I did model railroading as a child/teenager, and now (a few years later) it suddenly occurred to me that THIS is the hobby I want to do again. The fishes/aquariums and other stuff went out the door to be replaced with trains, tracks, boards, ballast, scenery stuff, electronics and all the other goodies that come along, and a hobby room suddenly appeared in my house, with room for a decent layout. What I really like is the diversity of the hobby, within the same area you can do all this different things, and expand in every direction. Instead of painting a flat picture, you get to paint 3D models! Just that is so intriguing. I am an electronics and software engineer, and a physicist by education - and by occupation - although today my paid time is spent on software programming. Within the hobby I want to build [most of] the electronics I need, as it looks rather simple, and some programming is also ok, but the main interest is building the complete layout. I started 6 months ago reading up, and looking around, and bought a small startup set to get familiarised, and a couple of test locs. I also visited a local model railroad group, on an open day - immensely fun - spent hours there! And found a local shop that was very helpful with advice, tips and tricks. Now I have made a small test bed (diorama?) with a couple of tracks and turnouts, and have set it up with a DCC++ system using an Arduino. And, it works! Also my first rail program accessing the DCC++ works! I want to check out all the aspects, bits and pieces, on this test bed, before I start really building the main layout. The design of it is done using SCARM and Google SketchUp (for the mechanics ).
Velkommen!! You'll find lots of support and good ideas all over this forum, enjoy the hobby!! He det godt!
Welcome to TrainBoard, Terje. We look forward to hearing of your progress, and perhaps some photos as you go along. I assume you are working with HO gauge ... or maybe N gauge?
Hi Terje, Welcome. Happy to have you on board. I like your approach of experimentation to develop techniques and results. Remember that with model railroading we never fail. Merely that the interim result is not quite what we had envisioned. So we try another approach to satisfy our creativity.
Welcome to Trainboard, Terje. With your background you can probably not only design your layout, but by use of electronics and software produce a completely automatic series of events on the layout. Please keep us informed of your progress.
Thanks for all the nice welcomes Yes, I am doing H0 gauge, small enough to fit on a layout, but still big enough both to *see* the details and be able to work with them. I found that I was most intrigued by the trains from my childhood, so epoch 3+4 seemed like a good choice. I am not so found of the steam age, they are really beautiful of course, but I decided to follow what felt good, and in my childhood in Norway we didn't have any steam locos, so they don't trigger my emotions. The next was I found that even if I am Norwegian, I was much more attracted to the German railroads, and also with the German post-war "wirtschaftswunder" story. So, I decided to go for a Deutsche Bundesbahn model. I also found the principle of the "Mittelstadt/Mittelstand" , which is really 3 things, a city in the middle of Germany, a term for a medium sized city, no larger than 100000 people, and a principle for an economy, and also here , which give some of the clues to how the germans could do what they did. Check it out! History learning too! . All this fascinated me, so my main station will be the Mittelstadt (using a Faller station) depicting that city as central of the layout. I don't want to make it a real life model, so the layout otherwise will be a kind of fantasy, but I will keep to German, small city stuff, at least a bigger bridge (so fascinating too), and then go from there. My test bed is shown below: My test loco is to the far right, a PIKO model where I added a piko decoder, which really is an Uhlenbrock decoder, in there. This is a low-cost model, which I can afford to ruin, if all goes wrong. I decided it was a good strategy, so that I could really test things out without worrying of breaking something valuable. After struggling with how to disassemble the thing, I finally managed it First victory. To the left is my first two attempts on ballasting, which went fairly well. Not so hard - got some good tips from the owner of a small model shop, so I mixed the wetter, glue and stuff myself after his advice. Very fun! I also learned some of how to do the cork, I tried with 3mm first, but had to double, and no nails of course, gluing it together to make sure I get the noise down. This is the Arduino with the motor shield mounted. I cannot supply too much current, too little cooling, but I will add boosters (found some great stuff on that on this forum site). My first real loco, an older Fleischmann model, on the test bed, with a test build of another station in the background - yes, I also wanted to test that I could glue these things together . when I was a kid it was much harder than today (I have learned now), so it was really easy. One other good thing about this is that I have to update my German, which is not that good, so I found this book on the German railroad which was extremely good. Fantastic stories and a lot of pictures, for inspiration! So this hobby takes me through learning to build, learning a language, learning history, and a tons of the modelling stuff. It can't be better
