Top of the Rock

Today I walked the streets some more, and ended up at Times Square. NBC/Universal has studios with large windows to the side walk there, and I wanted to watch how they film stuff. Turns out that they pulled the curtains. Oh, well. And here I was again next Rockefeller Center. I bit the bullet, and paid my $21 to get to the observation deck. The view is truly impressive. The pictures don't do it justice.

Looking south over Manhattan, and New York harbor . I really like the commanding presence of the Empire State Building in the sky line.

Me and Central Park. ... Sorry, I'm in the way ...

Yeah, that's better.

The lower level of the Observation deck. Notice the interesting variations in roof architecture with the buildings below.

6th Avenue was closed for traffic today, in favor of a long street fair with arts & crafts, and pretty good food.

More exploring at night

After dinner we walked the streets some more, and ended up at the Rockefeller Center. There was nothing going on at Radio City Music Hall, but the neon lights are always a nice in the darkness.

The Rockefeller Center main tower with the "Top of the Rock" Observation Deck on the roof top.

Another fun example of neon light effects. This is an office building lobby... 

Grand Central Station Main Hall. A very nice hall. Fits the name of the station well.

However, going through a door to the station platforms, you basically enter the basement. Yes, station platforms tend to be somewhat ugly, but here the difference is so sudden and rough, that it hurts.

Hoooonk!

What is it with New York drivers? My room is on the 8th floor, with windows to 7th Avenue. All night long, and day, too, there is some idiot down there on the street blaring their horn. Wherever you go in this city, the sound of honking horns is with you. It's a constant background noise, sometimes pushing itself into the foreground because some bonehead is particularly impatient about the driver in front of him, a truck making a turn, a construction worker holding up a stop sign, or they are standing just at a red light.

It's a mystery to me why people would honk at a red light. Seems to happen all the time here.

Exploring New York

Thanks to our tour guide Tristan, we got to see a few unusual sights.

These big wheels where powered by a steam engine in the basement of a house near Broome & Mulberry Streets and drove printing presses. It must have been quite an experience when they were still in operation.

These three guys are at home in Rockefeller Park on the Hudson River. The monkey is easy to spot in the park. However, the cricket and worm are actually a mere 2 inches tall.

View from Rockefeller Park across the Hudson River to Hoboken, New Jersey.

Apparently I'm not the only one admiring the sunset. This is the best photo I have of the Statue of Liberty. While we did take the Staten Island Ferry over to ... you guessed it ... Staten Island, the movement of the boat, and fading light made taking pictures from  the ferry quite pointless.

I do love this picture of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal after our return to Manhattan, though.

High Line Park

The Manhattan Highline is a former rail line that ran along the west side of Manhattan. It's a typical switching and delivery line, with the distinction that it ran three stories up from street level.

Today, sections of the High Line are becoming a city park. The bridges have been restored, and planted. There's a trail that runs along the former right of way.

What looks like nature taking over, is actually carefully arranged plantings. The Northern Spur bridge is a good example of a spur that leads directly into the 3rd level of a warehouse. Railroad cars used to be spotted inside the building through doors in the wall at the end of the bridge.

Tracks and trains often ran through buildings. The main High Line tracks lead through the red brick building on the right. The Northern Spur is set somewhat lower to the left, but going through the same building and then across the street.

During restauration, all tracks where removed. Later, they re-used the old rails, but installed new ties.

I like the radiant green of this grass here. The colors in the photo match the actual grass very closely.

Manhattan

Wednesday greeted us with blue skies and sunshine that stuck around for most of the day. Above is the view from the 8th floor of the office towards the North.

Every time I'm here it's a bit surprising how many residential buildings exist in downtown Manhattan. There are even fairly pretty tree lined residential streets, like this one just off 7th Avenue.

I'm not quite sure what's up with garbage collection in Manhattan, but it seems there are always garbage bags on the side walks, next to overflowing garbage bins. They do seem to get taken away over night, though.

Oh look, there's the Apple Store

9th Ave & 14th St

New York

After my flight landed, flight tracking claimed we were in the middle of Queens.

Nevertheless, I did leave the plane at JFK, and made it to Manhattan via Lightrail and Long Island Railroad to Penn Station. Definitely beats getting a cab in terms of money spent, and fun along the way. The signage at the Airtrain is impressively bad: Track 1 and Track 2 with no indication where a train is going. There are only 3 different lines to choose from...

It rained for most of the first half of the week, so I didn't take many photos, but one evening we did go to Times Square.

Book

Operations at Silicon Valley Lines

After living in the valley for over 12 years, I finally made it to Silicon Valley Lines today. This layout is clearly made for operations. The state of scenery varies a lot, from naked plywood in some places over areas in varying stages of construction, to nicely finished scenes. However, this should be somewhat expected as the layout is HUGE. While it takes a train on my own layout about 90 seconds to make one loop through all three levels and back, at SVL it took me a good 10 minutes to run a passenger train from one end of the layout to the other end. That includes station stops, but excludes time we had to wait for opposing traffic.

There are two main yards and several staging areas on the layout. The picture on the right is Bayshore Yard with Winston staging above, and Bakersfield staging below (bad quality due to cell phone camera).

Today was operations night, which means quite a few trains ran, a dispatcher was directing traffic, and the various train crews used FRS radios to communicate with the dispatcher who is sitting in a separate room. One of the freight assignments I ran was a super-long train traversing about two thirds of the layout. This run took us the better part of an hour due to some opposing traffic, but also because this train wouldn't move that fast. I quickly learned that it is easy to pull a long train off curved track if you accelerate too quickly. Overall, I ran 4 scheduled trains and an extra passenger train over the course of 4 hours. The people are very friendly, and I had a blast. I'll definitely be back for more.

Swiss visitor in Emsingen & Talheim

A co-worker from the Zurich office brought over his set of Re 460 and respective IC2000 cars. Here's a short video of the train running on the layout.



The cars are a bit longer than my longest cars, so we found that some of the curves in hidden staging don't have enough clearance for them to pass. Still we had quite some fun running the train on the upper two levels of the layout.

First Operating Session

Today I hosted the first operating session on the layout.

The session ran for about an hour, and involved a high-priority long-distance InterCity train only stopping in Emsingen, a local passenger train stopping in both Talheim and Emsingen. In addition to the passenger trains a wayfreight dropped off and picked up cars in Emsingen, which were brought down to Talheim by a local freight, switching industries in Talheim, and bring the outbound cars to Emsingen for pick-up  by another wayfreight run.

Things that worked:

• Wayfreight drop and pickup of cars in Emsingen, and use of the freight tracks in Emsingen
• Local freight to Talheim, and switching in Talheim, including mostly keeping the through tracks available for passenger traffic
• The long tunnel along the wall wasn't quite as annoying as I saw it recently, (at least for me) this might have been because I had two trains to look after in parallel.
• JMRI/Withrottle/Android Engine Driver using my Android phone as a wireless throttle. This worked very well for me.
• Mixing freight and passenger traffic, and keeping the single mainline track busy.
• We had a lot of fun!

Things that didn't quite work as  well:

• Some switches caused trouble with the IC2000 cars we used for the InterCity, so we had to run the InterCity in a loop on the upper two levels (and only in one direction). Thankfully, I do have a track on the upper level I can use for storing trains between appearances.
• Some low-voltage situations. With at times 4 locomotives in operation (one of them with sound) concurrently, ocassionally there was a significant drop in voltage on the track and trains slowed down. Either the booster in the Intellibox was running hot, or the respective transformer was getting overloaded. Either way, this clearly showed, that I will need to upgrade power at the latest once I have automated staging.
• Switching instructions, or more generally car routing and identification. While we wrote a switch list before the start of the session, and picked destinations for the various cars on the layout, once the wayfreight arrived in Emsingen, there was some chaos determining which cars go where. This is made worse by the habit of european railroads to use very small car numbers on the cars, so it's not nearly as easy to keep track of a given box car by its number as on most American layouts. I'm contemplating to use carcards with waybills, and include a photo of the car on the car card for easier identification. I've seen templates on a FREMO website that looked quite nice. However, this will make staging the railroad for operation more cumbersome.
• I need more locomotives active, and I need the engine servicing facilities built. The locomotive of an arriving wayfreight should couple off and top off water and coal, while a switcher takes care of the car movements.
• I need to activate the Schienenbus for local passenger service. A 151 with two coaches is a poor stand-in ...
• Two person operations works reasonably well, but the job of running passenger trains becomes somewhat dull after a while. This can be made more interesting with an actual timetable and more variety in both passenger train types, as well as variations in routing.

Overall, this was a lot of fun, and it showed both strengths and weaknesses of the layout. Thanks Balasz, for coming over and putting up with all the little problems we ran into.

Why should the return flight be less chaotic?

I arrive in time at BOS for my return flight. Make it through security, and arrive at the gate a comfortable 25 minutes before boarding at 18:15. While I'm looking at the monitor, the departure time changes to 19:45. The staff at the gate didn't notice at first, then called dispatch and learned that SFO has delayed our flight due to weather.








5 minutes later they announced that everyone should make their way to gate 34 for our flight, but the monitors are still showing departure 19:45. ...

Another 5 minutes later they announced that SFO is operating off one runway due to low visibility. Flightstats shows clouds at 800 ft, and since the two runways at SFO are so close together, they can't both operate at instrument flight conditions. yay.

There is also the FAA Website showing delays and reasons at major airports nationwide.

By the way, my flight to SFO will take 6 hours 30 minutes. Look how long it would take to fly from Boston to London...

Update (19:35):
Well. I'm still in Boston. If we're lucky we start boarding in 10 minutes, and might be in the air around 21:00, with an arrival in SFO some time after midnight...

Update (20:00):
Yay. We are boarding.

Update (09/19):
We were ready for push-back 20:20, but had to wait for a ground crew to show up, so we ended up leaving BOS just before 21:00 with a projected arrival time in SFO at 0:25 Saturday morning.

After a very uneventful flight, we started the descend into SFO. While I normally have a pretty good idea where we are as a plane gets ready to land at SFO, or SJC, this time I was completely lost. The pilot flew so many waiting loops I lost track of the direction we were flying in. Given the direction we were coming from on final approach, I think we were circling above the strawberry fields of Watsonville. Shortly before landing we passed through a very dense layer of clouds (also known as "fog", or "marine layer"). I was sitting at the rear of the wing, and the fog was so thick that I could barely see the front edge of the wing. The position lights at the end of the wing were also hard to make out. These clouds weren't very thick, a couple hundred feet maybe, and as soon as we came out the view across the Bay was very nice. However, this illustrated nicely why SFO was on instrument flight conditions with one runway shut down.

We finally were at the gate at 0:55 and I was out of the place 20 minutes later.

At 1:45 I was sitting in the Shard Ride Van shuttle home, ... with 8 other passengers. Each of them groggy and tired. Each of them going to a different stop. The shuttle dropped off people in San Carlos, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Stanford, Palo Alto (2), Mountain View, San Jose Downtown, and finally myself in South San Jose. It took us 90 minutes to go from SFO to downtown Mountain View.

"This shuttle is so not worth it."

Frustrated rider bound for Mtn View after 1h in the bus.

I was home at 3:40 in the morning after a 2 hour ride. Next time, when arriving in the middle of the night at SFO, I'll consider taking a cab. 

MBTA

The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) runs public transit around Boston and Cambridge. Yesterday when I arrived at Boston's Logan airport, instead of using a shuttle service to the hotel, I took the Silver Line bus to South Station, then the Red Line subway to Park station, and the Green Line trolley to Lechmere station. Total cost: Two dollars

Boston was the first US city to build a subway system. It's age is quite obvious when one looks at the layout of the tunnels and passages connecting the various lines in the inner city stations. Narrow stairwells directly connect the various platforms, usually on the most direct route, which leads to the amusing situation, that if you use the wrong stairwell, you easily end up on the platform for the wrong direction of the connecting line, and have to find your way through more connection tunnels to get to the other side of the tracks.



Amusingly, Lechmere station, the northern terminus of the Green Line, was featured in yesterday's Small Layout Scrapbook as a prototype example for a trolley terminus station with lots of tight curves and space efficient storage of trains.

Cambridge/Boston

When I'm traveling I rarely get out of the office before it's getting dark. Which is true for my visit to Cambridge as well. Still, today I got out early enough to leisurely stroll through the MIT campus down to the Charles River Basin.

The campus is huge, some areas have nice walkways like this one near the library, or open spaces with funky sculptures like this one at McDermott Court.

Once I got to the river the sunset was in full swing.

Along Memorial Drive on the banks of the Charles River is this gem of a street sign on the approach to the Longfellows Bridge. There are a couple underpasses with very low clearance so the Boston transportation department helpfully put up huge signs advising that this route is only for cars. However, do you notice how the branches of the tree on the left almost completely obscure the signs? The only good thing is that the branches hang so low that any sane truck driver wouldn't dare to go there anyways in order to avoid hitting the branches.

Surrounded by joggers I crossed the river into Boston. From the Longfellows Bridge I had a nice view of the Cambridge river bank with the remainder of the sunset.

On the Boston side, I hung right and walked into an area called Beacon Hill. Narrow cobblestone streets. Old brick houses. Old-town style street lanterns. A pretty place with surprisingly many people walking the dog, picking up dinner, or chatting with friends. One of the restaurants on Charles Street, the main street of Beacon Hill, has their kitchen out to the front, and one can watch the cooks from the side-walk.

After walking for almost an hour I reached Boston Common, a nice park next to Beacon Hill. The view of the skyline was fantastic.

There is even a small, creaky carussell.

And here is a photo of a little sideyard, off Charles Street. In the back they had a rug, and sofas, and it looked quite comfortable. An outside living room. Who would have thought I'd see that here. 

Air travel is never dull

5:25am Get up. Shower. Have a quick bite to eat.
6:05am Leave the house with Wolfram and Lamia heading to SFO
7:00am Arrive at SFO rental car facility
7:15am Rental car returned, waiting for Airtrain
7:22am Arrived at Terminal 3.
7:35am Cleared security (long lines, but they were moving fast)
7:36am The monitor says "UA172 Boston 8:25 DELAYED"
7:38am Checked online at mobile.united.com. No delay posted. WTF?
7:45am Got coffee, a joghurt/muesli thing, and a chocolate crosissant at Peet's Coffee.
7:46am Coffee is GOOD!
7:52am Pick up a copy of Freakonomics.
7:55am Arrive at Gate 90 just in time for scheduling boarding.
7:56am "The aircraft is still in the maintenance bay. We don't know yet when it will be at the gate."
8:00am "We've been advised that the aircraft is ready. We are planning for a 9:00am departure."
8:30am Boarding begins. The gate attendants are super-efficient, and everyone co-operates. Great!
8:45am At my seat. Hmmm. No audio program yet. Video monitors are still dark. Strange. Engines off?
8:50am "This is the captain speaking, my 1st officer found a slightly bent blade in one of the engines while doing the walk-around. Maintenance is looking at it."
8:57am "This is the cabin attendant: This aircraft is not operable. Everyone please get off and wait in the terminal area."
9:20am At gate 81, waiting for replacement airplane. New departure time 10:25am.

What the hell was maintenance doing that they didn't notice a bent blade in the engines? LAME!

I should have taken the 10:30am flight to Boston on Virgin Atlantic...

Update:
We did leave on time on the second try. It's funny to travel alone, sit in the cabin and know exactly who your seat neighbors are going to be, even though they haven't boarded yet. We touched down at BOS shortly after 6pm local time, i.e. only one hour late even though we left two hours late.

I really like United's "Flight Deck" channel where they relay the conversation between pilots and air traffic controllers. However, it got turned on only when we crossed 10,000 feet, along with the other entertainment programs, so I couldn't listen to the pre-take off conversations while taxiing. Then, as we crossed a really wide river  (probably the Mississippi River at the Iowa/Illinois state border), they turned it off for the remainder of the flight. I suspect the initial black-out is for safety reasons, so people don't have to evacuate with earphones in their ears (lame...). The blackout for the second half of the flight is probably due to some braindead security restriction flying in the North-East of the US. Sigh.

Feeding the fishes

I knew this would happen...

As much as I like whale watching, I don't like the part where you (and the people around you) feed the fishes. When we left Monterey Harbor shortly after 9am the naturalist aboard Sea Wolf II suggested: "If you are planning to take sea sick medicine, now is a good time. -- It's been a little bit choppy out there the last couple days". Uh oh.

That said, the trip was fabulous. Not even an hour into the 4-hour trip, halfway to the Monterey Bay Canyon, we saw a ~90ft long blue whale. As soon as we got to the canyon edge, the show continued with several groups of humpback whales, and then later with lots and lots ("thousands") of dolphins playing in the waves around the boat. Occasionally, it looked like the water was boiling around us from all the dolphins. There was lots of krill, including the famous "whale soup" that shows up as a redish stain on the water from all the krill in that spot.

Goodbye Cable TV. ... Goodbye Internet Service????

I canceled my residential Comcast Cable subscription yesterday, and specifically pointed out that I still have and want to keep my Comcast Business Internet service.

Dude on the phone: "I see only your Cable TV subscription here. Do you want to cancel that?"
me: "Yes, please"

Today my Internet Service is down, too.

I somewhat expected it to go down, given previous experience in dealing with Comcast. *sigh*

A technician is on the way to fix this. Supposedly, they should be here before 18:00.

Update:
The technician did indeed show up 10 minutes to 6. "Did you have Cable TV and cancel it?" - yes. "Well, yeah, this is not supposed to happen. They should leave our stuff alone, ..."
I'm up and running again.

Talheimer Bote, 25. Juli 1971

While going through some old stuff, I found this newspaper photo of a heavy German freight steamer at Abzweig Talheim.

...

The BR50 is my latest digital conversion, including a working smoke generator that I can turn on and off using a decoder function output.

Goodbye DSL. Hello Cable.

I would have never imagined I'd give up on the small guys and get Internet service from a large faceless cooperation. Yet I did.

Yesterday, I canceled my Sonic DSL connection (5.0M/768k down/up) which has served me very well over the last 3 years. The line was stable and I rarely had to call tech support (I only remember doing it once). I investigated ADSL2 and other wired options, but apparently the only high-speed providers in my neighborhood are Comcast and AT&T U-verse.

Now I'm getting Internet service from Comcast Business through a discounted group plan at work. I'm paying slightly more per month for a whopping 22M/5M down/up. Since this is Comcast Business (and not consumer Comcast), there are no download caps on the account, and it comes with a static IP and explicit permission to run servers. Also, the tech support experience when calling them is surprisingly pleasant. The person you talk to, can actually help and doesn't have to assume you did something wrong. Mistakes I make myself, I usually notice and fix myself...

The 10x improvement for upload bandwidth is quite noticable when browsing pictures on the family Web site. Browser pre-fetching used to regularly clogged up the DSL upload bandwidth.

Installation of service was quick and fairly uneventful, though it took them a day to "tune the network" so that I got the full advertised speed.

ns.goodcoffee.net is hosted on the new IP, though with a 2 week TTL. Interestingly, the DNS gtld-servers are still handing out the old IP address. As a consequence many DNS servers will have the old IP cached for another 2 weeks. That's not the end of the world since my secondary DNS provider (RollerNet) is reasonably stable, so I'll fully rely on them during the transition period.

Bliss

When I got home today, a package from a Tony's Trains was waiting for me. The Locobuffer USB had arrived.

The Locobuffer USB from RR-Cirkits is a nifty little device that connects Digitrax' Loconet to a USB port so that my train laptop can talk to the layout. While my Intellibox has a serial interface, and I spent quite some time on trying to get it to work reliably with the laptop and various software packages, I eventually gave up and ordered the Locobuffer USB.

What a difference. Plug in the provided Loconet cable to the layout, and the provided USB cable to the computer. Fire up JMRI, configure for Digitrax Loconet and Locobuffer USB. Exit and start JMRI again. Bring up a throttle window, type in a locomotive ID, pull up the speed slider and ... the locomotive starts moving. It took me longer to plug in the cables than configuring the software.

Nice. But what I really want is a wireless throttle, so I can control the locomotive without having to be near the computer, or the Intellibox. In JMRI select Start WiThrottle, and on my G1 phone download EngineDriver for Android from the Android Market. Reconfigure the firewall to allow connections to the train laptop from the wireless LAN. On the phone, type in the IP address and port of the train laptop. Connnect. Select the locomotive, pull the slider and ... the locomotive starts moving. It took me slightly longer to type this all up, than to do it.

It worked out of the box.

I'll have to spend some time to familiarize myself with all the options this opens up, and I'm sure I'm going to find some bugs along the way, but this looks very promising.

Finally some more scenery is in the works.

The mountain in the corner is becoming a reality.

I start with a cardboard basket weave, secured with hot glue. Covered that with masking tape and sculpting plaster.

 

I like the irregular look of sculpting plaster. There will be connifer trees along the top ridge of this hill, with some dark green forest shading on the wall. Also, some smaller deciduous trees along the edge of the "forest". Between trees and the tracks grass with bushes and some rocks peaking through the ground. To the left this will turn into an overgrown rockwall.

The tunnel portal on the right is just a stand-in. This will become a rock cut after I realigned the track to allow for better switching in Talheim.

Here's the corner between the tunnels at Abzweig Talheim in the masking tape stage.

Finally, some areas have very low clearance inside tunnels, so I need to occasionally catch pantographs and push them down, to avoid interference with scenery, or structural, features. After all I want to eventually build catenary in the visibile sections of the layout, but not in the tunnels.

This catch was made from 12AWG copper wire, and simply screwed to wooden blocks. The overgrown rockwall I mention above will sit atop of this.

I created this whole "tight space" situation because I didn't properly take the width of scenery into account when planning the layout. I have a couple more of those cases, and will attack them in due time.

I should start naming everything on the layout. Not only towns. But also streets, stores, industries, tunnels, and scenic features. That would make it so much easier to talk about things.

grumpy got an update

This was about time. I built Grumpy several years ago with Debian 3.0 Sarge, and left apt sources pointed to stable (and testing for some time, as well as debian-multimedia, which sometimes has more recent versions of system software ...) I never ran apt-get dist-upgrade, and only updated packages I really needed, since it took me some time to get this system working properly with MythTV. I started this when MythTV 0.19 was the latest and greatest, and I didn't want to fiddle a lot with a computer that serves mainly as an entertainment system. What is Grumpy today has changed hardware twice.

Over time this had the funny side-effect of an only partially updated system. Yesterday, I finally took the plunge and brought grumpy up to Debian 5.0 (Lenny), a current kernel, new Nvidia drivers, the latest MythTV 0.23, and so on.

I followed the usual approach of pointing my apt sources at lenny explicitly, aptitude update and then aptitude safe-upgrade. This ran into an issue with /usr/bin/add-shell, which probably moved in etch from package passwd to package debian-utils, and passwd has a dependency on debian-utils. Some manual dpkg -i while ignoring dependencies got debian-utils installed, and then passwd installed properly. Remembering my days fighting with RPMs on RedHat and Fedora systems, I continue to be impressed by how well the DEB package installation process works. dpkg --configure -a became a close friend. Once that completed I ran aptitude full-upgrade and got to choose which dependency resolution approach I wanted to use. There weren't too many problems, mostly related to mythweb, apache, and kernel 2.6.18 dependencies. I pinned apache and removed some packages (I really didn't need gcc4.1) to get through this.

Afterwards I still needed to manually install the 2.6.26 kernel image, and the mktemp package (that was surprising).

Shortly before booting, I checked the raid status and noticed that the 1TB RAID partition holding all downloaded TV episodes we record in Germany, as well as my vacation videos was degraded. Sure enough, Nagios is checking disk full, but not raid status. Gaaah!

A little while later that Western Digital 1TB drive was replaced with a Seagate 2TB drive, and the partition was syncing from the partner drive. Then I broke the mirror the other way, and put in a second 2TB drive, since we were running somewhat low on disk space anyways. Videos and video editing eat up disk space very quickly. Nagios is using nrpe and check_md_raid (from exchange.nagios.org) to verify RAID health.

This reminded me again that I need to revamp the Nagios configuration. I set this up in a kinda crooked way years ago, and it didn't bother to make this more logical and straight-forward since. Maybe some other day...

Cleanup!

The train room got a good cleanup today. It was badly needed with all the construction dust, cork scraps, wood chips, and what have you. Now it's looking actually presentable.

With all the lights on, the room is getting toasty. At some point I need better ventilation ...

After running some trains I was reminded again, that a lot of the action happens underneath, and I need to automate operation of staging, since it won't be easy to see what's happening down there once the scenery will start to get installed.

Power districts

Today -- well, yesterday mostly -- I finished a long-standing item on my to-do list: power districts.

The main benefit of districts is that derails in one area won't affect operation in another. Also, when the built-in booster of the Intellibox isn't sufficient any more, I can get one larger booster (say, 5 amps) and still limit the power draw per district to e.g. 2.5 amps, and limit any damage due to shorts.

I'm using the DCC Specialties PSX circuit breakers. They are very nice. Solid state operation, fail fast, very configurable. Can even be controlled by DCC accessory commands, and support POM.

Breaking up the existing layout into districts involved making several cuts in the rails in a somewhat hard to reach location. Another task I avoided for a long time. Now that the railroad is taking shape it was time to do it, since that location will be even harder to reach once the turntable goes in...

I planned for 3 power districts from the beginning, roughly corresponding to the 3 levels of the layout, and ran wires accordingly. Still, one surprise I ran into was that the PSX doesn't appear to play well with the Tam Valley Depot Servo controllers at the 1.27 power draw limit setting, so I installed the also long planned DCC accessory bus to the two controllers that need it, and hooked the new bus  straight into the main DCC power bus. That's a good thing no matter what, since I now can throw switches, even wile having a short in that segment.

Tomorrow (well, today really), I'll try to finally digitize the BR50, which has a fairly finicky wheelset, and run more tests to ensure reliable operation. Also, I need to make sure the railroad is operational for Sunday.

BRRRRR

Faszinating how cold it got last night. Wasn't it supposed to be summer?

Gremlins

The day had more annoying news: chipping in the counter top, and rats in the back yard. urgh.

However, I did break through the modellers block, and soldered the feeder cables to the long tunnel track along the wall between Talheim and Emsingen. The track is laid, the glue is drying. Using some flex track I managed to dance around some more clearance issues on this supposedly straight section of track.

I also found a potential solution to allow for easier switching moves in Talheim while also taking care of the clearance issues between the main out of Talheim and the circular track. I need to get another pair of switches for this, so for now I glued down some roadbed that is taking the narrower route from the tunnel portal to Talheim.
I decided to drop the approach semaphore in Talheim and allow switchers to pull out cars up to the tunnel portals on either side of Talheim. It's easier to switch Talheim if I can use the train as a handle...

Did I mention I have a lot of tunnels? One of the compromises I made when planning for this room. Yes, I'm not particularly fond of the time trains spend out of sight, but I'll live with it. ... At least for now. One of my favorite views is only visible to the camera...

Avoiding unpleasant tasks

Unpleasant, but necessary.

I hate soldering track feeders, but as much as I try to avoid this task, it's coming back to haunt me.  I can't permanently install the tunnel tracks without feeders. I can't close up the tunnel without permanently installed track. I can't start with some scenery without closing up the tunnel. I can plan for, but not really do anything for the backdrop, since that  -- again -- requires an idea where scenery is going to end up.

I'm not a big fan of soldering decoders in tight spaces inside locomotives either. I cleaned a bunch of freight cars yesterday, and as a result the yard in Emsingen is overflowing to a level that it's not workable anymore. I need to put a bunch of cars on a train into staging, but lack the motive power to pull them there.

The TEMPORARY sectional track alignments in Emsingen are mighty tempting to install them as permanent, since then I don't need to fiddle with flextrack, though I know that the curves will look much nicer if I used flextrack.

This might actually be an incarnation of "modellers block". Similar to writers block, I'm all pumped up and ready to go, and what do I do? Fiddle with tiny things. The sky got a bit more blue. I reinstalled the OS on the train room laptop, which really needs some more memory if I really want to run JMRI on this thing. I put the shapes of scenery on the backdrop ... on two of 4 walls.

On the plus side, I installed toe kicks and a quarter round in the kitchen which leaves the corner shelf as the last remaining major item to be installed. Maybe I should do that instead of sitting here and complain ...

Lessons learned

I found out a couple things today.

• The BR194 with the old style LCFM motor draws sufficiently enough power to trip the PSX at the 1.27amp setting. The power spikes don't show up nearly as strong on the analog ampmeter I have in the line off the transformer, so they must be quite short, but regular since the trip LED is flickering on the respective PSX as the locomotive travels between power districts.
• There's enough space around the yard in Emsingen to squeeze in 4 tracks if I pack them quite tightly. Which also means I can pack the 3 tracks I planned for more tightly, and get the clearance I'm looking for near the machine factory in Talheim.
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First operations moves in Emsingen

I built Emsingen station matching the plan I had laid out months ago but with a 3 track yard, instead of the two track version I planned for in October. The supports are in, cork roadbed is installed in all areas that are settled. I laid out track everywhere, but didn't fasten it yet. Also, no track feeders or switch machines are installed. The main purpose right now is to see whether the track arrangement "works". Here is the right hand side (or east side) of Emsingen with the loading ramp. The steamer is standing on the yard arrival/departure track near the run-around / team track.

Today I tried actual switching moves with a train arriving on the arrival/departure track in Emsingen. I quickly realized that the access switch to the yard tracks as planned is too far in the middle of the arrival track to allow for any satisfactory switching without fouling the main track.

The solution was to move the switch for the yard track closest to the main to the arrival track, so that the yard track becomes an extension of the arrival track (see picture left, the green car in the front is on the arrival/departure track).

This way I can take a 9-10 car train, and if needed, back the whole train into the extension track on either side of the arrival track. During switching moves this trackage can hold up to 8 cars. Regular storage capacity is 3 cars with the other two tracks holding about 4 cars.

The yard in Emsingen is used only for sorting and shuffling cars destined for local deliveries in Emsingen and Talheim, as well as to hold the returns, and assemble a local freight (Ng) to staging (Hausach or Freiburg), so the yard tracks aren't particularly long (there's also that pesky room wall in the way...)

Typical train length for switching in Talheim is 4-5 cars. Maximum train length for meets in Emsingen is 9-10 freight cars, or 4 passenger cars. Yes, train lengths on this layout are rather paltry compared to many US layouts.

Here is Ng 34724 getting ready to leave Emsingen from the arrival/departure track for Talheim.

Layout Status

I spent the last two days pretty much constantly in the train room, much to the dismay of my family.

All ramps are now built. Cork roadbed is installed, except in two places where I still need to make up my mind where and how to route the track exactly:

• At the south end of Talheim station the circular ramp intrudes a bit into the clearance of the southbound track. I worked around that by adding a 1/4 curve away from the hill. However, now the track doesn't flow well, and I'd still love to add that extra switch in Talheim.

• The planned viaduct out of Emsingen turns out to not look nearly as high as I imagined. Additionally this section of track is part of the transition area down the hill towards Abzweig Talheim. Originally I planned to build a two arch stone viaduct, but I now fear it will look rather odd at this place. I'm now considering a steel through truss bridge. Until that question is settled track routing in that area will remain in limbo. I'll probably do a few cardboard mock-ups to help decide.

Cork roadbed is installed for most tracks in Emsingen station. Semaphore locations are prepared. The Emsingen yard tracks come close to the air space of the Machinenfabrik in Talheim. I'll leave this area alone until I can settle the question whether I need 3 yard tracks, or can make do with two.

Next up are track feeders and basic wiring for the upper level. Then I'll try running a few trains up and down the hills, see how they do, and whether grades need further adjustment. This will also give me a chance to try out some operating schemes for the two stations and their industries.