fact that they're half the distance from home as the one down in Montreal helps. I walked out of there with an armload of scenic materials and some square styrene rods to add some height to my engine shed. Indeed, my engine shed was just a tad low, enough to prevent the stall doors from clearing the tracks. I added 1/8" square styrene rod to the foundation of the shed, just enough for the doors to clear the tracks and be able to open and close without obstructions. I tested my control boxes, and set up the second power pack (the first is used for the main line). All the individual isolated tracks switched in and out of circuit flawlessly, until... as the great philosopher Homer said... D'OH!!!!!! *facepalm* ... I had completely forgotten to wire up the leads to both the yard and the town. Each of the yard and city tracks had power, but there was no way to get there (unless you got out and pushed...). I had a couple of wires that were improperly soldered (soldering small wires to tracks nearly three feet away while bent over the layout, not easy... the mental image of me doing that, priceless). That was quickly fixed. Once I fixed all the bugs, everything went fine. I'll wire up the third power pack next. Then I'll bone up on scenery techniques and start ballasting the track, add a bit of topography and play around with trees, ground cover, grass and various growing things to spruce up the landscape.
Laid down the wiring for the town buildings. I just dug a narrow trench and pushed the wires into it. Where I had or planned a building, there's a loop of wire sticking out. Town street lighting is next, same principle. Yard and RR building lighting will have a separate circuit, same deal - trench and loop. Now the landlord is redoing the concrete walkways out front. A good thing but jackhammers and backhoes a few feet from one's window are horrible for concentration...
Bought more wire, another project box, a 12VDC power supply, and a few more toggle switches, to build the layout lighting control box. The power supply looks exactly like a laptop supply, with a small sealed case and 120V power cord on one side and a barrel connector on the 12V side. That's great because then I don't need to find room for it on the layout or a table, or block a power outlet with a wall-wart (even on a power bar, it will likely only plug into an outlet that blocks at least one other outlet because the one that wouldn't block other outlets just happens to be right next to the power bar's switch... ). Once that is built, I'll put in the wiring for the lights and begin installing LEDs. The next LHS trip will likely put some street lights in my basket, and definitely more scenic materials. I'm brushing up on scenery techniques before I start on scenery. A trip to the hardware store is in the works, to get some 1 inch thick (max) foam insulation to build up some terrain so the layout isn't quite so flat (I'm not modeling Saskatchewan... ). I cobbled together a makeshift track bumper using three ties glued together, tripod-style, for the scrap yard spur. It definitely looks... scrappy. It does the job!
I can't seem to upload photos anymore? The upload happens, I see it on the outbound traffic monitor graph, I hit the Save Media button, it says it was successfully saved, but it doesn't show in the album...??? I hit the media gallery embed button, and it's not in the list either. The last photo I managed to upload sucessfully was the Z scale guitar case layout. That's the second time it happens (the last time it was in my railfan photo album). The first time I thought it was a glitch, but now it's definitely a problem. Do I have too many photos? Do they take up too much space?
So far, very few problems test running locos and rolling stock over the new layout (especially the main line). Most of them had to do with couplers, either that @#$&*@@ spring was missing or the height was a little off. The great thing with a foam base is that irregularities in the track can be evened out with a little pressure, squishing the foam down and making the slope difference less abrupt. Electrical work continues. I'll run some wiring for lighting the railroad facilities and street lights. I've marked the locations of street lights on the foam base, most of them located in the town, with a few outside (leading to the yard and other outlying facilities). I had an idea about building lighting that will make maintenance easier - mount the LEDs on stalks sticking out of the foam base and just place the structure over it. The next visit to the LHS will happen soon. I'll need the street lights as well as roadway materials, plenty of ground foam, and maybe a couple of new structures. But there is a model train show at the end of the month down in Montreal (Sun Youth show). I might be able to find a couple of bargains down there, especially on buildings - I need several more to make my town look more... towny. Layout progress is still a little slow, but since the original three-week spurt during my vacation, I have returned to work, limiting most of my activities to the weekends, and there's been a lot of activity around the apartment building (first, replacing the windows and back door on all the apartments, now rebuilding the front walkways and some landscaping... very noisy and bad for concentration). Back to digging trenches, laying wires, and running more rolling stock over the trackage.
Back to the LHS yesterday, and came back with plenty of grass (NOS Bachmann and cheap!), bushes, coarse turf, coarse gravel and other scenic materials. I laid more wiring, for yard, engine house, and other RR structures, and covered some trenches with liquid nails (that stuff is great). We're getting ever so slightly closer to starting serious scenery work. Some more styrofoam will be needed if I want to add some topography in a few places, to make it more interesting than just flat. Then comes the base, grass, turf and bushes, and roadways. Before that, more electronic/electrical work is in order, to set up building lighting. As mentioned before, there's a train show down in Montreal at the end of the month and I want to attend so I can find some more cheap buildings. Houses, businesses, a church and one big factory (probably a brewery, someplace for my gaggle of beer billboard reefers to call home). There's a small piece of real estate that's a bit too small for some kind of building, but a fun idea is burgeoning in my brain - get an HO scale tank (not a tank holding something, but a tank with a big gun ) and park it there as a memorial type site. I got that idea when heading home from shopping and seeing the M109 the local Legion branch have parked on their lot... They have it for a couple of years now, but it just kicked my imagination into gear at that precise moment as I drove by. Either that or a howitzer. But a tank is more fun - it's big, heavy, loud (even Red Green confirmed that, tanks are loud) and can be parked anywhere one wants...
The last wiring is laid down, for future street lights. Now I'm ready to get some thin styrofoam sheets (less than and inch thick) and build up some modest topography before getting into the nitty gritty of scenery - grass, bushes, shrubs, trees, roads, ballasting the tracks, etc. I found a plentiful and cheap supply of rods to mount lighting inside the buildings and other structures - Q-Tips. I had the inspiration at the supermarket, where I remembered I had plenty of those at home. So I'll put the LEDs and their current limit resistors on them with some heat shrink tubing and plant them in the foam under the buildings.
That's a fine idea. Canadian armor served with distinction in WW-II, an example being horrific engagements around Caen in the weeks following D-Day.
I've seen documentaries about the Canadian contribution to D-Day, and they were indeed performing above and beyond the call of duty. Without the Canadian courage and sacrifice, it might have taken a bit longer to gain an effective foothold - and time was of the essence; the US Army liberated Wiltz, Luxembourg, my parent's village, just a few weeks short of my Dad's 14th birthday. That's when he would have been drafted by force into the German army and likely have been killed (I already know of two of my Mom's brothers that were drafted, and one never came back). In which case I wouldn't be here playing with trains. I bought a sheet of 1-1/4 inch thick styrofoam insulation (the thinnest I found that was cheap) yesterday and decided to start with a corner as practice. Other than producing a *lot* of tiny foam "sawdust" balls, it's going rather well. When I've built up enough height, I'll crinkle some aluminum foil and use that as a plaster mold to create the actual rock face, and sprinkle a few loose boulders at the base. That little exercise will build up my confidence and I'll decide where the next bit of topography will be.
Maybe the end of the noise as the building and landscaping renovations continue. Yesterday they finally finished the cobbles in front of my window, ending the pounding, the rattling of the "jumping jack", etc. I dug out an old box of plaster of paris and it still seems viable - it will serve as the test for the rock faces I'll mold using crinkled aluminum foil. I dug some ditches in the foam and did more carving to refine the corner hills. It's a cleaner process now that I've stopped using the Buck knife and started using my Dad's old fishing knife that's sharper than an X-Acto blade and nice and flexible. It slices clean through the styrofoam, with a way less foam balls produced. In about a week there's the Sun Youth train show, one I've avoided so far because it's way down in Montreal (very little parking) but now they have a shuttle bus). I hope to find some extra bargain buildings to complete the layout before deciding how much more topography I want to add. I was thinking about using public transit all the way but it would be a bit awkward in the subway, bus and train, carrying a lot of delicate and bulky plastic structures.
Since I am starting from a blank slate when it comes to my new 10x11 2 shelf layout I have chosen Stanton S-Cab and will not have to worry about any wiring except powering some track in a yard to charge the locomotives' battery packs over night. Decoders, etc. to upgrade my old DC steamers are not a big additional expense and most of my locomotives need minor to major conversion to fit my prototype: The Tacoma Eastern Railroad ca. 1910. Your layout is looking good, Mike.
The trip down to the Sun Youth train show, down deep in Montreal, was *very* fruitful! I walked out of there with two bags full of buildings, scenic materials and some kits (aerial conveyor, various piping, and a small gantry crane). I placed the new structures (a church, a pair of houses, a pair of apartment buildings with ground-floor businesses, and a warehouse-like structure) and rearranged everything to take better advantage of the available space. I still need to find a large factory building for a big space I reserved for it. There's a club flea market at the end of October, and another local show a week after that. But I think I have enough structures to start scenery for real. The show itself was very nicely organized, in the Sun Youth building on St-Urbain street, spread over several floors of a pretty large former school building. It was pretty easy to get a bit disoriented in the maze of layouts, vendors, and exhibitors. Very, very nice and I'll likely go back next year. Quite worth the bumpy ride over decrepit Montreal streets to the shuttlebus terminus - and I was glad that I didn't go all the way down and the shuttlebus took the brunt of the even worse streets going down to the show site. And amazingly, I resisted buying any locos or rolling stock!
My first plaster casting of a rock face - very, very satisfactory. I used crinkled aluminum foil taped down to the layout surface (not 100% effective at stopping leaks of soupy plaster... and the cause of much mad scrambling for paper towels, and a bit of a mess on the carpet below) and plaster of paris poured between the foam and the foil. It took several pours to build up the face, and though there still may be some touch-ups, it's done. I was convinced of the operation's success when the sun peeked out between rain squalls (AKA free car wash ) and shone down on the rock face at just the right angle, bringing out the angles of the rock (no chorus of angelic voices, but about the same effect ). It's still bare white plaster, but it should look very nice once painted (hopefully, I inherited at least some of my Mom's artistic talent). And just to be sure, I ran a train through there to check clearances, and let out a sigh of relief. Job well done.
I did a trip today, not to the LHS, but the art supply store. Whaaaa??? I bought some acrylic paint in earth colors, some large brushes, a palette to mix them, and... a decent Dullcote substitute. No longer am I subject to the whims of greedy LHS customers who buy the entire store's stock of Dullcote, leaving other modelers in the lurch! I tested it on a (too) shiny water tower and it seems to be OK. Take that, Dullcote hoarders! So I started being artistic and painted the rock face I cast last weekend. I know my Mom did that with my first layouts when I was a kid (she was a decent painter, most of the paintings hanging here are hers, and there are many, many others around in Europe and North America - she gave them away to anyone who liked them). I need a bit of practice, though, to get anywhere near her level. But the result is reasonable, considering that the shallower slopes will have some greenery to cover up my artistic talents... In the end, I may be no Rembrandt, but I had fun.
I'm getting better at the Woodland Scenics tree kits. It's slowly growing into a forest on top of my rock cut. I even placed some bushes and undergrowth there. It's just a matter of patience when letting the glue dry, so the foliage sticks. If I don't wait, the foliage comes off and the cuss words start flying - in two languages (and French is a *lot* richer in swear words than English...) Just for good measure, I spray on some matte clear coat as a kind of hair spray when it's done.
