Spring 2025 Layout Update

Since returning from Japan in January I have been mostly working on my modules in preparation for the 2025 edition of the Hiller Aviation Museum's Trains and Planes exhibit.  Our part of this went from the 9th to the 13th of April.  We had a real good turnout with the Ntrak club and it was great to visit with all the guys.  And I ran a lot of equipment that I don't run on the home layout.  Here's a shot of our Ntrak layout with the AsiaNrail layout being behind it.

Since last fall I have been trying out Vallejo paints and like them.  They are quite reasonably priced if purchased in sets on Amazon and I also found an ebay seller that sells them individually at a reasonable price.  So in February I bought a rack specially made to hold these paints.

The Vallejo paints don't have the same colors that we are used to with Floquil paints which were more focused on model railroads.  I discovered that Model Railroad Hobbyist which is an on line magazine I follow had color matching charts showing how many parts of each Vallejo paint to use to get a close match to a Floquil color.  So I printed all the pages and have them hanging on the inside of one of the cabinet doors where I keep some of my painting supplies.

In late March my friend Roger visited the layout and we ran a couple of jobs while letting the glue dry on a new Ntrak module he is building.   He is experienced with layout operations and one suggestion he had was more uncoupling picks and holders around the layout so that is something I'll be working on.   

A new locomotive was recently introduced the layout.  This Atlas GP35 was given to me last year and I finally got around to installing a DCC decoder in it.  It was custom painted many years ago by another friend from the Ntrak club who has since passed away.  I could not find any evidence that the prototype number 644 ever made it into UP service but it will on this layout.

Organizing operations

 As I am interested in having a few friends over for operating sessions in the future I thought it would be useful to start simulating some operating sessions to run by myself

I have always read that staging trains for an operating session can be a large chore.  Yes, moving many freight cars around to specific locations to stage everything takes a bit of time but what I was having a hard time figuring out was how to organize the flow of trains.  I have 3 staging yards and the idea is to be able to move trains from an occupied position in one yard to an unoccupied position in another yard.  My first step was to make track diagrams using the same graphics that I used for the staging yard's control panels and assign a number to each track.

Next I made up a magnet board from a piece of sheet metal I had laying around.  This was mounted to the bottom of the DC test setup that I keep on hand to test DC equipment.  Enlarged versions of the track diagrams were pasted to this.

The magnetic "trains" were made from sections of .040 x .125 styrene strip with labels pasted on them and small magnets on the back side.  The train symbol is printed twice, once in each direction so it can be easily read from both orientations. There are two of these for each train, the yellow ones are to trains that have not started their run and the blue ones are for the trains that have completed their run.  In some cases the same train is used once in each direction and when it arrives at the first destination, a yellow one with a different train symbol is placed in the new location.

>

By running through the exercise on the magnet board, I was able to put together a job list showing where each train departs and arrives both in theory and actual location number.

From this list I have been running the 17 jobs listed in sequence by myself, fine tuning it as necessary.  Hope to have a few of the guys over sometime this summer to actually run the layout together.