Thank you, guys! I hope it will be a good one. Been working on it with Dana Kawala, who has been a big help and caught more than one minor problems...
Congrats Congrats on the article! Glad to see more N in MR and your layout puts the best foot forward with your long trains and massive scenery to track ratio.
Thanks, Fellas The scenery to track ration is for me what it's all about in N scale. I've done spaghetti before, and while I love to eat it I don't much care for it in modeling. I must admit to getting a hankering to build a populated area, though. I've seriously considered building a sub layout off a wall in the basement's bay - the entire east side of the basement is windows and a door - featuring downtown Oakville...maybe 2 X 6 or so...
Thanks for the kind words, guys! Here are some RTTXs - yet another superb model from BLMA. across the Bealville horsehoe:
On the track plan where the main comes out of staging there is no S curve shown...now this, to me, is one of the really neat places on the layout - you can't see the entrance to staging because of that S curve, the train simply appears out of a canyon - just like on the prototype (south of Sandcut, north of Caliente). I had to exaggerate the canyon, but it serves the purpose well and I consider it a focal point of the layout. I'm gonna have to redraw the plan for here and the website, and I hope they were able to change the illustration for the article. I ended up taking a series of long shots so they could see everything, and did it for the whole layout. Normally I shoot in tight so you can't see anything but the layout and backdrop...
Busy day at the Caliente crossovers...the earthworm is celebrating the fact that all the IM 5161s and ER 5161s are now body mounted and have the correct size wheels. That was a hike!
Jim - Congrats on the article! Can't wait to see it. The earthworm photo is great. That train is the modern day version of the oil cans when you see it real life, very impressive and very heavy. Do you run it 4x3x2 like BNSF does over the hill?
Haven't even looked at them with body mounting in mind yet. 5161s are definitely up the evolutionary ladder with the dimple in the correct location. But the 4750s are a whole 'nother animal. Not impossible, mind, but I think you'd need to do some creative construction there...
So far I've just done the head end with an occasional pusher - very occasional. But I do have it in mind to play around with mid train locos, just a question of available time. You'd think being retired would give you this huge pool of available, but it just ain't so. Kind of like the old adage that work expands to fill the available time...
Jim, I'm just curious about the pulling power of the Kato ACe, how much weight can you get behind one before it becomes too much?
I haven't got a number for you, Mitchell. I never run only one loco (except today when I needed to shunt a few cars around). I can tell you they are good pullers. At a guess probably fifty cars on the straight and level - but those are free rolling cars. The FVM GEVOs are good pullers also, maybe even a bit better. I would think there'd be somewhere that information is available. How about the spookshow site?
