4 story houses in Emsingen ... or not.

I'm currently building more houses for the town of Emsingen. One of the kits I got for this a while ago is Faller's 130436 half-relief, background houses. I like the idea of half-relief houses since one doesn't need as much space as for the complete house, while still giving the impression of "there's more".

These two houses are the 4-story variant. The kit was an impulse buy, and I didn't really consider how high 4 stories is, nor the feel of Emsingen town. As time progressed and first houses were set on the layout, I took another look at that kit and mused that 4 stories is quite high. When I started building the kit I kind of spaced on this earlier insight. After the ground floor was built and I placed the house on the layout, it felt like a sky scraper, and completely out of place. Some kit-bashing was in order. Of course, by now I already had glued together the ground floor, so I couldn't go the easy route and do a nice straight cut along the bottom of the side-walls, instead I needed to cut at the roof line.

In the photo below I already shortened one of the two side-walls, and am test-fitting the facade, while the wall in the rear is still the original height.

Here's a view of the almost completed kit with other houses in Emsingen...

Yep, that works much better. Just imagine there were another floor in that house. It would be almost as high as the church steeple.

Our annual two weeks of fall

Gobble, gobble

Wild turkeys on my way to work...

Tabletop Switching

Breakfast

New office location. Different breakfast options. Same sun.

More box cars

I was lacking a sufficient number of "real" box cars ("Gedeckte Gueterwagen") so Maerklin's new 2012 release of the 00776 display set came at the right time. Robert Frowenfeld from rjftrains had a good pre-order deal so I jumped on it in February. The shipment came in today.

These are Gbs 256 sheet piling wall box cars, not exactly one of the most common cars around on the prototype, but a good example for modern cars in the late 60's and early 70's.

The cars look really good as far as brown freight cars go. The molding is nice and crisp. Lettering sharp, legible, and as far as I can tell correct. Grab irons are present and iirc in the right places. Maerklin also molded the brake handles, though as usual didn't get the release valve handles correct (they are mirrored when they shouldn't be). I'm sure the rivet counters will be all up in arms about that. Some cars in the set are factory-weathered. The weathered look is nice, but I'll hold judgement until I see them on the layout.

I can now retire some of the really old box cars I'm running on the layout, but will need to revisit maximum train length. The new cars are quite a bit longer than the somewhat compressed cars from yesteryear. It might turn out that a 9 car train is now too long for the sidings and storage tracks.

NOT according to plan ...

Timesaver in N-scale

I've been toying with a timesaver module before using Bauspielbahn parts.

Last year I started to build an N-scale version. That project fizzled after a while, and the module was stored in the garage for most of last year. The baseboard is only 1 x 5 feet, so it wasn't much in the way, and, as can be seen on the photo, that leaves plenty of space for "scenery".

The module is fully wired up and operational. The Rapido couplers on my existing N-scale cars were not very good for switching, so I installed Microtrains trucks with knuckle couplers to match the little Diesel switcher. Replacing the trucks was reasonably easy on most cars.

This afternoon I sat down for a little while, cleaned tracks, hooked up power and indeed, the little thing actually works. It has some minor connectivity issues that should be easily fixable with some soldering and a couple extra power feeds.

Now, ... the point of the Timesaver is to act as a switching puzzle. I needed a way to define where cars are supposed to be spotted. I used Lego bricks on the Bauspielbahn-Timesaver a few years ago to give each car a color identity, and randomly placed matching Lego bricks at the loading spots.

For the N-scale version I wrote a script that shuffles assignments and delivers the result on a Web page in ASCII art. Not pretty, but functional and perfectly sufficient for the purpose.

Each car has a distinct color, which makes spot assignments very simple. Using the switcher locomotive the operator moves cars to their assigned spots. Then we start over.

Bad Mojo Day

Never a good idea to get up late on a Saturday morning. Too many things went wrong yesterday.

Along the way I managed to blew out LocoNet communication on the SRC16 controlling the Talheim panel.

That's it. I'm going to put all the accessory and feedback decoders on a standalone LocoNet bus, while only devices required to control trains will remain on the LocoNet bus attached to the Intellibox, i.e. the LocoBufferUSB and a UP5 panel. The idea is to electrically isolate this bus from the Intellibox to protect it from the unusual reference voltage setup used by this command station.

For the stand-alone bus, a LocoBufferUSB needs to provide the Master termination, and the RailSync lines need to be powered by 12V DC. There are several ways to do this. I'll try to learn more about this over the coming week.

sunset

Lunch

Mediterranean meat-loaf and salad. Oh. My. God. So good.

JMRI BackAndForth.py

Most underground tracks are hooked up to occupancy detectors. I'm cleaning track and one of the easier ways to distribute the cleaning alcohol is to run a train back and forth over the cleaned section.  But that gets old pretty quickly, so I modified JMRI's BackAndForth.py sample script  and made a locomotive run through staging tracks controlled by a script.

This presents the first time that I dabbled in automated train control on my layout. So many possibilities ....

The video shows a trip of the locomotive through staging as seen on the main panel of the Welztalbahn.

Working under palm trees

No rain this afternoon. A good excuse to work outside.

New Emsingen Panel

The new panel for Emsingen is built and functional. All powered switches in Emsingen can now be controlled using the same logic I deployed in Talheim, along with routes and appropriate semaphore signaling.

The red buttons control routes and semaphores. The logic works by first pressing the button FROM where the train is coming, then the button TO where the train is going. The computer/JMRI take care of throwing the right turnouts and set the appropriate signals, including speed signaling for diverging vs. straight routes. The black buttons control the turnout at the respective location.
The story here goes that turnouts with black buttons are hand-thrown by the switching crew, while turnouts off the mainline are thrown by the tower operator.

The red buttons on the yard ladder line the yard turnouts so that the respective yard track can be reached from the switch lead.

I have not yet put together the indicator LEDs for the mainline turnouts and various control indicators. I'll do that for the Talheim panel first, Emsingen next, and finally the various turnouts in staging.

The fascia still needs some paint. Another day... I haven't run trains in a while, so the tracks in staging are all gunked up in various places and need some thorough cleaning.

Another house for Emsingen

I'm putting together yet another Faller kit to add more houses to Emsingen. In this kit I'm trying out a trick to get more depth behind the windows by adding a 0.20x0.60" styrene strip on the inside to keep the paper mask a whee bit away from the window glass.

House with the styrene strips behind on the inside of the windows

The 3D effect is surprisingly good. I did not expect that at all.

Franziska wanted to have a flower shop in the house instead of the bar that comes with the kit. I re-decorated the shadow box behind the big window with some foam flock... Well, ... at least it's clearly no longer a bar. I'll add a canope for "Franziskas Blumenlaedle" later.

Window shopping

The house placed with it's friends in Emsingen. I have at least 5 more kits to go before I'll even attempt arranging houses and where to put streets.

oh yeah, I can see it now ...

Looking south towards San Jose from the San Antonio Rd Caltrain station

[For those of you who missed it. This is the storm carrying hail up to 1" in diameter down to Gilroy.]

Fascia fix-it

The fascia at Emsingen was one of the first I hung when I decided to keep the "operating pit". Since then I learned a few things, such as how to cut holes in an installed fascia without scratching the surface (use blue painter's tape), or to check for things that are behind the fascia (turnout motors, layout supports) before cutting a hole...

Either way, I moved the UP-5 out of the way of the turnout motor a few months ago, and now that it's time to upgrade the control panel for Emsingen, I might as well put it in a spot that is more convenient to reach. Since most operators have problems seeing the panel with the somewhat tight space in the operating pit, I wanted to install the new panel slightly tilted, so that the button and track arrangement is more visible. We'll see how well that works out...

New fascia board installed. The UP-5 is now mounted on the L-girder supporting the layout.

Testing view lines with the old panel. I can barely see the uppermost buttons when I'm standing straight, but the new tilted arrangement is much easier on the eyes for anyone shorter than me.

Scenery update

I promised removal of the ugly distant hills behind Hinteraecker in my last post on this subject. Here is the result.

Hinteraecker background

One of the items in my luggage on the return trip from Zurich was Faller's "Rathaus Ahlsfeld" model, which is to become the centerpiece of the market square in Emsingen.

Emsingen

I need to get cooking on building more houses, as well as potentially get creative with background flats for the town.

Morning Light

Working in the backyard