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.

Kindergarten

The debt-limit "discussion" in Washington makes me sad.

This non-stop posturing for political gain on both sides (but particularly the Republicans) is so lame ... even Kindergarteners have a better sense for when to stop being silly.

Semaphores

I couldn't resist. ... Talheim now has all semaphores selected, though not yet functional. Tonight I installed the two on the north side of the station.

Talheim north end

The twin-coil machines are installed into the roadbed to hide them a bit from view. Where space is tight between tracks, I dug the hole even a little bit under the track. I will fit a piece of styrene over the opening to protect the machine from landscaping, dust and dirt. Yet I'll try to keep the cover removable for maintenance.

Twin-coil detail

Exit signals at the north end of Talheim

These signals are about 30 years old, and even though they are definitely not up to modern detailing standards, they look reasonably good.

Yes, that Roco 211 still needs detailing...

Talheim Local Panel - part 5

The remaining buttons are now connected, and I can finally reset a badly chose route before throwing it with the left black button in the back. The black button right next to it will be used to toggle whether to set signals, too, when setting a route.

One minor snag is that the cross-overs at the bottom don't throw consistently in unison as I press the button to toggle them. I'm not sure yet if the computer is sending the turnout commands too fast, or if the commands get lost. However, since I'm experiencing zero problems with other turnouts, and it's always the same turnout that doesn't toggle, I think communication is fine, and JMRI is sending the turnout commands a little bit too fast for the Tam Valley servo controller to handle. JMRI routes allow to add an extra delay between commands when executing the route, so I'll try that later tonight.

I'm very tempted to pull out the semaphores and connect them, even if only temporarily ... It would substantially change the look and feel of the Talheim area, and would be really cool. Hmmmmm...

Update 23:00:
My stupid perfectionism found a few issues:

• The old signals need a color refresh. Particularly the red color on some of the semaphore arms is in sad condition.
• To my utter surprise I'm short 2-3 signals. Had I realized this earlier, I could have picked up a few real cheap last weekend at Eurowest... However to my delight I noticed that there are two signals that can show Hp0/Hp1/Hp2. Those will be used as entry signals to Emsingen, and/or maybe Talheim. Though for Talheim I can pretend the entry signals are inside the tunnel.
• The semaphore masts feel small, but it turns out that a mast height of 10.5cm above the bottom of the rail works out to just over 9 meters in HO which is right in the middle of the prototypical heights of 8 or 10 m. I'm mounting the semaphors lower than intended to partially hide the huge Maerklin twin-coil machines in the base.
• In some locations the semaphore arms are partially above the neighboring track. My literature says that is prototypical as well. Tough one location in Talheim is very tight, and the prototype would have used a different kind of mast with tracks that close together.
• At least one track in Emsingen needs the semaphor location adjusted by a few centimeters.

Just toggling the cross-over turnouts in Talheim doesn't give reliable results, apparently because the QuadP can't handle the turnout commands right after each other. Adding a delay helps, but it looks like there's a race condition around releasing the sensor button, so the logix still didn't work correctly.

I broke up the one logix into three: One logix to toggle an internal sensor based on the pushbutton sensor going active, and one logix each to explicitly set the turnouts to thrown or closed based on the state of the internal sensor, including a small delay between the turnout commands. That works very reliably, and I couldn't get the turnouts to go out of sync any more.

Talheim Local Panel - part 4

Yup, still spending time on this. Tonight I finished up the basic JMRI logic, and even came up with a way to conditionally throw signals as the routes are set based on the state of a sensor. As usual apparently I'm over-engineering this ... again. Oh well, we'll see how long this one will last.

Seen at Eurowest 2011

To bad this was the only signal I could find on the whole layout, and it was always green :-)

Talheim Local Panel - part 3

It's starting to come together. The bad push-buttons are swapped out. The buttons for locally controlled turnouts are added, as well as the LEDs put in place for show (though not connected yet).

Push-buttons

I cleaned up the remaining mess from the 63400 testing. All systems are back to go, ... well, with the exception of the Talheim panel. The push buttons are in, plus some LEDs, electronics hooked up, too.

I'm now writing the routing logic in JMRI to get two-button routes. I.e. the way it works is that the operator presses one route button on the panel to start the route. Then another route button for the end of the route, and JMRI will align the switches (and later semaphore signals) accordingly. Since Talheim has tracks going into 5 directions there's no way to use the more regular way to control turnout ladders with a single button per route.

Some of the cheap push-button switches I use are already breaking, partly because I need to be really careful when soldering wires to the connectors, since the casing is plastic and easily melts, displacing the contacts inside. So annoying.

Does anyone have a source for reliable push-button switches that don't cost the world? The ones I use right now are similar to these.

Google Apps transition test

I completed transition of my Google Apps hosted domain to Google's new authentication system. This is a test post to make sure, Blogger still works with the new credentials.

Yumm Yumm - What giraffes like to eat

LPAC @ Belwood

Today was the last regular swim meet before Champs. Both Tatjana and Pascal are swimming great.








And I finally managed to convince kdenlive to not letterbox the funky SD mpeg2 wide-screen videos that my Panasonic SDR-H80 camera produces. I'm setting the project settings to edit in 720p, import the 480p SD material, force pixel-aspect ratio to 1.19 on the clips, edit the video, then finally render into HDV 720 30p 2-pass. This produces ginormous videos (sorry, storage and processing folks), but the final quality doesn't suffer nearly as much as when I edit and render in straight SD.