A short Lovelock local - Part 2

Continued from Part 1.

The next customer is Diamond Plastics.  The road switcher makes a run around move by going to the west end of the siding and then moving on the main line to the east end.  Anytime the main line is occupied, it is coordinated with the despatcher by radio.  Now being on the east end of the train, the covered hopper can be pushed into the Diamond Plastics spur.

After spotting the covered hopper at Diamond Plastics, the Railbox car and the caboose are swapped in position by using both the siding and the spur, and then left on the Diamond Plastics spur.

The last customer of the day is the Halliburton facility which is on the main line.  There is a loaded covered hopper to be picked up there.  After receiving clearance from dispatch, the whole string of cars is pulled out.

Leaving the loaded car on the main line, the remaining empties are pushed back into the spur, spotting the first one under the loader.  This facility uses a winch to pull the cars under the loader.

After finishing at Halliburton, the loaded covered hopper is moved over to the siding and pushed past the turnout for the Diamond Plastics spur.  The road switcher then makes another run around to get to the east end of the siding.

From the east end of the siding the road switcher couples onto the covered hopper left on the siding and then pushes it into the Diamond Plastics spur and coupled onto the box car and caboose that were left there. After pulling clear of the turnout, the train is now ready for the return trip back to Carlin.

This main line is the westbound line in the paired track arrangement.  The local will go back to Carlin to the east on this line but first must wait for a westbound UP intermodal train to pass

Now on the move back to Carlin through the Palisade Canyon.

Arriving back in Carlin there is another UP freight waiting on the main line as the local takes the siding.

A short 1985 Lovelock local - Part 1

The Lovelock local doesn't always go all the way to Lovelock.  Today we have just two cars to deliver and two more to pick up from customers in Battle Mountain.  The SP box car is an empty for Premium Choice and the covered hopper is a load of plastic pellets for Diamond Plastics.

This train will be assembled on the siding so the yard switcher has pulled the caboose out and with it has coupled onto the two outgoing cars and will move them to the siding were the road switcher waits.

With the train assembled and an air brake tests done, the local starts rolling to exit the west end of Carlin yard running long hood forward.  

Within just a few miles the train has already passed through the Palisade tunnels and crossed the Humboldt River twice.  It will cross the river a few more times before reaching Battle Mountain.

While all of the turnouts in Carlin are controlled from the tower, everything is manual at Battle Mountain.  Arriving at the east end of the Battle Mountain siding, the head end brakeman dismounts and aligns the turnout for the siding.  He will then get back on the locomotive and the rear end brakeman will re-align it for the main once the train has cleared the turnout.

The first move to get out of the way is at Premium Choice.  It's a simple exchange of box cars.

The empty SP box car is uncoupled from the caboose then used to pull the loaded Railbox car out from the spur and then it gets coupled onto the caboose.  Sometimes this customer wants cars spotted at a specific door.  They didn't care this time so the empty is being spotted a door 2.

To be continued in part 2.

Summer 2026 Layout update

Summer of 2026 is moving by fast so I thought I would put out the quarterly roundup of some of the things going on with the layout that have not already been covered in other posts.

Soundtraxx Econami DCC decoders have now been installed for the Lovelock local in both Carlin and Lovelock and for the 44 ton switcher at the EP Minerals plant in Lovelock.  Plus, the original Digitrax sound decoder that was for the Carlin switcher died and got replaced with the Soundtraxx model.  There are now a total of 5 sound decoders stationed around the areas of the layout where switching goes on.

Recently I added this small section house at the east end of Carlin yard.  This will provide a place where main line crews can wait out of the weather while the yard crew is moving cars and also some equipment related to re-fueling activity can be stored here.  I scratch built is structure from styrene with the door and windows coming from Tichy.  The roof was printed on plain paper from a Visio drawing.

I recently acquired a holder for my phone that allows me to record a video while running the throttles at the same time.  So for the first time in over 3 years, I have a new layout video up on YouTube.  In this one, instead of background music, the locomotive sounds are coming from the stationary sound decoders.

Link to the video: https://youtu.be/CFmkwDiLaUU

In June we learned that the 2027 N Scale Enthusiasts convention will be held in Sacramento.  This is only about 100 miles from me so I am looking forward to making it to this one.

Lights for Carlin Yard

For some time I have been wanting to add some yard lights to Carlin Yard.  I had seen some interesting ones on ebay but they were all shipping from China and I am reluctant to buy directly from China.  So I checked on Amazon and found the same ones that shipped from the US.

There were 3 light towers in a pack for about $20.00 including tax.  They each have two LED's and have plastic towers similar to what is on some of the Miniatronics products.  The set comes with 1000 ohm current limiting resistors for each tower.

While I liked the green color of the towers, I felt they were too shiny and plastic looking.  So I sprayed the towers with Dullcoate and that made a big improvement.  As Dullcoat is clear, no need to mask off the LED's.  I also painted the bases a primer gray to represent concrete.  I found that Evergreen #423 3/32 plastic tube fit inside the base of the tower with no adhesive needed.  This creates a stem to secure the tower to the layout.

To mount these, I drilled a  hole through the 1/4 inch thick deck that was just a bit larger than the plastic tube.  Then applied a small amount of canopy glue to the tube and pushed it into the hole.

To connect each of the yard lights to the 12 volt DC power, I made some small circuit boards with the resistor and a 2 position terminal block that the small wires from the light tower can be easily connected to under the bench work.  The larger 22 gauge wires were then connected to one of the 12 volt terminal strips.

And this is the result I was looking for. 

Learning about static grass - Part 2

Last year I finally got around to seriously working with static grass and documented what I had learned so far in THIS POST.

Since then I have done a few projects and have gotten better results with each attempt.  On this layout I have been using various shades of brown and dark green Buffalo Grass products from Scenic Express to represent the many scrub bushes seen in desert areas.  While I like the results it can get rather expensive to cover a large area.  That's why my deserts have been somewhat sparsely populated with these.

At a convention a few years ago, I attended a clinic where the method of how to make similar types of scenery with static grass was demonstrated.  So, I gave that a try using some 4mm straw colored static grass from Woodland Scenics purchased at my local hobby shop. This was actually lighter than I wanted but the selection of colors in the Woodland Scenics line of static grass is somewhat limited.  I put dots of Woodland Scenics static tac out on a piece of wax paper then applied the static grass.

After vacuuming up the excess I had this batch of bushes. They seemed good but again a little lighter in color than what I wanted.

After installing a few of these straw-colored static grass bushes on this layout, they seemed to be almost invisible against the base scenery.  So before removing the rest of them from the wax paper I gave them a light spray of Vallejo burnt umber.

After planting a few of these on the layout I was happy with the results.  Shown here is one of my home-made ones next to one of the Buffalo grass products that was purchased.  Scenic Express has a greater variety of static grass colors than does Woodland Scenics so at my next opportunity I will pick up some of their static grass in some darker brown shades.

Operations - an eastbound transfer

I've been enjoying operating this layout and plan to make more operations posts like this on in the future.  Would also like to get some videos going too.  The layout is currently set for the 1983 - 1988 time period.

An eastbound Roseville to Odgen manifest (RVOGM) is due in and the Carlin yard switcher is standing by to make some transfers to and from this train.  Here the eastbound freight is taking the crossover from the eastbound UP track into Carlin yard.

There will be 4 empty covered hoppers that need to be set out from the eastbound train while it's being refueled and the crew is being changed.  2 of these are bound for the Halliburton facility in Battle Mountain and 2 are going to the EP Minerals plant in Lovelock.

Once the eastbound has entered the yard and come to a stop, the yard switcher moves in and pulls the 4 cars to be set out from the rear of the train.  The rear end crew has already exited the caboose and the off going and on coming conductors are exchanging notes in the operations office.

The 4 empty covered hoppers along with the caboose are pulled back far enough to clear the turnouts then pushed into the siding for now.  They will be moved again later.

Today there are 4 loads and 1 empty to be picked up by the eastbound train, all covered hoppers.  These have been sitting on the storage track.  Again, these are all covered hoppers this time.

With the caboose from the eastbound still with the yard switcher, these 5 cars are now pulled out of the storage track.  With some of these longer cuts of cars, the switcher ends up being on the bridge when pulling the cut clear of the turnout.

These five cars are coupled to the end of the train.  By now the re-fueling is done and once the train is coupled and the new crew is aboard, and the air brake pressure is built up they will be ready to leave.

The eastbound has now left and the yard switcher has gone back over to the siding and pull the 4 empty covered hoppers out and then pushed them onto the storage track.  Here they are coupled to 2 other cars that were already there.  These 6 cars will make up tomorrows Lovelock local.

With their work done for now, the yard crew ties up the switcher and calls it a day.

Signaling for the Lovelock section

The Lovelock section of the layout is connected to the main line by a turnout at the bottom of the helix.  The helix already has signaling controlled by an occupancy detection circuit.  I want the new signal and both of the existing signals to monitor the position of the turnout as well as occupancy of the helix.

To accomplish this I used a diode matrix type of technique.  Refer to the drawing below.  The two diodes that are in parallel with the relay coils are just there to suppress back EMF when the relay opens and don't affect the logic of this circuit.  The two diodes that are on the input from the detection circuit isolate the two relays from each other and prevent the 12 volts from the tortoise contacts from reaching the relay 

The use of a Peco insulfrog turnout at the bottom of the helix means there is no frog to route power to.  This left both sets of contacts on the Tortosie switch machine available to control the signals.  Referring to the photo below, +12 volts DC was connected to both commons (red wires).  The orange wires are connected to the position contacts.

This is the new circuit board to control the new signal.  The red and black wires are 12 power, the orange wire is from the Tortoise motor contacts, and the yellow wire is from the occupancy detection circuit.  The red and green wires are the outputs to the signal.  Notice the diode on the board between the terminals where the orange and yellow wires are terminated.  This diode allows the occupancy signal on the yellow wire to activate the relay but blocks the turnout signal from affecting the relay on the board for the helix signals.

At the board that was already installed to control the signals at the top and bottom of the helix, the diode was placed in line on the wire that connects it to the detection circuit.  This diode will prevent the signal from the orange wire on this board from affecting the relay on the new board.

So here's the new signal on the Lovelock siding.  It will indicate a red whenever the helix block is occupied OR the turnout is aligned to the staging yard.

And here is the same signal showing a green when the turnout is aligned to the lovelock siding AND the helix block is clear.

Building EP Minerals - Part 4

Continuing with progress on the EP Minerals plant.  The final track arrangement was a compromise between keeping the spurs easily accessible and attempting to capture the look of the actual facility.  The final track arrangement does include 3 spurs - one for the loader, one for a storage track, and a third one that runs along the long warehouse for the occasional loading of box cars but can also be used as a storage track. 

With the track installed and painted, next job was installing the wiring, and the turnout linkages.  As this is a removable section of the layout, this was an easy job to do while it is sitting up on the saw horses.

The buildings showed in the last post have started to get some paint.  The loader building got a base made of tempered hard board to increase the vertical clearance for the covered hoppers that will enter it.  A sheet of fiberglass reinforced plastic has been made into a removeable where the rest of the plant can be built at the work bench.

Building EP Minerals - Part 3

In this part, I am constructing some building that will be part of the plant.  The first building is scratch built around a leftover roof from a Kato overhead station.  This roof piece has been sitting around for years and it feels great to finally use it.  In fact, this entire project is absorbing bits and pieces left over of past builds.

The Halliburton barite processing facility in Battle Mountain was built from a Walther's Glacier Gravel kit and I did not use all of it.  This car loading structure is built around one of the larger sections of the Walther's kit that I had left over.

This last building is entirely scratch built from Evergreen styrene.  I had noticed some long narrow buildings in overhead photos of the prototype with a rail spur running alongside of one of them.  In the photo there are covered hoppers parked on that spur but I am going to go with the idea that they could also ship bagged product in the occasional box car.  So this one has one large door and a long loading dock.  The ramp was something left over from the Walther's warehouse kit so I used it here.

These structures just have a primer coat of paint right now.  These will all be getting some finish paint and more details.   Although the prototype site has 3 spur tracks, I've decided my model will only have 2 and am building the turnout I'll need for that now.