Colorado Railroad Museum: 318

Narrow-gauge locomotive #318 was built in 1896 by Baldwin and served on the Rio Grande narrow gauge lines.

I went to the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden, CO this morning. They have an extensive collection of rolling stock and naturally quite a bit of it is narrow gauge. The photos below are details of locomotive #318.

Don't even think about it ...

Springs above one of the drivers

Pumps

One of my favorites

Cab view trip on the Welztalbahn

Select the full-screen option to watch in HD.

Going home

On US50 going home.

Breakfast

After a fulfilling breakfast at Sprouts Cafe in South Lake Tahoe ...

... I drove out to enjoy the views at Emerald Bay.

On the way to Tahoe

Half-way stop at The Firehouse Restaurant

Re-fueling almost complete

 

Yes, there is snow on the mountains, but it's not really that much.

cab car

The office railroad has obtained push-pull equipment.

Western Maryland power with Chicago Metra cars... The engine was there first.

Trees and Bushes

I worked in the backyard most of the day today. Since there wasn't much wind late afternoon, I decided this is a good opportunity to try and make some bushes and low trees to practice for making actual trees.

I'm using Scenic Express' Super Trees as armature and basically follow Joe Fugate's scenery clinic for making deciduous trees.

A couple weeks ago, I pulled some Super Trees out of the box and sorted them into "big trees" and "the rest". After bathing the Super Trees in thinned matte medium (didn't seem to make much of a difference, and I'll likely skip this step the next time), I hung the big trees under the ceiling to dry, and left the bushes and small trees in aluminum tubs. Once they were dry I planted the small trees and bushes into styrofoam sheets. I should have planted them into styrofoam right away, getting them out of the tub unharmed was a bit ... tricky.

Today I took the styrofoam sheets outside and made trees.

Spray the trunks in a light brown, followed by a light smattering of flat black to create some shadows. Then spray glue on 2-3 armatures at a time, and sprinkle medium-green coarse foam on the "tree". Repeat until the tree looks good. I tried to create fairly dense foliage since these trees will be close to the wall at the rear of the layout. Finally, I sprayed the trees with light shots of ColorMaster Basil green spray paint to give the tree foliage a pleasing color and add variation in the green. I finished off the trees with extra-strong hairspray to lock the foam in place.

Using this method it is shockingly easy to produce nice looking trees.

Look for yourself.

Using Youtube Live Streaming to broadcast an Ops Session

Today's Ops session was available for viewing live on Youtube using Hangouts on Air. The embedded video above is the recording of the session. I haven't edited the recording all, so the first 90+ minutes are me and Balazs chatting, while the microphone was muted. I need to use a different (web) camera. Should do the recording in HD.

Since I haven't operated a full schedule on the layout for a couple months, and rather built scenery instead, there were various issues both mechanical and with the computer control, thus the action in the recording is limited ...

Nevertheless, it was an interesting experiment and I might do this again some other time.

Welztalbahn Panorama

We took panoramic shots at Silicon Valley Lines today, and I used the opportunity of having a 8mm fish eye lens and a panoramic head in the house to do the same at the Welztalbahn.

This is the panoramic view from the Emsingen operator position. I made the panorama from 4 individual shots taken in exactly 90 degrees offsets, and processed them with Hugin on Linux.

Here is the full-size version of this picture.

Weekend Fun

Colors and Weeds

I started writing this blog over 8 years ago. This is post number 701. Congrats to me. Yay!

Here's how I made the scene below...

In my last post, I had photos of the unpainted rock, but didn't describe how I made them. I used a mixture of Fine Vermiculite and plaster (roughly in a ratio of 5 to 4) to cover the extruded foam pieces underneath. This stuff is similar to Woodland Scenic's "Mold-A-Scene plaster". The mixture has a working time of roughly 10 minutes so I make it in small batches. I use a spatula to smear it wherever it needs to go. First in fairly broad strokes to apply the whole batch, and then I go back and smooth out where necessary (e.g. along the hill), or make it more lumpy where I want rocks.
As the mixture hardened I carved out bits with a putty knife to create the weathered look of an older rock face. This creates a fairly soft looking rock, which is exactly what I needed here. The result can be seen on the right.

At this time of year in the garage it takes several days for the mix to dry.
If I wanted sharp rock edges, I either wait for the mixture to dry completely and then start carving, or make the rock from Hydrocal in molds.

Next, I painted the rock face next to the railroad crossing. ...

Well, actually you can tell from the photos that I got impatient and didn't want to wait for everything to dry before I work my way down along the wall, so I finished up most of the grass and left a gap near the rock face to finish later.

... I'm using cheap acrylics from Craftsmart for all my scenery painting needs. "Golden Brown" and a bit of "Espresso" is my earth color. For rocks like in this picture I use plenty of "White", a bit of "Black", and a tad of "Golden Brown" to break the stark gray and get some variation of shades.
I just take a bit of the colors on the brush and mix them as I paint. If the color doesn't look right, or doesn't quite match nearby areas, I might go back to the palette and take a bit more brown, or white to shift the effect in the right direction. Sometimes I take a very little bit of black, too. The point is to mix the wet colors in place and allow slight variations of color shades.

Acrylics dry quickly, so it's important to work fast. This method works quite well for me, since it forces me to keep moving forward and not fret over getting the perfect look. Amazingly enough it looks just fine with only a little bit of effort. This rock face took only a few minutes to paint, after which it looked like in the photo below. When the color has dried a bit I go back and dry brush a very light gray over the edges of the rock to create some highlights.

Now I needed to blend in the rock face with the surrounding scenery. The brown area on the right is pretty steep so I carefully brushed matte medium on the brown areas and sprinkled in fine turf to give the grass more body in the next step. Next, I carefully soaked the turf in 70% isopropyl alcohol as a wetting agent,  applied more matte medium, and used the Grassinator to apply a mixture of short and long grass fibers. In this case I used Noch medium green 6mm fibers, mixed with spring green and summer green 2mm fibers from Scenic Express, just like what I did for the grass nearby.

I applied full strength Elmer's White Glue everywhere I wanted bushes and weeds to grow. I'm using various shades of Woodland Scenics coarse foam, mostly light green, medium green, and olive, as well as lots of Scenic Express "Spring Green Super Turf". The larger Super Turf bits make nice small bushes and are excellent for overgrown weeds. I shaped the bushes to follow the edge of the hill, trying to imagine where the house owner would cut them back from above. Finally, I added another piece of fence to separate the garden from the path down to the tracks, and was pretty much done.

Here's another perspective.

"Path to the tracks?" you say? Yes, it's not there yet, but will discuss this in another post.

Working on scenery again

Plaster is still wet

Now that he gap at the railroad crossing is closed, work has started on scenery north of Emsingen on a 3 inch wide strip between the track and the wall towards Welzbruecke and Hochwald. This will tie the northern edge of Emsingen to the already scenicked area of Hochwald.

This is a fairly diverse section involving a backyard garden, the edge of a small apple orchard, unkept gras areas, a walking path, deciduous trees, bushes, a small creek with waterfall, and transition to the existing trees of Hochwald.

I tried to facilitate hiding the edge of the town module by not making it a straight line

Bushes will cover the gap along the rock cut. There is a bit of masking tape to keep the wet plaster mix away from the respective section on the town module

Emsingen Impressions

Emsingen station in the foreground. The historic town of Emsingen can be seen in behind the station.

Dog and cat make for good amusement.

"Fresh bananas!" -- "I'd like to try this liquor, please."

"Hurry up!"

Railroad Crossing Emsingen

Today I dropped the town of Emsingen back into the layout. I wrapped up the detailing I had planned so far, and also was itching to do something else than work on the town.

I decided to finish the scene to the north of town next. On the far side of the track this involves completing the orchard and the backyard garden behind the two village houses on the edge of town, and completing the scenery behind the Welzbridge all the way to Hochwald. On the near side I need to build the railroad crossing the scenery on top of Tiersteintunnel, as well as detailing the road out of town.

I started on the far side with filling in the gap between town and the existing scenery. I need to build this in a way that the town module continues to be removable, so I need to be very careful with glue along the edge...

I built the land form from pink foam and styrofoam pieces I had lying around from earlier projects. I tried to hide the rather steep drop from the town module to the track as much as I could. It's still a bit steep, but doesn't look quite as horrible as I feared.
In an ideal world this crossing will be protected with operational crossing arms. However, this might not work out since it will be difficult to mount a motor underneath, both because that area is hard to reach, and there are tracks and switch machines in the way. Due to the edge of the town module I have very little wiggle room.

I was dreading building the actual road crossing until I realized that it shouldn't be a total mess if I built the road from styrene. Getting exact shapes of the tracks passing through the road was surprisingly easy. Lay a piece of paper over the tracks and trace the contours of the rails with the side of a pencil. The paper templates turned out very accurate and fit perfectly on the first try.

In the coming days I will cut the styrene shapes for the crossing and find a solution for the inside of the tracks. Maerklin's center studs make this an interesting problem.

Cirque Du Soleil: Amaluna

We saw Cirque Du Soleil: Amaluna today. 

Great show. Great artistics. Good music, too. Recommended. 

Finally

Rain. Finally some rain. It won't be much or be enough, but it was so nice to  walk out into it this morning. 

LD/Ops SIG weekend

Entrance scene at Otis McGhee's Shasta Division

This year's LD/Ops SIG meet was at the Elk Lodge in Alameda, a very nice venue with quite a few stuffed elks. The day started with Clif Linton presenting his rendition of the Baltimore and Ohio Chicago Terminal Railroad (B&OCT). Clif introduced us to the prototype setting in Chicago, and how his small switching layout on a shelf grew into taking over half of a garage. I had no idea how dense Chicago's rail network used to be, and to a degree still is.
Don Marenzi's talk about paper and pulp industries put all kinds of ideas in my head that I'm not going to be able to realize ... at least not on my home layout.
After Birds of a Feather sessions, that I mostly spent chatting with various people around the Silicon Valley FreeMo-N modular setup,  we had a nice lunch with plenty more chatting and exchanging of ideas. In the afternoon Mike Coen talked about the design and build of his Western Pacific Oregon division, a proto-freelanced layout set in Oregon. 
I haven't had a chance to see Ed Merrin's NWP layout yet. His presentation about how he designed the layout to get the scenic effects he wanted was mighty interesting. A "herniating helix" or a city street that turns around the edge of the peninsula backdrop to become a rural road are not only neat ideas, but Ed gave us insight in his thought process and construction methods to make the ideas reality.
The Ocean Shore Line used to run from San Francisco via today's Pacifica halfway down the peninsula towards Santa Cruz. Pete Cressman is in the middle of building a layout that depicts this little railroad, talked about the prototype, and gave a construction update.

For the evening layout tours I visited Clif Linton, and Otis McGhee's very impressive Shasta Division. Then we moved on to Mike Coen's WP Oregon division, and wrapped up the evening at Chuck Oraftik's NYC. Every layout we saw had something going for it, and I drew quite a bit of inspiration from seeing what others had done.

A New Haven passenger train is waiting for departure on Chuck Oraftik's NYC

Sunday I operated on Jon Schmidt's Nicosia Northern Railway, which was a different, yet interesting experience for me. I got the Yardmaster job and realized that visualizing moves, what works with the track work and what doesn't, is a lot easier once you've done or seen it once. On top of the amount of transfers to be worked in the yard, the tracks around Bayside Yard are sparse enough to be challenging and it requires planning to optimize activity. Apologies to Bob and Peter for completely gumming up their yard moves in the first half of the session...
I really like how Jon added servicing and turning of passenger trains into the operating scheme and got away from token passenger ops.

The Evening Glow is ready to push down to Bayside Ferry to pick up passengers returning from San Francisco by ferry

After the debrief at Jon's place I headed over to Bill Kaufman's State Belt, and marveled at the maze of tracks Bill recreated in his garage. Bill is also a quite entertaining host with lots of knowledge about the State Belt, its history and operations, so I stayed quite a bit longer than I had planned.

The Ferry Building with lots of State Belt tracks leading to the piers

As in previous years, this was a great way to spend the weekend. I had good conversations with like-minded people and enjoyed the friendly atmosphere.

An earlier version of this post accidentally attributed Chuck's layout to Steven Van Meter.

Evening at LD/SIG

Fairly grainy evening picture of passenger service on Silicon Valley FreeMo-N modular layout at this year's LD/SIG meet in Alameda. 

Green

Done for tonight

Just a quickie picture. First attempt to do a backyard garden. Maybe a bit too ... bright.

The house needs drainage around the foundation. That can be arranged.
The swing set will be on the permanent part of the layout, which is why the lawn will continue to look nice and well-kept where the swings are currently located.

Work in progress

Today I finished building curbs, weathered the roads a bit, built retaining and safety walls, and put a first layer of grass down.

The curbs are made from Evergreen 0.040 x 0.060 styrene strips. They match the sidewalk height and are easy to bend. I attached them with plain Painter's Calk, which is very tacky and it's easy to keep things in place when positioning 10 inches of curb along the street. Since we're inside a town, I put curbs everywhere when there's no sidewalk. The weathering of the road is a bit overdone, but it looks worse in the photo than for real.

For the grass I painted the ground with my standard earth color and sprinkled fine Woodland Scenic turf into the wet paint. Once that is dry, I'll vacuum off all loose bits, and follow up with matte medium and a helping of static grass to match the area below Steinle.

Emsingen by night

You're all probably bored to death by my never-ending Emsingen postings. The boredom continues....

Here's a night shot as seen from the tracks.

 And an overview of town:

There are almost 30 tiny light-bulbs in this photo. I'm using a cheap 12VDC/ 1A power supply for now, and step down the voltage to just over 10V with a couple diodes in series. Eventually, I'll either run a 12VDC bus under the layout for lighting, or power this from the existing 16VAC bus and use a LM7812 voltage regulator.

When running at the full 750mA the diodes get quite warm, so I split the circuit in half and feed the halves through separate diodes. Here's a photo of the underside of town before I finished cleaning up cabling ...

...  the finished cabling doesn't look at whole lot better.

Next up is adding basic scenery in the front, some more weathering for the roads, and starting the backyard / fruit trees scenes on the right.

Good Morning!

Sunrise over Edenvale

It's a new year in life.

It's a new year at work.

Very nice two week break.

Now back to the day job.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone. 

It's still quiet in Emsingen shortly before midnight. But in a couple minutes there will be fireworks.

Today I added lights to new town and just test wired the bulbs together to figure out the right voltage. The bulbs are Micromark's grain of rice 12V/30ma. The photo was taken with the transformer set to 10 Volts. Looks good to me.
The street light is from Viessmann. I have a few more of those to be used around town.

I'm surprised that there's almost no light leakage under the buildings. They are standing loosely at their place. It definitely helps to raise the bulbs to about the middle of the buildings:

As can be seen in this photo I also painted and weathered the sidewalk helped by some bubbles. There are a few minor things left to do here before moving over to old town and installing lights over there.