DCC sound my way - Part 1

While I have DCC decoders installed in nearly all my locomotives only 1 has a sound decoder.  It's this Atlas SD7 which has an early MRC sound decoder.  The frame was milled to be able to get the speaker in.  Something I really did not like was how with any brief interruption of pickup from the track, the sound would cut out then start up again, plus the sound quality was not very good with the tiny speaker.  So this loco ended up sitting on a siding with it's idling sound running.  

At some point the technology of electrical capacitors developed into what are called a "super capacitor" which has a large amount of capacitance in a small size.  Adding such circuits to a DCC sound decoder installation eliminates this problem of the sound cutting out but it's still a challenge in N scale to find room for decoder, a speaker, and a super capacitor circuit.

For my next attempt at DCC sound, I chose to build a sound car.  This was built around an Atlas covered hopper car and used a Soundtraxx decoder and a "keep alive" super capacitor circuit from Train Control Systems.   Here is a LINK to a short Youtube video demonstrating this project.  And here is another LINK to this project on my DCC blog.

I ran this sound car as the first car behind the power after programming it to the same DCC address as the locomotive consists.  Sometimes when switching cars at either Battle Mountain or Carlin, I would park this car on a siding and with the address again programmed to match the locomotive doing the switching. This car worked well in both of these applications but the sound quality still left something to be desired.  An unexpected take away from the experience with this sound car was that I realized I got the most enjoyment from the locomotive sound when I was doing switching.

When I installed the grade crossing signals in Carlin, I used an 8 ohm, 3 was speaker that I found on Amazon for about $6.00 and was small enough to fit into a house that was next to the grade crossing.  Here is a LINK to the post I made on that project.  I really liked the sound quality from this speaker.

About the time I had bought the Soundtraxx decoder I had also purchased a Digitrax SFX0416 sound only decoder with the idea to build a sound dummy locomotive with a Kato SD40.  I never got around to this project but one day was wondering if this decoder could drive one of the 3 watt speakers and how that would sound.   The decoder was able to drive this speaker and sounded better than anything I've heard from a speaker in an N Scale locomotive.  So it was decided that I would use this sound decoder and this speaker as a stationary setup to add sound to the Carlin yard switcher.  The next post will cover the details of how I did that.

Glitter Gulch moves to Carlin

Over 5 years ago I modeled a roadside casino in Winnemucca.  It was made from a kit bashed building kit and included a Miller Engineering animated sign.  Here is a photo from that post in February 2019.

Problem with that scene was that it is in an out of the way location and the sign was not very visible to operators and visitors to the layout.  My version of downtown Carlin is somewhat freelanced but based on some buildings that had been there at one time.  I decided that one building would be a casino and moved the sign to this new building.

The building is a Design Preservation Crestone Credit Union kit.  A hole was cut into the roof of the building and a scratch built rooftop structure was added for the electronics that run the sign.  The Miller Engineering sign was mounted on the front of the building over the center 2 second floor windows.

The sign's electronics were mounted to the inside of the roof of the rooftop structure.  The switch on the circuit board sticks out  of an opening on the back so is accessible to turn the sign on or off.

For now the ground floor is empty but the building and it's base are removable so in the future I plan to add lighting and details to the interior.

Spring 2024 layout update

After a long wet winter, spring is finally here.

Some of the layout projects that I've been working on have been presented here as posts of their own but here are a few other things I have been doing.

Finally finishing the GHQ crane kit for the scrap yard in January motivated me to add some final touches to the scrap yard and call it finished,  One of my friends from the Ntrak club I belong to sent me a weathered Golden West gondola to add to my fleet of cars that will service this industry.

After finishing the messy scenery work on the east end of Carlin, I gave the layout a good cleaning and have been returning to operations.  Some additional covered hoppers were purchased for the Halliburton barite processing plant in Battle Mountain including a pair of the new Micro-Trains PS2 models.

Additional car cards for these new cars and more freight waybills for the industries that have been recently added to the layout.

We have already had a couple of Ntrak layouts this year and I had modules in both of them.  The most recent one was at an air museum and included the AsiaNrail extension.  This layout was set up for 4 days. 

And I have been continuing to work on structures in Carlin and will be posting on some of that work individually in the near future.