Fun with the rock crawler

Yesterday, Pascal and I went out in the neighborhood to look for places to exercise the rock crawler. There are some nice, steep hill sides around the sports field and we had a lot of fun coming up with dirt courses to run.

Not too shabby

Some paint and Pascal's expert color advice transformed the Scuptamold.
Next up: Painting the tunnel portal, then ground cover and bushes.

Scuptamold

Scuptamold is a paper-mache-like material. Just add water and you get a paste that is extremely easy to work with.

Today was the first time I worked with Scuptamold to fill in holes and cracks around the retaining wall near Tiersteintunnel. I practiced a bit applying the Scuptamold with an artist's spatula, and experimented with the relative amounts of water and Scuptamold, and the resulting effects. Eventually, I finished up the hillside not yet covered in hardshell. The stark white could probably be toned down by mixing in some tempera powder paint.

I really liked working with Scuptamold. The drying time is quite a bit longer than my plaster-vermiculite mix. Working with a small spatula allows for very good control of where the material goes. Next, I turned my attention to the cracks between the tree bark "rocks" around the south portal of Hochwaldtunnel. ... Yeah, that is really white. For filling in the cracks I used fairly little water to get a more solid mixture (about the consistency of not quite fresh Play-Do), that allows for modeling sharp edges and crevices of rocks.

Next up is painting the rocks in a grey/brownish tone with light grey dry-brushed highlights. I hope it's going to come out well. We'll see...

I also rebuilt stub-ended staging (again). The faulty turnout was replaced with a spare double-slip. I really don't feel like buying any more M-track turnouts, so when making repairs I just use extra pieces that I have lying around.

While testing I accidentaly ran the test engine off the unconnected track of the double-slip. It got caught by the "let's not fall on the floor" fence I have installed in various places around staging, so nothing bad happend, though I obviously need to pay better attention when running trains out of those tracks.

Emsingen northbound semaphores

The northbound exit signals in Emsingen are now fully functional, including turnout routing via JMRI. I mounted the semaphores a few days ago, and connected wiring tonight.

In other news, I discovered that large locomotives (electrics with 3 axles per truck, or a steamer) derail on the entry turnout to stub-ended staging. The loco climbs up while taking the curve, so it appears the turnout is out of gauge. Sigh. I thought I was done with surgery in that corner of the layout.

Upcoming and ongoing projects:

• Fix stub-ended staging turnout ladder
• digitize and fix a couple locomotives (railbus/Schienenbus, BR141, BR194)
• add a 4th track to Emsingen yard
• scenery, trees, and shrubs around south portal of Hochwaldtunnel
• Hochwald trees and scenery. How do I make forest ground?
• build and try out the grassinator

Not even mentioning building Werner & Soehne machine factory, the Lokstation, or the town of Emsingen, nor the stations in Emsingen and Talheim...

Productive Weekend

This has been a productive weekend.

Stub-ended staging track 2 is set for departure

I rebuilt the stub-ended staging yard, added more power feeds and squeezed in some more track. The switch ladder is now fully powered and integrated with JMRI. The logix are set up to throw the switch ladder and set an imaginary signal to Green when leaving the staging yard. Also, when setting the route for an arriving train, the cross-over on the staging ramp is thrown automatically.

I actually relaid the staging tracks 3 times, because M-track was giving me some connectivity issues. I hope I have that worked out now. Time will tell...

The decoder "bank"

Next was adding another DS64 to the main decoder panel. The panel was originally envisioned as the central place where all electronics is located. Over time that turned out to be not such a smart idea, and I came to appreciate a model of components distributed on the layout and connected by LocoNet. Nethertheless, there *are* a lot of solenoid driven turnouts in staging, and the signals in Talheim, so it made sense to group the decoders driving those units together.

Finally, I spent some time to install and connect the first semaphore signal in Emsingen. This signal is known as "A". Since there is a facing point turnout in Emsingen, the signal needs to be able to signal both "Stop" (Hp0), "Go" (Hp1), as well as "Slow" (Hp2). I wrote JMRI logix to control what the signal shows based on which route is chosen through the station. Below is what the signal shows, as well as what's shown on the layout panel in JMRI. Yes, JMRI introduced the concept of signal masts in version 2.14 which should render quite a bit of my custom routing and signalling logix obsolete. However, what I have works, and I don't feel like ripping it all out at the moment. There are more interesting work items ahead of doing _that_...

"Stop" (Hp0) "Go" (Hp1) "Slow" (Hp2)

Fourth Operations session of the Welztalbahn

Yesterday, the 4th operations session of the Welztalbahn took place. Balazs joined me again, and Alex popped in for a little while.

I updated the schedule based on feedback I got at the LD/Ops SIG meeting last weekend. The biggest change is the addition of a local freight (Ng / Nahgueterzug) that runs from Prechtal staging to Emsingen early in the session, and a return trip to Prechtal staging near the end of the session. The intent was to make more use of existing staging capacity, as well as make use the engine servicing facility during the session. An unintended side-effect was that switching Emsingen became more involved. I'll likely revisit the yard in Emsingen in the near future to add a 4th yard track.

Another suggestion I implemented was parallel meets of passenger trains in Emsingen. While it's interesting visually, I'm underwhelmed about the operational need to run two trains up from staging on the same route back to back.  However, I'll definitely take another look at this as part of running passenger locals from Prechtal only to Emsingen (possibly servicing and turning the engine in Emsingen), and returning back to Prechtal, without running the train all the way down to Freiburg staging.

For the first time I used the new stub-ended staging tracks under Kopper Furniture to hold the two freight locals from Hausach and Freiburg respectively, which freed up the main staging tracks for trains that make multiple appearances. Even though the track is still not mounted permanently in place, nor has feeders, it worked well enough. I really need to power the switches, though ... A side-effect of using these tracks is that I actually do need to spend a little bit more effort on staging the layout for a session.

While the layout mostly ran well, this session still had some problems:

• Early on we tried to convince the freshly digitized BR141 locomotive to actually work. It appears I need to take the motor completely apart and clean it thoroughly. Even on straight DC the motor didn't run properly, and lots of arcing was visible around the commutator and the motor brushes.
• BR86 got stuck regularly, and needed the commutator cleaned.
• After throwing a switch on the down ramp towards Staging 2, JMRI and/or the Intellibox went into a fit, LocoNet got flooded with switch commands, and the switch got toggled endlessly. I had to power down the layout, exit JMRI and start over to clear this condition. Adding "breakers" to Logix to control whether groups of Logix rules are active should help to diagnose this condition further in the future.
• Due to the missing BR141, the schedule couldn't be run as written, and we somewhat messed up towards the end of the session.

Overall, the session lasted for about 2.5 hours, and we ran 21 out of 23 scheduled trains.

Emsingen Engine facility track connected...

I originally intended to use Flextrack to build the two tracks leading from the 3-way switch to the turntable. Which means, I wouldn't use the engine facility for quite a while. Last night I built a temporary connection from sectional track and for the first time ran an engine from Emsingen to the turntable and back. Things are starting to come together.

Emsingen town area

I've been building the support structure for the town of Emsingen over the last week. Since the town will sit on top of the ramps between the layout levels, I'm planning to make it at least partially removable. 

The brown area will house the Emsingen freight shed near the track. Depending on how space constraints work out, it will also support the lower parts of Emsingen, with the upper part of town (including the market square) sitting over the ramps in the corner. I simply used a 3/4" sheet of styrofoam (aka "Styropor") as the base, and cut it to the right shape. Messy as usual. I also reduced thickness a little bit around the freight shed area, so that the floors of cars on the track are at the same height as the loading dock. That said, the shed needs to connect to a small loading ramp that extends along the side of the track. The current arrangement is too diminutive. Maybe also scratch build an extension for the shed?

The "brown area" from below

The support framework will get in the way when cleaning track. I hope that by making the town removable, I can work on the town at the work bench in a somewhat comfortable seating position.

Boo-boo of the week

Oooops. Vertical clearance for the Prechtal staging track (center of photo) is 5 mm too low. That needs to get fixed.

The top of a wall

After walking through Andy's Hobbys in Morgan Hill (not much train stuff there, but a good seletion for model car and plane enthusiasts), I picked up a piece of dimensional balsa wood that I figured might work well to top off the wall I added last year.

I managed to bend the balsa just enough to match the curve of the wall, and pinned it in place until the glue sets. I'll find out tomorrow if the glue will be strong enough to hold the piece in place. As it turns out the top is a bit on gracile side compared to the track ties. Oh well.

Eventually, I'll add a steel banister to prevent switch crews from falling off the wall.

Town and Freight area supports

I'm about to fill in the empty corner in the back of the room shared by the freight shed, and the town of Emsingen. The bracing supporting the lower lying freight area and first row of houses is framed and glued in. I really need to get cooking on the layout of the actual town, and the detection sections in Hochwaldtunnel. While the town will be removable, access is starting to become tricky...

Thank you!

Got some nice wine from a co-worker today :-)

Racing Fuel

Seen at a 76 gas station in Saratoga. Yes, that's $7.99 per gallon of Racing Fuel.

View from the office

From the extended weather forecast, I knew the rain was coming. Yet it was at the same time exciting ("yay. Wind and rain, and I'm in the middle"), and depressing ("urgh. I'm cold and wet. Want to sit by the fire and sip some hot chocolate").

Books

Seen in the office library.

I love the combination of titles right next to each other.

Let it snow

Contrary to last time I was in Cambridge, MA, today we got a real dusting of snow.