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.