Hallelujah Papermill: Measure twice ...

[Hallelujah Paper posts]

Hmmmm ...

The good news is that the surgery on the north wall of the Finished Paper warehouse had the desired effect. The building fits between the mine spur on the left and the loading spur on the right:

The bad news is that the south facade needs more surgery to fit over the hidden mine spur. Never mind that track embedded in the homasote...

And the "ooopsie" of the day is that I didn't take the wall width of the covered car loading area into account when laying out the spur to the warehouse. Clearance between the run-around track and the warehouse wall is just a little bit too tight. While even the longest cars fit, they fit just barely and every operator will be scared for their switch men in that location. You can see how tight it is with the bulk head car on the right in the photo of the north wall above.

Thankfully, I have enough space to move the loading spur and the warehouse building a quarter inch to the back, which will alleviate this super-tight situation.

The part of the spur outside the covered loading area will be served by a loading door in the middle of the wall section facing the track. I intend to treat this as a dedicated car spot, so that crews will have to put a specific car to this door ("box car CN&W 46529 to Finished Paper Warehouse, Door #6"). That wall is about 70 scale feet long, so there is enough space to position any modern center door box car.

While standing in front of the layout and contemplating building arrangements, it became crystal-clear where the offices from Walther's "Magic Pan Bakeries" kit would go, and what to do with the open space between said offices, the paper machine building, and the chemical unloading facility.

But first, I need to do some more surgery...

Hallelujah Papermill: Kitbashing the Finished Paper Warehouse

[Hallelujah Paper posts]

The Finished Paper Warehouse for Hallelujah Paper needs to be modified to fit into the space I have for it.

I started off by fitting extra wall sections to extend the warehouse space.

Roofs were found in the boxes, too. Good.

Moving on to rebuilding the support structure, so that it is not as deep and a bit more solid.

Now comes the fun part: Shortening the north wall. I scribed the wall from the inside, and very carefully from the outside to get a clean cut.

I wanted a clean corner. So I need to remove the light brick work and the middle window, and replace it with an edge window fitted with brick work to the edge of the building.

Edge window moved

Cuts cleaned up, and some brick work fitted to the edge

When this building gets painted the remaining gaps from the gaps will mostly disappear. In the above photo I already installed the roof. Remember, one purpose of this building is to hide away the mine spur behind the paper mill. The middle section of the building hangs over the hidden track. The story goes that the spur actually curves away from the viewer into the back drop "leaving the room". To accomplish this effect I cut the roof at an angle to widen from the loading doors toward the middle of the building, and installed a roof edge suggesting that the building ends before the back drop.

The main warehouse section extends "into the back drop".

I've built up enough of the building that I now need to bring it down to the club to make sure it really fits into the space I have planned. Depending on clearance of the hidden track, I might have to cut more from the rear wall at the bottom of the picture, but I hope I can avoid that.

So far, so good. Let's see what this looks like on the layout tomorrow.

Hallelujah Papermill: The problem of the Finished Paper Warehouse

[Hallelujah Paper posts]

I decided to use a half-finished building I found under the layout as the basis for the Finished Paper Warehouse at Hallelujah Paper. There's only a tiny problem: The building doesn't fit into the allocated space. As you can see in the photo above the warehouse is too deep to fit between the Hell'N'Begone Mine siding and the warehouse spur. The closed loading dock is very appropriate for a paper loading facility, but too short.

I should fill the empty space behind the spur with more warehouse space and might want to add a loading door next to the spur.

The other problem with the building: There are clearance issues between the Mine track and the internal support structure as well as the foundation of the building.

How I kitbashed the building is in part 2.

Prepping for Hallelujah

A dozen Tortoise turnout motors have now pigtails soldered on their contacts for use in the Hallelujah area at Silicon Valley Lines. Still need to finish up the spade connectors and sleeves on the other end of the cable.

Loading dock cut off

I really like the station building that was floating around the Hallelujah area. It's an old Pola kit and I promised myself I'll find a spot for it on the layout that makes sense with the paper mill and other new industries under construction in Hallelujah.

As it turned out this was a bit more difficult than I expected. Even when working with 15 linear feet of benchwork, there just was no good spot for the building, except one location squeezed between track and the back drop. However, while the building fit just perfectly, there was a clearance issue between the loading dock next to the platform and the track. After some deliberation we decided that the loading dock needs to be removed and cut back to the loading ramp of the freight house.

Cuts cleaned up

I pried a piece of the stone wall from the loading dock and fitted it before the opening left by the cut-away dock. Since there is some overhang from the platform roof, I decided to extend the platform a bit and built a small platform extension from styrene.

Stonewall fitted to loading ramp and glued in. Now working on the platform extension.

Platform extension glued in place ...

After the glue set up, I used flat black, roof brown, and CSX gray, as well as water, to paint the platform extension, and hide away the cuts. Tomorrow I'll use weathering powders to tie the newly painted areas into the existing faded paint work.

While at it, I also added a station sign.

... and painted.

Loading Crane for Emsingen

The finished loading crane in Emsingen

Over the last couple days I built Vollmer's 5727 "Ueberladekran", a loading crane for the Emsingen freight area. This is a fairly straight-forward build.

I used the nice weather today to set up on the patio and spend the afternoon on finishing up the model after I mostly painted yesterday.

As usual for my recent builds, I did some light weathering with acrylics and weathering powder. Here are some more details and close-ups.

Evening Entertainment

The portable workspace is getting a workout ...

... I just need the whole dining table.

I'm building the crane for the Emsingen freight area.

Detailing and Repairs

Today I went back to fix the Brawa BD4yg Umbauwagen that fell to the floor a little while ago. The Roco BR211, that was in operation on the Welztalbahn undetailed for the last 2 years, still needed its detailing, too.

Getting inspiration and the correct color scheme of stirrup steps and handrails

Detailed 211 082 in Talheim

I also tried my hand at some light weathering of the roof and the hoods. I used thinned acrylics and Bragdon powders.

Grenzzeichen

A Grenzzeichen in Emsingen

What's a Grenzzeichen you ask? Grenzzeichen are used on in Germany wherever tracks diverge that are used to store cars or a train stops. The Grenzzeichen marks the location where a car on one track will foul the other track. This is obviously useful for in switching yards, freight stations, and similar situations.

The typical Grenzzeichen is a pipe stuck into the ballast with a round enamel head painted white and red in quarters. I have thought about how to model German Grenzzeichen for a while. I considered painting a round piece of styrene. However, in HO scale the head is only 2mm in diameter, and painting quarters of that in red accurately was a little bit more than I felt like doing.

I considered early Reichsbahn Grenzzeichen, a white stick with a red top, but by the early 1970's they would have been replaced pretty much universally.

The other issue is that a scale Grenzzeichen is really small, and easy to overlook when switching cars. If I put those things in, I also want to use them for their actual purpose. I was willing to make them a little bit oversize so that they are more obvious to operators. 

Eventually, I found Erbert Modelltechnik, a small supplier in Germany, that makes scale Grenzzeichen among other neat lineside details, and I ordered the O-scale version, which is just perfect for my use case. Ordering was easy and the various parts arrived with no fuss within a few days.

Most of the roadbed in Emsingen and Talheim stations is not yet ballasted, so it's a bit early to fuzz around with this kind of detail. Nevertheless, I did try it out in the yard, and I very much like the effect.

Makerfaire 2015

May, time for Makerfaire. This time around the weather was overcast and not nearly as sweltering hot as the last couple times. 

We had fun this Saturday, but I do notice that the novelty has worn off. Yes, there's lots of cool stuff to look at, and yes, we recognized exhibits from last year. 

Nevertheless, there's always opportunity for surprises.

One of my favorite part is the combination of metal working, sculptures, and fire. There were several opportunities to press buttons and send some fire into the air.

The Megabot exhibit was well attended, but they had a weapon system failure during the show we saw, so the oversized paint guns did not splash a car in paint.

The "Mission Impossible" booth were one needs to pass through a web of laser beams to "steal" the glowing ball was quite popular.

Overall,  this was a good way to spend a Saturday. The proliferation of Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and 3D printers continued. There was a vast supply of kits and add-ons on display in booths, and/or available for purchase, and I completely ignored them. If one wanted to see things that were not computer-connected or all-electronic, one had to look a little bit harder.

Middle of the Month Ops

A quiet moment at Bayshore Yard

To my surprise Silicon Valley Lines operated today. I thought we would just have an Open House for attendees of the NMRA PCR meet. As it turns out trains were staged and guests were ready for some action.
For a change (and because I had a committment later in the evening), I ran Bayshore Yard, which was a very laid back way to spend the evening.

Nowheres Yard is busy as usual and there is traffic in Jacksonville

I also finally installed the two turnouts in the wood yard at the South Hallelujah paper mill. I'm starting to come up with a concept for the style of the various buildings and connecting infrastructure.

Wood yard turnouts installed

Yes, there is rain today

Just in time for Bike-to-work-Day, rain is in the forecast, and as you can imagine in times of a severe drought emergency and mandatory water conservation, every drop of rain is welcome. Having lunch outside in a light drizzle is fun, too.

Household Chores

Refinishing the counter top and attempting to fix showers and kitchen faucets. Fun Saturday afternoon.

Ouch!!!

As I was preparing for an upcoming operations session, I ran one of the local freights back into staging, and didn't stop quickly enough. Momentum ran the train into the end of track, and it partially derailed on track 3 which is hard to reach from the aisle. GRRRRRR.

Oh well, ... I took two cars from the train that was staged on track 2, put them aside and started tending to the derailed cars. ... I hear a rolling sound ... and before I can react, see one of the cars roll to the edge of the table and fall head down onto the floor, landing on the coupler, which goes flying. GRRRRRR².

The molded plastic noses holding the coupler in place are sheared off. Taking a lesson from American-style coupler boxes, I cleaned up the remains, carefully drilled a hole for a screw, and mounted the coupler back to the body. I didn't get the hole perfectly vertical, so the coupler now hangs about 1 mm too low, but this is manageable. So far, so good.

Fixed coupler on the left. Undamaged original assembly is on the right.

Since it was still early, I decided to finally detail the Roco 211 I bought two years ago. The train with that locomotive was staged on the inside tracks of staging so I decided to back it out from it's track. As I was doing that, the last car derailed and fell to the floor. GRRRRRRR³ and then I noticed it was one of the new BRAWA Umbauwagen. GRRRRR⁴

The trucks had come off and the end steps on one side of the car are damaged. Also, one of the pressure springs at the trucks was missing. After searching for the spring fruitlessly, I was so utterly frustrated, that I packed up the modelling supplies, and went to bed early.

Dinner fresh from the grill