Adventures in scratch building

Given that I'm only re-using three walls of the freight shed from Faller's Trossingen kit, and they make up less than half of the building, I'm basically scratch building the freight shed for Emsingen.

The shed as seen from the street.

... and the view from the tracks.

The lower wall is from the Trossingen kit. I cut off the original flat gable and added a sharper one.

Testing the effect with the card board roof.

... and the other side. I won't add a window in this wall.

The scratch build part will have loading doors as well, but I'll model them "closed", and glue them on top of the wall boards.  ... Oh, shoot! The sliding doors hang on the inside of the building. Sigh. Won't get around creating those wall openings.

Metrolink Highrailer in Burbank, CA

For Maintenance Of Way activities pretty much all US railroads use SUVs fitted with small wheels that fit on the track and guide the car.

Layout Computer Shenanigans

Snowy is the Ubuntu machine controlling my layout with JMRI. I used an old Antex Sonata multimedia case for this machine.

Last Saturday, there was an "electric smell" in the garage. It took us a little while to locate it, but, you guessed it, the power supply in Snowy was dead, and I immediately suspected a popped capacitor in the power supply. Time for a new one. I got the old one out, drove down to Central Computers and ... learned that this power supply is specially made for the Sonata case, and no longer available. Well, at least they didn't have any that would fit. So I ended up spending a little bit more and got a new CoolerMaster case with power supply included.

While at it, I decided to do what I always wanted to do and mount a computer screen in a corner above the layout. Big daughter is abroad for a year, and she's mostly using her laptop anyways, so that nice 17" monitor got mounted to a wall bracket and installed above the Emsingen roundhouse.

Today I put it all together again. Here are a few shots of what the setup looks like now.

The screen is mounted to the beam above the Emsingen roundhouse. The cables for power and video signal go down the server in the triangular channel in the corner.

The screen is big enough to show the JMRI layout editor view of the whole layout, plus imagery from hidden staging. The red lines show occupied tracks in Emsingen.

The server cabinet underneath the layout. The Emsingen roundhouse is right above the right hand side of the cabinet. The cabinet is normally pushed all the way into the corner like on this photo. However, it's mounted on wheels, so it's easy to pull forward and work on cabling at the back of the computers. 

On the left is Chef, our home server. On the right is the new Snowy case, and the UPS on the far right.

With the old case it always bugged me that I had to open a server cabinet door to turn on the computer. For the new setup, I took the power button socket from the old case, extended it and added a push button at the far end. The button is now mounted to the shelf on the side of the cabinet and conveniently accessible.

Snowy's power button is the small black push button mounted to hard board in the center of this picture.

Latte

I love our barista.

A Bridge

In preparation for a school project, Pascal decided this afternoon to build a through-truss bridge ...
All by himself...
From tooth picks and hot glue!

Even the beams running the length of the bridge are made from tooth picks. Pascal first built the end supports, then the lower beams and the truss on each side. Afterwards he connected the trusses at the top, and built the deck.

Attack of the Boy

This is what's left of our old kitchen mixer after Pascal wanted to know what it looks like from the inside...

Emsingen Freight shed mock-up

I threatened to do a mock-up, and those things go together really fast. Building the shed from cardboard took me a mere 20 minutes.

The freight shed sits at to the "Gueterschuppen" track next to Emsingen station.

Emsingen main station and freight shed mock-up.

Aerial view of station area.

I want the shed to not look silly when putting two freight cars next to it, so it needs to be a decent size. Since I'm kit-bashing it, I'm assuming that it was originally built smaller, and expanded later to double its size. The parts I have call for a single-story building with a fairly low angled roof.

The footprint of shed feels a bit large but works well with the freight cars at the loading dock

The loading dock wraps around one side of the freight shed. Dock height will be set to meet car floor at level height.

View from the North. Station access road will pass behind the shed on the right of this picture. In the final model I'll extend the ramp a little bit closer to the curve. There will be stairs to the loading dock.

View of the shed from the street. The mockup is straight, but the ground is crooked. The loading dock along the street is made from wood and supported by wood beams, while the trackside arrangement and foundation are concrete.

Figuring out what the freight shed is going to look like

Now that the Emsingen station building is basically complete, I need to figure out what the freight shed is going to look like. This will be kit-bashed from parts of the attached freight shed included with the kit, and styrene sheets. Do I want two doors to the loading platform or one? Which wall segments will be built from kit parts, which from styrene parts? Do I want to build the shed to the size of roof parts I have? If bigger, should I cobble together the roof from cut parts, or build a roof from scratch?
...
So many questions to answer.

Before cutting styrene I should make a cardboard mockup.

Lunch

This is it.

Time for my flight home. Can't wait. It was really nice spending time with family the last few days, but I'm ready to go home. Two and half weeks is a long time to be away.

Here's a shot from our weekend walk at Monrepos.

The photo quality of my cell phone doesn't even pretend to be near what Tatjana's camera produces. 

Morning Fog at School

It was very nice fog this morning. And even thicker when Tatjana went to school.

Important Literature

Photo credit: Tatjana

Tiersteintunnel

On the way from Zurich to Stuttgart as usual I was watching the scenery outside the windows of IC184. Between Rottweil and Horb the track tunnels through several hills along river Neckar, and to my utter surprise at one of the tunnel portals I read the sign "Tierstein-Tunnel".

I later looked up the Gaeubahn on Wikipedia, and indeed there is a "Tierstein-Tunnel", followed by "Hohenstein-Tunnel", whose name is awfully close to my "Hochwald-Tunnel".  It's amazing how sometimes completely made-up names can be found in reality, not that far away from where I imagined they could be located in my model.

rottweil.net has a few very nice photos of the tunnel portal that in an instant had me wide awake on Friday afternoon.

"Critical" Supplies

A visit at Zuri-Tech yielded a nice set of second-hand Maerklin D-Zug-Wagen. While they are compressed in length, the cars will look reasonably ok on the fairly tight radi used on the Welztalbahn. This gives me the material to model a detoured long-distance D-Zug during operations, and they just look good for an Open House setup.

I also couldn't resist the siren call of a Roco Rungenwagen, and some figures to populate the farmers market in the town of Emsingen. All of the items were on sale so the damage to my wallet wasn't too horrible.

She Arrived

Fun at Zurich HB

Emsingen station interior, part 4

And you thought I would let you off easy, did you ... ?

Just as I suspected, when I put a light bulb inside the station building and turned off the work bench lights, the building walls started to glow:

Yeah, that's really not cool. This is not a scene from a ghost story. The wall on the left got some thick sheet styrene on the inside, which helps, but isn't perfect. The wall on right is not fixed yet, neither is the door. 

The baggage / express freight room after installing a screen of black construction paper inside, which then gets covered up with a thin sheet of white styrene.

The station office.

And the fixed waiting room. The doors are impossible to fix properly at this stage. Before installation I should have painted them black on the inside to reduce the sheen. The wall on the right is covered with construction paper, the one on the left with just sheet styrene. Paper wins.

The last three photos are exposed for 3 secs with 5.6 aperture. I used an LED flash light to briefly light up the walls and simulate some moonlight. No digital editing done.

Busy time in Emsingen

The transfer run from Emsingen to Talheim is extra long today. The Talheim switcher will have some work to do...

Emsingen station interior, part 3

It's done.

Station office and baggage / express department

Waiting room now with passengers

Tonight I built the luggage department. The shelves are made from styrene, and the boxes / bags are cut from some balsa wood strip. Putting it together isn't really that hard, but it took forever.

I updated the waiting room with the arrival and departure information (thanks for the idea, Wolfram), as well as waiting passengers. This is the first time that I painted figures this small myself. The paint looks appropriately clumsy. However, when they are behind glass inside the building you can't quite see all my mistakes, so it's acceptable. I'll get some more practice when I paint the remaining 40 sitting passengers in the package...

The rooms are now permanently installed in the station building, the light mask is adjusted and cut out ... and I have this nagging feeling that I'm not done with this topic yet.

Emsingen station interior, part 2

I was encouraged by the success of the waiting room, and continued to build rooms behind the track-facing window front. Next up was the station office, which also houses the ticket counter.

Hey, look! There are papers and folders on the desk.

What I found interesting is that it doesn't take much details to suggest a room behind the windows.  I'm likely going to add a Preiserlein somewhere in the office to make it look more "lived in".

Now I only have the express shipment and luggage department left to do before I can return to the regular construction of the station building.

I'll leave the top of the rooms open, and place the bulbs for general building lighting high enough, so that they illuminate the decorated interior spaces as well.