Summer 2023 layout update

Summers always go by so quickly and summer 2023 especially so.  

With the pandemic now seemingly behind us, my wife and I have been trying to make up for lost time in regards to travel.  Earlier this year we spent a month Japan, then in April spent a few days in Santa Rosa, CA, and then in June attended the N Scale convention in Reno, NV.  We still plan to get in a longer RV trip before the summer is over and then a trip to the eastern US in the fall.

Not so much has been happening as far as construction progress on the layout.  I have been enjoying operating the layout regularly by myself and have been continuing to develop the operations.   I've also been doing some small projects which have been presented here.

I have also taken on a couple of hobby related projects outside of this layout.  First is the design and building of a control system for a pair of 5 track staging yards that are part of a friend's large N Scale, DC controlled double track layout.  These are the control panels that I have built for this project.  They are built using the same methods as I have used for the control panels on my layout.   The painter's tape around the edges is to keep any debris from getting in between the layers and will be removed just before installation.

The track power control circuits that were removed from my layout have been modified to control the turnouts on this project.  I have also built a pair of new diode matrix boards to match this yard's track plan.  

I came home from the N Scale convention with the Ntrak club's 30-year-old, 20 ft staging yard which is in need of an overhaul.  The main part of the project will be to change the electrical track selection from using the Peco contacts to some sealed relays.  This was done on the red line during the last overhaul in 2011 and eliminated any voltage drops on that line. So this time this will be done on the yellow and blue lines.  Then there are a few other minor repairs to make and my deadline for this is early December when we have our next setup.  This is that yard in it's storage configuration along with it's legs sitting under part of the layout.  It's 20 ft long overall in four 5 foot sections.  All of the work to be done is on the 2 end sections and those can be set up in the middle of my train room.

So through the rest of this year, most of the time spent in the train room will be spent on electronics work but I can still do plenty of running on the layout and may even sneak in a few more small layout projects too.

Patching a patch job

During the N Scale convention held in Reno in June, Scaletrains sent out their PS-2 4785 3 bay covered hopper painted for Golden West Service and patched for Cotton Belt (SSW) to everyone who attended the manufacturers breakfast on Sunday morning.  What a nice surprise that was.  Because my wife also attended, we received two of these models with the same number so I wanted to re-number one of them.

I always like to start with a prototype photo and so looked through a bunch online.  The patches on these cars were done in several different ways.  I settled on this one although it is less weathered than the model.  While the stock Scaletrains model has a dark blue background with yellow characters, this one appears to have a black background with white characters.

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First thing to do was to remove the original patch.  I found that with a soaking of Microscale Micro Sol and gentle scraping with an Xacto blade, the original patch comes off fairly easily.

For the black background I used some of the wider stripes from a black stripe set I had.  None of the stripes were wide enough so I doubled the rows to get the width I needed.

This is the area with the black stripes applied.  The black stripe decals were applied in between bunt not over the panel seam to match the prototype photo.  These were then given an application of Micro Sol before the characters were started. 

This is how the model looked after the characters were applied.  As the weathering on these cars was identical, I added just a bit more to this one to make them seem different.  This was a fun project.  Most prototype patch jobs tend to be held to lower standards then original paint jobs so a few crooked decals or mismatched character fonts can be forgiven.  These are great models and I'm really happy to have them on my layout.