An afternoon in Rems

There wasn't much water in the river. 

I like the many tones of green.

I never quite realized that his house on Hegnacher Strasse has this bridge mural.

Friendly company on this walk.

Swiss Accuracy

A train is not "about 15 minutes" late in Zurich. It's about fourteen minutes late. And we left pretty much exactly at 15:24...

Eurowest 2011 BEMO Layout

This is a narrow gauge modular layout usually shown at the annual ETE Eurowest show. The lighting in the exhibition area was very bad, so the video came out a bit dark.

Haltbarmacherei

I love the name of these guys. Seen in Zurich.

Thinking of Transit agencies as Welfare Providers ... Really?

The Transport Politic has an interesting discussion about how to look at transit agencies and their respective subsidies. I'm disappointed by the conclusion of looking at transit agencies as welfare providers. Though, it is reality in today's America.

While it's not quite in the american psyche to consider transit as a viable alternative to the car, in the end change comes down to a chicken and egg problem, both in terms of supply and demand, as well as mind set both of planners and users.

Routes planned for today's usage pattern of the poor rarely encourage new users from more affluent neighborhoods. Placing transit stations on the median of freeways tells you something about the relative appreciation of transit users. Poorly timed transfers between transit agencies, and/or disparate fare systems, make using transit very inefficient, and yield nonsense like monster-long urban bus routes (e.g. in San Jose, Route 68 from Gilroy to Milpitas, or Route 22 from Palo Alto to Eastridge).

Furthermore, the true cost of daily automobile subsidies (yes, building roads costs money, too) and their relative cost to society (e.g. traffic accidents) is rarely discussed, and mentioned in the blog post only in passing.

However, I have very little hope that views on this topic will ever change in America. A clean, efficient, and fast public transportation system would be nice, and I'd use it. I guess my only option to experience that (again) would be to move back to Europe.

Traveling ... again

"I'll go back to the engine and see what's going on ..."

I stumbled over the railroadradio.net Web site a while ago. This is a collection of various radio receivers across the country and Canada providing audio streams of the communication between locomotive engineers and their respective dispatchers. The link above goes directly to the Caltrain page, which is a very busy railroad, so there are a lot of conversations going on. The sound quality of the radio transmissions varies a lot, some are extremely clear, others are choppy and very hard to understand.

On a late Tuesday evening one can hear three active trains: southbound 194 and 196, as well as northbound 197. One hears the engineers announcing arrival at stations, asking and getting track authority, as well as more unusual stuff like setting blue flag protection at San Jose Diridon, people walking on the tracks, or an engine failure of train 197 in Redwood City. "I'll go back to the engine and see what's going on there". 10 minutes later he comes back on, reports that "HEP is down, but the main engine is running again" and then asks for authority to proceed to San Francisco with the engine doors open. The HEP (head-end power generator) provides power for the cars. I.e. 197 is currently running dark with no lights, or air conditioning in the cars.

Danny Macaskill at Ayshire Railway Preservation

Well  worth the time to watch the whole thing.

Kicker scenes:

• balancing on a rail, ... and jumping to the other 
• jumping on top of roof supports
• riding on a crane steel wire

Effect of Cleaning Solar Panels

Saturday Pascal and I cleaned the solar panels. I was curious if there's a measurable effect of the cleaning. Conveniently enough, I have data to look at.

Here's the SolarGuard graph from Friday (which is quite typical for last week), a nicely shaped curved that closely follows light intensity over the day. We're topping out at ~1.3kWh around 14:00.

Here's the graph from Saturday. Starts out quite similar, ... 11:00 - 12:00 the sky was a bit overcast, so there's a drop in production, but when the sun fully came out again after 13:00 our production shot up to peak at just under 1.5kWh.

... and that wasn't a fluke as the graph from yesterday shows:

So, for us it's worth it to clean the panels once during the dry season. Over the winter we get enough strong rainfall to wash off dust and dirt.

Hungry rat causes short circuit at Stuttgart Hbf

Wow, this is hilarious. A hungry rat decided to munch on cables that power platform lights at Stuttgart Hbf plunging the main station into darkness for over 90 minutes.

I wonder if anyone took a photo of the dark main station...

Update:
Indeed, there are a few photos floating around. A pretty bad smart phone video can be found at bambuser.

Update:
YouTube to the rescue:



It's interesting how, after a few days, more and more content pops up about something as boring as a limited power outage at a train station. First the same article was linked from multiple places, then a few local papers and TV stations published their own versions, and finally user-generated content climbed high enough in search rankings to be actually findable.

Salad

Hass Avocado, Black Bean, Tomato, Red Onion, Cheddar Cheese,
Bread 'n' Butter Pickled Jalapeno, Red Pepper, and
Cilantro Salad with Cumin-Lime Vinaigrette, Sour Cream, and Tortilla Crunch.

Peek-a-boo

Roaring Camp's CF7 is waiting in Felton for its next assignment down to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.

Some switching in the evening ...

Switching Emsingen and Talheim is a nice laid-back experience at the end of a day. Especially if -- for a change -- everything works. A lot of work items are idling on the to-do list, but I didn't feel like building stuff tonight.

I'm making up way-bills for any empty car cards that I encounter, defining at least the destination cities. If no specific industry is specified on the way-bill it's up to the operator to find a proper spot for the car at the respective stations. So far, car cards and way-bills feel more natural to me when operating the layout, compared to computer-generated switch-lists.

Best Buy: We're sorry

I went to www.bestbuy.com and got this. Why is that guy so friggin' happy that their Web site doesn't work?

Feeling better

Last week was quite eventful at work, so I took it slow over the weekend, and spent time with family and building stuff.

Today's project: The tunnel tube.

Now that the tunnel portal is installed, I need an actual tunnel. Near the tunnel entrance I also want stone structure. I made a cardboard template of the portal opening, transfered it onto thin plywood, and cut it out. Rinse, and repeat. The stone structure is made from Faller wall paper. I didn't like the color of the stones, so I used black water colors to make the inside of the tunnel quite dark. I sealed the watercolors with some Dullcote. I'll use heavy black paper further back in the tunnel. After a few inches one can't tell anymore whether the walls have stone structure anyways.

Next, I painted the ground on the inside of the tunnel deep black. 

Yep, that's exactly the effect I was after. I might add some additional black paper later to extend the covered portion of the tunnel. However, this will also need to be removable for access in case of derailments and repairs.

Now that the tunnel is in place, I mounted the other side-wing from the Busch kit upside down. Except for the small portal opening I really like this kit.

After this photo was taken I started building the substructure for scenery down to the creek, and extending the creek to the inside fascia.

First tunnel portal

I've had mock-tunnel portals made from cardboard on the layout for quite some time. Today, the first actual portal was installed.

This is a heavily modified Busch 7022 "Dampflok Tunnelportal" I bought by accident a couple years ago. The original is made for steam engines -- no catenary -- so the portal height it is quite low, just over 7 cm. I cut out the original arch stones in the portal opening enlarging it to an inside height of 9 cm. Then I installed a Faller arch stone strip in the new opening. The left side of the portal wall is heavily trimmed for clearance with adjacent scenery. The retaining wall on the left, as well as the tunnel crown, is from the Busch kit, too. Judicious application of Scuptamold will integrate this with the surrounding scenery.

Semaphores - installed

The north semaphores in Talheim are installed. Including covers. I used Polly Scale Aged Concrete for the base color of the cover, and will glue sand, ballast, and greenery on top. The idea is that the covers remain removable.

This afternoon the semaphores at Abzw. Talheim got their covers cut, as well as their wiring for the light bulbs. These semaphores were made for an analog Maerklin layout and the bulbs are wired to "light" and "ground", while the twincoils are powered from "light" to "ground".  With DCC decoders I don't have a constant on power source on the outputs, so I disconnected the "light" wire of the bulb from the twin coil machine, and instead wired in a dedicated 16V AC power source connected to "ground" of the semaphore body. Conveniently, the twin coil machine is insulated from the semaphore base, so I can easily keep those circuits apart.

The extra wires for the light bulbs can be seen to the right of the semaphore.

As much as I don't like paying taxes ...

"We as citizens don’t take enough personal responsibility for doing our part to pay for the basic services our government provides, and that we use every day."

From The Infrastructurist, click to read their commentary on gas taxes.

Couldn't have said this better.

Reflection

It's strange how I find myself doing wiring work again, while craving for more scenery. It seems I automatically end up wrapping up projects I started a long time ago (detection, semaphores, route control) before opening up even more cans of worms.
Might also be that I unconsciously want to ensure the railroad runs well and is usable before diverting attention to more scenery. The long tunnel sections continue to bug me, but that's how this layout worked out, and I'm not going to change that in this setup.

---

Either way, the visible Talheim semaphore signals are mostly installed and wired. I decided to use both multi-position semaphores I have as entry signals for Emsingen, since using one in Talheim would severely restrict the available switching space before the tunnel portal north of Talheim.
I also started to wire up detection sections in Talheim. Some more surgery with the Dremel tool will be necessary to add gaps to all sections. for proper detection. Since most of the station area is made up of already installed flex track, and gapping bent flex track is yielding very unwelcome kinks, I will need to cut a rail at two switches. Not ideal, but should work out ok.

San Diego Model Railroad Museum

Most of the footage is from the Tehachapi layout.