Expanding the signaling, again.

Over the past few weeks I have been working on the signaling on the layout.  First to correct some problems I've had in one of the signal blocks, and then to expand the signaling to the upper helix. The signaling on this layout is just red / green aspects with the actual signals being something I have scratch built myself.  Below are links to some of the earlier posts I have made on the signaling.

July 2021 - Expanding the signaling

July 2020 - My home made searchlight signals

May 2020 - First working signals on the layout

So the first step was to correct a problem I have been having with sensitivity on the Southern Pacific line in the 3rd signal block which includes the Carlin yard.  The NCE detectors I have been using don't have any sensitivity adjustment so I picked up a circuit from Azatrax that does have a sensitivity adjustment to see if that would make a difference.  After installing it, I was able to adjust it to get the results I wanted.  A nice thing about this Azatrax circuit was that the double pole relays were included on the board so I did not have to make up a relay board like I have been doing for the NCE sensors.

The sensors and relay board that had been removed from the 3rd signal block location was installed to provide detection for the upper helix which has become the 4th signal block.  They works fine there, I think because the track arrangement is simpler.

At the top of the upper helix the occupancy for each track is indicated with bi-color LED's that were added to the upper return loop control panel.

At the bottom of the upper helix near the east end of the Carlin yard, a pair of signals indicate the occupancy within the helix.

At the west end of the Carlin yard where the crossover leads to the WP track, another signal is connected to the WP signal block.  In the future I would like to have the signal only be green if the block is clear and the turnout is aligned for the crossover.

Renting a U-Haul in a small town

U-Haul rental trailers and trucks have been part of the American scene since the mid 20th century and nearly everyone has rented one at some point in their life.

Years ago I was making cast resin N Scale U-Haul trailers.  It all started with me making replicas of our Ntrak club's trailer and giving them to the members after finding out that it was a retired U-Haul.  After that I made several different versions of U-Haul trailers shown in the photo below and and also painted and decaled cast resin trucks and vans from Lineside Models.  I sold many of these on ebay but kept a few for myself.

From left to right: 5x8 in the older paint scheme, our Ntrak club trailer was like this one. 6x12 in the older paint scheme.  6x10 in the super graphics scheme that started in 1988.  And 5x8 in the super graphics scheme.

On a club module I had built a U-Haul rental center using several of these trailers plus some of the Lineside Models cast resin trucks.  Rental centers like this are common and larger cities and towns.

In smaller towns where there might not be enough business to support a rental center, various types of existing businesses are authorized U-Haul dealers.  The most common types of businesses that become U-Haul dealers are gas stations and self storage facilities and tool rental centers.  So, on this layout the Sinclair gas station in Carlin has become a U-Haul dealer.  

As I have both the pre and post 1988 versions, I will use the older models in the two earlier eras of the layout and a mix of those plus the 1988 super graphics versions in the 1988 to 1996 era.

Fall 2024 update and layout 10th anniversary

Where did the summer go?  The older I get it seems like the summer months go by faster and faster. Most of what I've been doing on the layout has already been documented in previous posts. Throughout the summer I was working on the buildings for Carlin.

I recently had one turnout motor start acting up.  It is one that had been in operation at the far end of the WP staging yard for almost 9 years.  When I removed it, I could tell that this motor was from 1997 so this was it's 3rd layout.  It sounded like a gear had stripped so I replaced it.  Also had one point rail break loose on one of the hand laid turnouts and that was easily fixed.  I think it's the first one and I have been happy with how well they have held up.

Recently my friend Clif was over to return the throw tie fixture I had loaned him.  The throw tie fixture was something I made to help me make stronger throw ties for my fast tracks turnouts.  Link HERE to the post on that.  Clif took the idea a bit further and had PC board throw ties made and gave me a sheet of 32 of them.

The timing of Clif's gift of throw ties was great as I am considering an expansion of the layout and will need to build several more turnouts.  Just in the early planning stage of this and I'll post more details as they develop.  Another change I am considering is to convert the existing area along the front edge of Carlin into a general transload facility.  Right now it just handles chemical tank cars and I would like to be able to have a greater variety of freight cars in use on the layout.  The area would be extended over the control panel housing as shown with the blue outline in the photo below.

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the layout.  I started the layout room the year before that shortly after retirement.  At that time, I thought if I got 10 years out of the layout I would be happy.  There was always the possibility that my wife and I would decide to move after retirement but we are still here and don't really have any plans to leave.  I have been happy with this layout and amazed at how far it's gotten.  But I'm not done yet as there are still more things I want to do with it and of course there is always something that needs fixing.

A gas station for Carlin - Part 4

It has taken over a month but this is the 4th and final installment on this project.  It has been an enjoyable project and I have taken my time with it. Being satisfied with the interior details, I installed the roof decking and the roll roofing material that came with the kit.   After the roofing material was installed, I painted it a dark green.

I did some more work on the pump island, adding water and air hoses made from .020 brass wire on each end. No smoking decals were added the posts, and more details with paint and decals were added to the pumps. 

One of the things I remembered about the gas station I worked at in high school was the tub of water they had to find the leak in a tire so I included something like that seen here as the yellow tub at the corner of the building next to the Coke machine.  I also added the hoses that would ring a bell whenever a car rolled over them.  Those were done with some small black wire.

The roof over the pumps was just large enough to mount the large Sinclair signs that came with the decal set.  The roof got some plumbing vents over the rest rooms and a TV antenna.  The exterior walls got a light weathering using brown detail wash and the roof got a light dusting with weathering powders. 

The sign on the pole is made from decals that came with the set.  The sign with the prices was made as a paper sign printed out from the computer and glued to a scrap of styrene.  The prices are about what I remember paying in the mid to late 70's before they just about doubled in 1979.

So with the completion of the gas station, all of the structures along Main Street have been finished.  There will always be little things that can be added and there are still things I want to do with the rail yard.

A gas station for Carlin - Part 3

Welcome to part 3 of this saga of me building a gas station.  The summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I worked just about full time at a gas station so I am drawing on my memories of that summer to add details to this gas station scene taking advantage of the height of the layout and viewing angle.

My plan is to have at least one of the garage doors open and to light and detail the interior of the garage.  Some of the details seen this this photo such as the tool chests, locker, compressor, and tire rack are scratch built from scraps of styrene. The lift, tanks, and the floor jack are details left over from other kits.

The office area of the building is also getting some interior details.  The chairs are from a Faller set and the remaining furniture is cobbled together from scraps of styrene shown here before being painted.  The bathroom area will not be seen and will serve as the place for the wires that power the lighting to go through.

When I add lighting to buildings, I often use left over locomotive LED boards from the many DCC installations I have done.  In this case, I am using the just the boards replacing the original LEDs and resistors to get just the right amount of lighting.  Surface mount LED's are being used because of their small size.  The garage gets two LEDs mounted on a scrap left over from a kit.  This assembly will rest on small blocks attached near the tops of the walls.  One of these is visible in the upper right hand corner in the photo above.

Here are all the assemblies with the lighting now added to the structure and viewed from the bottom.  With the stiffer 22 gauge wire going through the hole in the bench work I decided to add a small magnet in the bathroom section that will mate with a washer on the floor to stabilize the structure within the perimeter.

And here is the structure assembly set in it's place before the roof sections were added.  The small 30 gauge decoder wires are soldered to the PC board in the upper left corner of this photo and that board has a pair of 22 gauge wires that will connect to 12 volt DC power under the bench work.

And here is the effect of the interior lighting.  The pump island has now also been finished and glued to the base.  Next will be installing the roof and this project will be almost finished.

A gas station for Carlin - Part 2

Basic assembly of this kit has been quick and easy.  The pieces cut out easily from the sheets and the tabs and grooves fit perfectly.  I used my flat sheet metal fixture along with some magnets to hold the pieces nice and square while the glue dried.  This fixture is something I made 35 years ago and has been a great tool used for many structure projects.

One change I did make was to remove the large square columns from the island that support the overhang and replace them with styrene rods.  The large square holes that were on the bottom of the overhang section were covered with a styrene strip and holes matching the round columns were drilled in it.

Once the basic structure was assembled, it's exact position was determined on the base and a perimeter of .040 strip and sidewalk was glued to the base.  This will hold the structure in place but it will still be able to be lifted out.  As I was installing the sidewalks along the front and one side I realized that I will need to adjust the height of the outside doors to the bathrooms and office.

The building got painted a gray color on the inside and white on the outside.  The trims will be red and I am waiting for the red paint to arrive.  I am going to wait to install the roof sections as that will make it easier to add details on the inside.

Next I painted the surrounding area to match the nearby road.  In this photo the paint was still wet and when it dried, the color did match.  The floor inside the structure is another shade of gray and a coat of gloss finish to simulate the type of polished concrete floors found in gas station garages.

My local hobby shop did not have the decals I wanted for this project so I ordered them directly from Microscale.  I got a set for Sinclair and another set which is a general gas station set.  With decals in hand I started to make the signs that are separate items that will be added to the scene later.

 

 

Converting old smart phones into Wi-Fi DCC throttles

Recently my wife and I both got new smart phones.  Our old phones were too old to have any trade in value so I decided to try using them as additional Wi-Fi DCC throttles as I have really liked using Wi-Throttle-Lite app to run the layout.  

After transferring data to the new phones I installed the Wi-Throttle Lite app on the old phones made a custom wallpaper for each of them.  The Wi-Throttle Lite app is the only one available on the first page with any others being on the next page in case they are needed.  The camera and other features still work on these phones after the phone services are deactivated. 

Next I wanted a holder for the phones at the layout.  I followed the design I had used for the Digitrax throttles using scraps of tempered hard board.  A link to that project is HERE.  These phone holders also got a hole in the bottom for the charger cord and a pair of standoffs cut from 1/2 inch plywood scrap so the phone is held up enough not to damage the charger cord.

After priming and painting the assembly was mounted to the staging yard fascia just as the Digitrax throttle holders are.

A gas station for Carlin - Part 1

There was this one lot left on Main Street that I have planned to have either a gas station or grocery store.  I had considered doing a gas station with the garage being converted into a convivence store but then realized that is a more recent trend and might not fit in with my mid 70's to mid 90's era. 

I had this gas station kit left over from an estate.  It looks like a well designed laser cut wood kit that I have been looking forward to building.  But it seemed to me to be a different style of building than most gas stations I have seen so was not sure how it would fit in.

As I have done with the other buildings on this layout, this scene will be built on a removable base made from fiberglass reinforced plastic sheet.  It was verified that this building would fit on this base and leave enough room for the surrounding scene.

So, a gas station it would be.  But what brand, or should it be an independent?  After looking through some photos of gas stations on the internet, I found inspiration in this photo of a Sinclair station housed in a smaller, but similar style of building as my kit.  This photo will also serve as a guide for paint colors.

Microscale makes a nice decal set for Sinclair gas stations.  I'll be making a trip to the local hobby shop to look for it and if they don't have it, I will have to find it on line. 

Layout visit - Silicon Valley Lines

On Saturday, August 24th I visited the Silicon Valley Lines HO Scale layout in downtown San Jose.  I have wanted to visit this layout for some time but somehow never had gotten around to it until now.  A few weeks ago I received an announcement for an open operating session and signed up. 

This club alternates between modern and transition eras which they define as being after or before the start of Amtrak in 1971.  For this session they were in the transition era.

This layout is using plenty of technology, some of which is new to me.  It was all DCC using the NCE system with boosters and many power districts.  They are also using LCC for some of their turnout and signal controls.  The layout is almost fully signaled.

What was different was the fact that some of the operators were remote.  A couple of the trains running had camera cars in front of the locomotive so the remote operator could see where they were going.  I was told that one of these remote operators was in the UK and that the dispatcher was in New York.  On one of my jobs I even made an opposing meet at a siding with one of the remotes.

During my visit I ran three jobs.  First was a short freight train using a pair of Santa Fe GP7's in zebra stripe as power.  Next was a longer passenger train that ran over most of the layout.  As I was using my phone as a throttle, I did not get any photos while running but below is a photo of the passenger train's power that I took at the end of the run.  This club uses Chicago & Northwestern colors as the home road, removing the C&NW logo and adding their own SVL decals.  Both of these sets of locomotives had sound decoders and both runs went really well.

The third job I ran was to take 9 cars from Bayshore yard and load the car float with them.  While the first two jobs were on the main line with signals and turnouts under dispatcher control, this train was a local on a secondary line so I also controlled the turnouts.  In several places such as this around the layout there are small touch screen computers mounted with track diagrams programmed into them.  This was something else that I've seen in videos but had never used before.  I soon got the hang of it though.

It was a fun time and good to meet some modelers from another scale in our area.  The members here were quite welcoming and helpful to guest operators such as myself.  This club has a website, it's at https://siliconvalleylines.com/   There is also a professionally done TSG Multimedia video about this layout on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeoH92UYrrg

Weathering a couple of Conrail covered hoppers

In the operating scheme of the layout, Diamond Plastics in Battle Mountain receives car loads of plastic pellets from the east coast.  I found that I had a shortage of eastern railroad's covered hoppers in the correct era.  I did have a pair of Delaware Valley cylindrical covered hoppers in Eire Lackawanna that I felt were too old to fit in my 1975 to 1995 layout era.  Then realizing that the Eire Lackawanna was adsorbed into Conrail in 1976, I started to do a little research on these cars and found photos of these type of cars being in service with Conrail at least into the late 1990's.  In this photo below, an old PRR keystone logo can be seen showing through just to the left of the Conrail logo.

So, the Conrail era of 1976 to 1999 fits right in with my layout and they inherited many of this type of freight car from their predecessor roads including the Erie Lackawanna.  Seems the Pennsylvania and Eire Lackawanna cars were this mineral red color but some later were painted light gray by Conrail. The road numbers assigned to these cars by Conrail seemed to range from about 884500 to 884950.  For these cars I want to model them before any re-painting had been and just patched with the new Conrail road number. 

The first step I took in weathering these cars was to fade the "Erie Lackawanna" road name in varying degrees.  I used a soft eraser pencil dipped in Microscale Micro Sol and rubbed off the lettering part of the way.  Photo below shows before and after.

The next step was to use black stripe decals to black out the existing Eire Lackawanna road number.  I did this with some black decal stripe.  When this had set, I then brushed some gloss finish over it to make it extra secure when working with the road number decals that will go on top of it. 

 I could not find any photo of a car known to have been a former Eire Lackawanna car so the road numbers chosen were from within the range of similar Conrail cars that I had seen in photos.  The lettering for the road numbers was taken from a Microscale white numbers and letters set.  I also added a data panel from another Microscale set.

Next, I used black detail wash to weather the car bodies.  Once I was satisfied with the wash effects, the car bodies were let dry over night and I took a look at the trucks that I had pulled off of them.  They were Micro-Trains older era types with pizza cutter flanges so I pulled out 2 pairs of roller bearing types from my stash as these would be more prototypical for the layout's era.  The wheels on these had low profile flanges which I prefer for use on my code 55 track.

The wheels were removed from the trucks and the trucks were places into a holder that had made a few years ago for specifically for spraying Micro-Trains trucks.  After first spraying a adhesion promoting primer, I sprayed the truck side frames with Mission Models railroad tie brown.  After that had dried, I sprayed both the trucks and the car bodies with Testors Dulcoate lacquer.   

After installing the new trucks, both cars were given a test run around the layout and preformed perfectly.  So, two freight cars that had been sitting in the "to be sold" box and now active on the layout and are among my favorites. The two photos below show 884534 on the siding at Diamond Plastics and an empty 884590 in the yard at Carlin waiting for the next eastbound manifest to pick it up. 

Chipping away at the box of N Scale vehicle kits

Like many of us in N Scale, I have a collection of unfinished motor vehicle kits that have accumulated over the years.  I keep them in a box about the size of a large shoe box.  Most are cast resin but some are metal and there are also bags of finished plastic European vehicles that had been given to me.  Every once in awhile I dig through this box picking out a few to do something with.  

With the town of Carlin developing on the layout, I was looking to populate the town with some more vehicles that would fit in the layout's 1970's and 1980's era.  Here is the most recent batch of cast resin vehicle kits that I have finished.  A classic 50's era station wagon and a red 65 Ford Mustang.  These will be perfect for this layout.

The 63 Chevy fire engine is from a Lineside Models kit.  The yellow pickup, I think it's an early 70's GMC and is something I got on ebay.  The white 64 Chevy Impala is also from Lineside, my dad had one of these but his was blue.  The gray 2000 Chevy Silverado pickup was also from ebay.  Too modern for my layout's era but I had one like this for 17 years so had to have a model of it.