I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011

[princessclyne69]

Been a while since I posted an update. I now have modules 10 to 14 lined up, connected and leveled. Still have one missing set of bridge rails, between modules 12 and 13, consisting of one main track and four yard tracks. Yard tracks are code 55, glued down with Barge. The rail joiners on the side I’ve finished do not move, so I have some testing to do. Must have inadvertently glued them with the Barge. BTW that stuff sticks, but not that well, in that a good yank dislodges the rails. They do need to be laid with a track gauge, since the 55 has a narrower rail base so it does not precisely auto-gauge like the code 70 mainline rail does. This yard is the storage yard at Tolerville, which needed to span two modules.

Once this is sorted out, I’ll have a continuous run of about 32 feet. I’m waiting for this to be done before I build modules 7 to 9, which will be Eureka and the Fall River bridge and more curvy track. Just as a refresher, I have modules 1 to 3 connected, and 4 to 6 connected, for roughly 20+ feet in each of those segments. Still need to bridge the gap between 3 and 4, which is where the door is. Only an engineer would start building a railroad at the precise point where the ingress / egress to the room is located.

Scenery work has now progressed beyond the experimental stage. I’ve been using plaster gauze over the plywood, and over the carved Woodland Scenics foam. Most of the landforms are above the track level, other than the one creek with a concrete trestle, and a couple of gullies with culverts in them. Correction, one gully has a culvert, and the other one will once I build it. I set the culvert with a block of foam under it and surrounded it with WS foam putty.

Around Sallyards on module 6 there is a low hill, and I’m trying to plot out how much flat space to leave for the stock pens. Module 10 has a cut higher than the loading gauge, and the area on modules 1 and 2 has a partially finished hill. This represents the area between Durand and Yates Center, and although it is pretty hilly there, I may have overdone it a bit. I’m considering a US 54 overpass which might hide the forced compression a bit.

For roads, I’m trying a subroadbed of strips of 1/4″ plywood, with another 1/4″ or so layer over that. This should match the track height, which is on 1/4″ plywood with Homabed roadbed over that. The top of the plywood is 1/4″ below the module edge, to give room for scenery, and that allows me to jigsaw out parts of it and to add some to the edge so as to follow major changes in the contour. I do this after the foam is in place, and after I whack chunks out of the module to represent low points. Yates Center will be my first town scene, but most of the buildings will be seen from the rear since the town is only visible from the north side.

This spring I’ve been delayed a bit by interruptions such as buying a (prototype) house in Wichita. I’m happy to report that you can hear trains on the consolidated north-south main line through town from the house, just like I can hear the Sufferin’ Pathetic from my Houston house.

I already am planning in my head how to build the Wichita portions of the railroad, but really should try to restrain myself until I get the rest of the Wichita Division finished. I’d like to at least hint at the Garvey Grain and Frontier complexes on the Hardtner line, but I definitely don’t have room to do more than hint. I’ve had the Conway Springs scene about 70% finished for two years, and haven’t been back to that for a while since I haven’t cut the holes in the wall. Or rather, I haven’t finished the holes in the wall. The holes are there, but no roadbed and no lining. Started that during the “winter” when the temp was 40 degrees, but now that it’s 80 outside and probably 100 in the attic, I suppose it’s time to pay more attention. And I’ve been seeing wasps…….

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

Now the four turnouts at the east end of Tolerville yard are all in. Not powered, but then this entire stretch of railroad has no power yet….

This yard still exists. Try to Google Bel Aire, KS, then move southwest toward Wichita and you’ll see a place where K-96 jogs and passes over the yard. (I’m not modeling the highway.) Today the two outer tracks are gone, and in fact the current Google view shows the piles of ties that probably came from the track removal.

The west end of the yard is on a slight curve. The geometry of the train room is such that I’ve had to curve the main line in the opposite direction from life, but directions in the train room are so confusing that most people who see it would never notice. In fact, even I have to stop and think, ok, trains headed for the yard are westbound. so looking in that direction must mean north is to the right.

A few parts of the railroad, as is true of railroads all over Kansas, run truly east-west or north-south. I’m not sure I’ll get to model any of those, so I’m trying to analyze the actual railroad direction and get the road crossings angled properly. Even now, with some plywood strips laid down as the highway sub-base, these are standing out more than the edge-of-module plywood.

Just the other day I figured out I can put an overpass in the middle of the curve on module 10. This area could sort of be like Summit, at the extreme east end of Butler County, except the whole El Dorado thing is missing. El Dorado is going to have to go somewhere else. There was a real underpass and railroad bridge just east of Summit, which is actually on a high point in the highway so it’s really hard to see now that almost all traces of the railroad are gone. But there was another point farther east, on the other side of Eureka, where there was a big sweeping curve and the tangent passed directly under US 54, which could be the inspiration for this. I still want to build the overpass just west of Eureka also, but that module doesn’t exist yet.

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

Last night I lifted module 7 (Eureka). Up til now I have vacillated as to how complete the module frame would be while it was still downstairs on the fabrication platform. But after I’ve been working on the floor of the layout, with the module upside down, to install the basic wiring, I have decided to do more before I bring it up.

Even the clips for the legs I have sometimes installed upstairs, but I’m going to be trying to do more of it on the platform. For one thing, all the tools are upstairs, so I’m bringing drills and drill bits upstairs and down anyway, so not much additional effort to bring the components downstairs and attaching them, then carrying the whole thing up. I even added the terminal blocks at each end to this one, but not the wiring.

I’ve had a couple of 4x to rest the upside-down modules on, but there is more wood upstairs that I could use to raise the thing even farther above the floor to do this kind of work. And, the higher it is, the less far I’ll have to swing it when I get the legs installed and get it upright.

One reason I thought of this is module 7 is 7’6″ or so long, and I’ll be definitely be building more that will be this long. Modules that have curves with an effective length of 6′ or so are not that hard to handle.

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

I’m approaching the end of module building for one part of the layout, since I lifted module 9 today. This one is a simple reverse curve with about 16″ of tangent. Actual inches, or a little more than one full passenger car length. Last one will be module 8, which joins two ends of the railroad and will contain the Fall River bridge. This one will be an adventure, since the two ends won’t be exactly parallel and when I measured everything this afternoon after I lifted the previous module, now I find three or four inches less room than I thought I had. This one will be tight.

Meanwhile, I’ve been back downstairs restarting freight car construction, which had been on somewhat of a hiatus (that’s Latin for big piles of stuff that I’ve lost track of the contents of). There are a number of cars that I pulled off the layout because they needed repair or upgrade, for instance so many Branchline cars that didn’t have Dullcote or weathering, when I laid them in the foam cradle boxes they stuck. I can’t tell you the number of doors I’m going to have to re-glue. A few even have foam crumbs stuck to them, which might even count as weathering.

But I had standardized on the new Kadee couplers, meaning first the 58, then the 148 and the 178 as appropriate. So I’m taking cars that have Kadee coupler boxes, prying them apart and inserting new couplers in them. Works, if you make sure the box goes back together right. Sorry, I don’t screw the coupler boxes on like the nominal best practice is. But I do use brass 2-56 screws in all the truck mounting, so taking the trucks off and getting them back on is no problem.

I had had an Intermountain kit that I’d built as one of the late 40′ PS-1 boxcars with 8′ door, the 39015-39189 series. Undec, I might add. Would have been sometime in the late 90s that I built this model. So since the prototype had 50 ton roller bearing trucks, I’d carved off the truck mounting boss so I could accomodate the Kadee sprung trucks, with their flat mounting pad, since those were the first roller bearing trucks available that were less than 100 ton. Now I’m replacing all those, so I use a piece of 1/8″ tube for a spacer, thread the truck screw into it, then drop that over the truck and screw it back into the body bolster. Not a pretty solution, especially since the spacer has to be very short since if it’s too long, the screw does not bottom out which leaves the car weaving drunkenly down the track. Ask me how I know.

The trucks I used for the replacement for this one are Athearn roller bearing ASF 70 ton trucks, with the 2-3-2 spring pattern. To this day there is no 50-ton roller bearing truck with the 2-2 spring pattern, so I’m sure I’ll replace these trucks yet again someday in the future. Fortunately, the car doesn’t have serious weathering, so new black trucks don’t look too out of place.

My kit Intermountain boxcars all have Kadee coupler boxes, since the Intermountain ones were so crappy. The Branchline ones were always marginal, and half the time something hung up in there (almost all of these were built before the introduction of the Kadee whisker coupler, so they have the folded sheet bronze centering spring) so besides the oversize #5 coupler, they just don’t center right. Fortunately, I gave them all a waiver which I couldn’t do if I had a real car inspector like any serious railroad club would have.

Now, for new Branchline cars, they’re getting the full treatment. I use a Kadee 178 scale pocket, and these I actually do screw in place using real screws. For the Branchline car, you have to cut the frame end back about a tenth of an inch and carve back the corresponding piece of the underframe that’s molded into the bottom of the car. Not nearly as much butchery as you have to do to mount the 178 onto an Intermountain underframe.

I do still have a few old unbuilt, or half built, decorated Branchline cars, but not many. I do have a decent inventory of undecs, and I’ve been able to get a few more from Caboose Hobbies when I see them although it’s really spotty. I’ll worry about that after I work down my existing inventory, though.

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

(Author’s note: even though this is a reply to another post, it does contain some layout construction content.)

In some ways, you could say that glues are my best friend because I can glue something, then let it sit while I file or drill something else. I usually get something done every evening, even if not more than a few minutes’ worth.

I’m doing the framing on the last module for the portion of the layout extending from just outside the Wichita yard to Durand, with all the track down on a module or group of connected modules before I start the next one. That’s at least allowed me to run an engine or two back and forth, or (not and) stick fifty freight cars on the main line to get them out of storage boxes. And, I have a workbench in what we call the archive room, so I can be building more freight cars at the same time. It’s pretty brutal here in southeast Texas in the afternoons outside, where the module fabrication takes place, so after this last one gets lifted I’ll be taking a break from module construction until it gets cooler outside. We’re headed into that part of the summer where the air doesn’t move. And, I’ve promised people a few scans, and of the three PowerPoints I’m working on now one is about the railroad…..

So, with luck, in the train room I can work more on scenery, which my wife constantly reminds me about the shortage of. Four modules have most or all of the styrofoam terrain, and three more modules at least have plaster cloth and green paint, even if there are no trees or bushes yet. Fortunately that part of eastern Kansas never did have much in the way of vegetation other than grass.

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

Module 8 is now on its feet, after being upside down for a couple months. I’d finished it sometime in July, just when it got entirely too hot to do much fabrication outside, but because it was a closure module I needed it in place. Actually, I’d finished each end and left the one-third of it in the middle to be matched up from each end. Good thing, because I could take about eight inches more length for best alignment. Took me a while to drag modules 4 thru 7, which had been chained together by this time, eastward by eight inches. This also made the gap between modules 3 and 4 eight inches longer. I’ve heard this called a mini-mo, but since I lurk a bit on Free-mo I’ve heard the term applied to other, different little bridging devices. But, here, mini-mo it is. I can accommodate perhaps a 42″ or 48″ curve here with respectable tangents, when I get around to designing and building it.

But enough of this, back to module 8. Module 7 is Eureka before the curve, and it’s just a rectangular module with a kink in the east end, the same direction as the prototype on the east side of town. I barely, and I mean barely, have room for a team track on the town side of the station site, and there’s a passing track that won’t accommodate very much. Right now it has track centerlines marked, and some subroadbed glued down, and that’s it. But it’s accessible from both sides.

Module 9 is a big sweeping s-curve with about a 14″ tangent in the middle. West end of it is square and the track is tangent. East end is already partway into the curve headed for the river bridge, about where the now-gone overpass would be if I was modeling it. That leaves module 8, which has some 1/2″ plywood for sides and the remainder is 1/8″ wood, with 3/8″ behind it for strength in the flat stretches and a tight, maybe 12″, radius curve on the primary viewing side, which incidentally is the upriver side. I don’t think hardly any living being ever saw the railroad from this angle, since the dam and the US 54 bridge are on the downstream side, but it’s the configuration I’ll have to live with. Module 9 today has Homabed on it, while I made a trip to Lowe’s over the weekend for more 2x2s because all my legs aren’t long enough — two of the legs each on modules 8 and 9 are bracketed from the 1/8″ plywood because I couldn’t fit 1×2 stiffeners in those locations. Hard to explain, but it’s all (almost) worked out now.

I’ve also figured out where I’m going to cut away one side of module 9 to get some ground level below track level. I have entirely too many cuts and places where the scenery is higher than the track, and I need some the other way round. Besides, I want more opportunities to build those classic MoPac culverts, which in some places are now literally the last evidence that the MoPac was ever there.

Because I can’t get through the room easily with those modules in place, I plan to do the trackwork and the (crude) scenery with them in another room where I can have 360 degree access, as well as easy access to the rest of the railroad, then I’ll slide them back in. I did prove there was enough clearance to get them out past the existing railroad, so I know that works.

After these modules are in place, I’ll build the mini-mo that will also block access to the room where the supplies are, and to the straight line stairway. Duck-under, here we come. As it is, I’m training myself to duck under the finished sections of railroad that have about a 41″ clearance above the floor. Memo to self — get as much of that stuff done while I’m still flexible enough to be ducking under.

Come to Joplin, I’ll show you the prototype. Might even work in some photos of the layout, but those will have to be ad hoc since I’m afraid to stuff any more slides into the Power Point.

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

Not a setback exactly, but for sure a big inconvenience…..

During the Gulf Coast ‘winter’ I often leave the lights on in the train room 24/7. Not all of them, but in the corridor at least, sometimes others. I have been known to only turn the lights off when I’m leaving town for a few days. This is a bad habit, and during the summer I’m conscious of heat buildup (even though these are T8 fluorescents) and try harder to turn them off. I think I got started this way with the T12s in the old train room which had the older style ballasts and often took an hour or two to start if I’d turn them off. The T8s don’t have that problem but….

So I got bit, big time. We had a lightning strike somewhere nearby at 2 am yesterday. I slept through it, like I slept on the floor of the hallway during the last hurricane. My wife, of course, didn’t. I’m aware of the damage that other lightning strikes have done around here, blowing up transformers and a few other things. I think it was a lightning strike that caught my gas meter on fire and almost burned down the house, starting with the train room, several years ago.

This lightning strike knocked out a few things around the house, like the living room radio, but no actual damage. Except…

I’ve blown nine T8 fixtures. All the lights in the corridor, where I’m currently working on scenery, and about half the lights in the other rooms. The storage room has CFLs, no damage there and none to the couple of incandescent floodlights, which of course were all on also.

Took a fixture apart, no of course there’s no reset on the ballast. I’ve seen a site that shows how to check if a ballast is dead, so I should do that next. But, at least I can identify the manufacturer of these ballasts and looks like I can order some online. If I can replace the ballasts, I’m definitely not taking down nine fixtures and replacing them.

Will I learn from this? Ask me later. Was I expecting a lightning strike in January? This is the Gulf Coast, I should have known that anything can happen here.

(Author’s note: I ended up replacing nine ballasts with a GE one, seems to be better than the OEM one in the fixtures originally. I also installed a whole-house surge protector, which mounts on the main junction box. Still lost a few hours of modeling time to this.)

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

Been awhile since I had much to report on layout progress. For one thing, we had a lightning strike that knocked out 9 of the 18 fluorescents overhead. Took a month to replace all the ballasts, but while I was at it, I replaced one of the cool white lamps in each of the affected fixtures with daylight lamps. Big improvement. Interestingly enough, the T12 fixtures in the old part of the layout, the ones I had wanted to replace anyway, were not affected.

Then the storage room, which had been open studs, got sheetrocked. Partially this was because of a critter who had developed a habit of pushing past the insulation and walking through the rest of the attic and eventually demanding to be rescued. As tempting as it would have been to me to decline performing said rescue, the prospect of dead cat in the attic sort of ruled out that option. Sheetrocking the room required moving everything out of it, installing new shelving, and moving it all back in.

So last week I finally got back to module work.

Modules 8 and 9 are being worked on at what I would call an offsite fabrication site (the next room). These two are two S curves, one of which is the Fall River bridge. I’ve finally gotten the roadbed installed, and the non-bridge one will have the ties and rail laid this weekend. The bridge one is having all that done, except for the three-span bridge. If I have any sense, I’ll get the plaster gauze on these two modules at least, before they go into their actual location. Module 7, which is in place, has never had anything beyond subroadbed because the plaster, various tools and styrofoam scraps are on it. This one is the town of Eureka and I can just barely fit a siding and a team track on it, probably really too tightly to be realistic. But that’s a problem for later.

The very first two modules I built were for a storage yard. They sat vacant, until I came up with a good track plan that I could assemble from off-the-shelf turnouts and flextrack. Now that one is coming along well, with four of the seven tracks complete from end to end. Had to wait until this weekend to pick up more rail joiners and code 83 flextrack to finish it, then when it’s done I will connect it to the railroad. Still no power to it, so there’s some soldering in my immediate future.

And last year I cut two holes in the wall to build a connection between old and new. The new part, which was the first segment to be built with CVT ties, had the rail attached with cement. This has essentially failed, so I’ll be going back over it, drilling out the occasional tie and spiking it all down. Then, on the end toward the new part of the railroad, I’ll lay track on the subroadbed which occupies that pair of holes with the tunnel between, then mounting about 20 feet of track on brackets on the wall — and it still will dead end. Believe me, there actually is a grand plan for this somewhere, as soon as I figure out what it is.

Got a chance to pass through the actual town of Eureka last week, and I’d forgotten how high those bluffs are just west of town. Now I know what my scenic divider should look like.

Also got a chance to visit a model airplane and gamer shop in Wichita, Hobbytown USA. They have a good selection of Woodland Scenics, tools, paint and other basics for a modeler. Even had a couple of freight cars and locomotives, mostly Bachmann. But I’m pretty sure that it’s no longer possible to buy a Kadee coupler in Wichita.

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

My railroad space is built as two rooms, since I made use of the existing stud walls and I wasn’t enamored of the idea of my roof falling in just to open up the space to one big room. One is 13′ wide and the other 16′. The narrower room connects to the outside world via a corridor, and the wall between the rooms has two doorways in it, one near each end. I’ve been working in the narrower room, which I’ve called the country room because there’s track in it representing the cities of Yates Center and Eureka, plus a couple of other noteworthy locales and the storage tracks in Sedgwick County that are a mile or so east of the end of Wichita 25th St. yard. The other room is going to have trackage in and around Wichita.

In order to get more operations going, I had built a storage yard which is really temporary trackage. That yard is two modules, both 8′ long, which convinced me that a full 8′ is probably not that good an idea. The storage yard ended up with seven tracks, code 83 flextrack with a wye at the beginning of the yard throat at each end, so there are essentially no through tracks. The center track runs through one leg of the wye turnouts at each end. The trackage is completely symmetrical, although there’s probably no real need for this. So far I’ve stuffed about 120 cars into it. Each end is electrically separate, with insulated joints on each rail at the joints between the two modules.

Because I’d intended to cut through the wall to connect the rooms, I had built the frame for a module that would be a mirror image of module 14, but after bringing the frame up to the room, I had decided that the angle and radius was not exactly what I wanted. So this frame sat on the floor for a year. I did designate it as module 15.

Finally, I realized that I could build out the storage yard and use this ill-designed module to at least connect it to the rest of the railroad, so I could at least run out and back on it. In order to do this, I had to design a mini-mo to go between the two. The mini-mo doesn’t have legs, but is supported by clamps from the ends of the modules adjacent to it. It’s about 32″ long, 3/4″ birch, with 3/4″ endplates only as wide as the ends of the mini-mo, which are slightly less than 6″. The track on it is flextrack, tangent at each end with a 42″ radius curve in the middle. There will be full wiring under this thing, with a ‘cable trench’ to protect it. Just like every problem is a nail if the only tool you have is a hammer, in my case every solution to a problem is something that I can cut on the table saw.

So this weekend I cut the holes in the wall, using an NMRA gauge as a template. Oops – even though I’d measured at least once, the two track centerlines ended up about 3/4″ off. Not to worry, I rotated module 15 a couple of degrees counterclockwise, and glued a couple of small shims onto the end and side of the module where they stood away from the wall, so at least it would be braced. I lined the “tunnel bore” with 1/8″ birch plywood, after installing a floor of 1/4″. I was able to use a piece of roadbed to support the flextrack, which fits between the ends of rail on the module ends.

So far I’ve rolled a few cars over it. My test train includes the longest cars I have, a 75′ pig flat and a 65′ gon, with some 50′ boxcars for eaves-width clearance. Haven’t tried a passenger car yet, which probably will have clearance issues even if these freight cars don’t. There could be 85′ pig flats in my future, but for my time frame there was nothing longer.

I can do some beveling of the walls, if I need to, since the pinch points are at the ends of the “tunnel”. At one point I thought I might put a smaller hole, say with a piece of PVC pipe lining it, under the main bore to accommodate the wiring, but instead I drilled 1/2″ holes in the tabletop on the back side and put the jumpers through there, and left a ‘ditch’ alongside the track to snake the wiring through. There’ll be trees or something to hide the wires from view.

My track construction is CVT tie strip, which is laid right up to the end of the module. The module rails end about 1 inch or so, or slightly more, back from the end and I fit jumper rails between. Then the rail joiners on at least one end, usually both, can retract so as to drop the jumper rails in, which requires carving no more than two ties. Each rail is filed on the end, bottom, sides of the rail foot and beveled slightly on the rail foot, for the jumpers, so they’ll go on easily. I’ve also used about 4″ of tangent at the end of most modules, but a few have a curve that transects the module joint and not even on centerline, which obviously makes them a married set. A few of the other modules could end up being rearranged if I move the railroad, since they’re not exactly in their proper order on the railroad, so I tried to accommodate that. I’m definitely not Free-mo compatible, but I didn’t like several of their standards.

This is actually the second hole I’ve cut in the new walls, but the other one is just now starting to be connected to anything. The old railroad has several holes in the wall, so this is not new to me. At least I was able to avoid one hole I had thought I’d need — that one was described last year.

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

I’ve been playing around with brick streets the last couple weeks. All those county-seat towns in the midwest had lots of them.

Years ago I used flexible, probably vacuum-molded brick sheet, cut on the diagonal since that’s the way most brick streets that I knew were laid. Did ok for a while, but my assembly technique wasn’t good and almost all of them came unglued.

Now I’m trying Walthers brick street, which are molded in segments. Each segment includes a curb attachment strip and is wide enough to be half of a two-lane street with parking. The brick is laid transversely, which I think is common in some places so I won’t complain about that. Each segment ends with the same ‘course’, so when you butt two segments together there is no staggering. I could have trimmed one course of brick off from one end, but I decided not to.

Because of selective compression, I need a narrower street width so I’ve scored and broken each segment for the side streets to 1-5/8″ wide, for a width over curbs of 3-1/4″ (just shy of 12 and 24 HO feet). The drop from each segment goes to add to the width of another full segment to model the main street of town, which is on the edge of the module and facing a wall in this case, but it’ll be obviously wider than the side streets. And I need an alley, which can also be made from two of those drops and can have negative crown since alleys were usually built that way.

There are two different moldings for the street segment, one easy to work with and rare, the other one harder to work with and more common in the Walthers packaging. The easy one has two small longitudinal ribs on the underside, the hard one has three transverse ribs which I have to both sever and trim back. Problem is, I think those are the current production.

Speaking of crown, the pieces that Walthers provides for that purpose are 1/16″ thick (6″ HO), which I thought was excessive, especially considering the narrowing I did. I had some .040 x .438 Evergreen strip, which makes the crown look better and I can use a strip as a spine to glue several segments together for easier handling. So Yates Center will very soon look more like a town, especially after I install a few buildings,

I thought I’d built a few buildings here and there over the years, but it was obvious right away that I didn’t have nearly as many already-built ones as I need even for very small small-town scenes. The Yates Center module, for instance, has one full block of downtown buildings, four-ish blocks of brick side streets, and a couple blocks of dirt street and I’ll already run out of buildings that I could just plop down on the layout. I have photos of the actual current appearance of the town, but I’m inclined to think I can find generic brick one- and two-story buildings. There is an elevator on the west end of town that I can modify from two kits, but that may be as far as I’ll go. Eureka will be easier, since the MoPac station was farther out from the center of town and it was mostly industrial buildings that were visible from the station.

(Author’s note: At the Wichita hobby shop, I found a Tichy kit for a steel water tower, which can be built in several ways, but it’s just about a dead ringer for the Yates Center municipal water works tank, which I’m pretty sure was not a MoPac tank despite being within squirting distance from the main line. So there is some good stuff one can find in unlikely places.)

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

I haven’t posted anything about progress on the railroad lately, mainly because there hasn’t been much. A little scenicking, to the point where three-plus modules are covered in green stuff, but that’s about it. After having either been at conferences or preparing for them since springtime, and building freight cars when it was too hot to do module work, and commuting to Wichita, I was expecting to play catch-up soon.

Bear in mind, I live in Houston. So what’s about to happen here, MoPac-wise? Yep, I get an email in the middle of the night about having a layout tour. Our esteemed convention chair Bob Barnett, who I’ve known for about thirty years, was writing in broad daylight, it was me who was in the middle of the night reading messages.

So I will be open on Sunday morning at the end of the MPHS convention. We’ll have directions available, but I’m not that hard to find. Bear in mind, though, that there’s not much electrical so there will be something ‘running’ but only back and forth for about 20 feet, and the modules that have track on them are still in three disconnected sections. Lots of work in progress, though. And I think almost all of the MoPac rolling stock is on the layout or the storage yards.

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

Now that I’ve had several visitors, a new surge of inspiration has appeared (along with newly-freed-up time).

Module 9 has been moved from the other room and connected to the adjoining module, which still leaves me a gap to allow easy movement around the room. It has absolutely no scenery, but it extends the main line by seven feet and a nice s-curve.

More electrical work, using a neat inset switch-mounting device which is almost impossible to get. For some reason, the website is not well maintained, but if you can actually place an order, the part is really useful. It mounts in a 1-1/2″ hole, which is the right size to pull the wiring through and mount the swich (I use a clothespin to keep the wire loop from falling back through while I’m soldering the switch).

The device I refer to is called the T-cup, and it’s available on line direct. I haven’t seen it stocked by anybody.

And today I finished four #7 turnouts. I have a bad habit of building through a turnout, getting as far as installing the frog and leaving the innards unfinished while I lay more straight rail. So I had two turnouts at the north end of Conway Springs and the two mainline turnouts at Durand that I finished. The ones at Durand represent the end of the line so far, so I was in no hurry to get them completed. Same with the ones at Conway, which are out on the beginning of the Larned line. Model-wise, these turnouts lead back to my hidden yard, so I do have some incentive to get those completed also. It’s now possible to run under power from one end of module 1 to the other end of module 3, then all the way through modules 4 through 6, through the stock siding at Sallyards. The wiring of other modules is under way. Memo to self: try harder to do the jumpers from the power feeds to the rail while the module is free-standing, before it gets built into the layout and becomes easier to crawl under it than to turn it over. I use a crawler stool made for automotive use, so it’s not too bad. The height of the layout is such that I can’t kneel on the floor and reach the underside of the modules (too high), which is good because the knees aren’t suitable for being on the vinyl tile floor any more anyway.

Reference the turnouts, I use CV turnout tie strips, Micro Engineering weathered rail, and Proto87 Stores frogs and points. The tie strips can be cut through to make curved turnouts, of which I have a lot.

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

New posts in this seemingly never-ending series will now be here.

Between the new train room and the old one is a corridor about sixteen feet long which I cut through the attic, taking out several feet of the old railroad in the process. I had visions of connectiong the two by hanging a track from the walls of the corridor somehow.

So now that’s happening. On the Conway Springs sub, I’m extending the track past the point where I’ve cut through the wall. I needed to cut through the wall because the construction contractor put a doorway at that point, and I had to go behind it in order to get the required 30″-ish curvature. Fortunately I can access the attic at that point. So now I have two holes in the wall. with track through them, and I’m in the process of walling in that track with Masonite backing to insulate it from the attic proper. There’ll be photos soon. At this time, that track suspended from the wall will be dead-ending in mid-air until I figure out what to do next.

And it gets crazier. On the opposite wall, I’m extending the track north from Durand but I realized I could build this as a siding, so as to have a place to store a train. So the main track will have a code 55 siding, turnouts at each end, where I can at least leave a train with a runaround possibility. Maybe the other end of this track will go somewhere one of these days.

And I’ve moved module 9 in place, leaving me still with a way to get from one side of the room to the other since module 8 is not ready for prime time. Modules 14 1nd 15, through the wall at the opposite corner of the room, are now officially connected completely wired. Since I can run on into the storage yard, that’s really a big improvement since I happened to use live-frog turnouts and can run directly into any yard track even though I hadn’t done any wiring on those modules. (Yay!)

Oh, back to the the Conway Springs sub. I’d laid this track with Barge cement on the rail base, and it almost all came loose. Perhaps because there is more of a temperature swing there than anywhere else in the room. 😥 So, I have re-spiked close to thirty feet of this track and rebuilt a few turnouts, and now it’s secure. A few humps in the track, but what the heck, it’s a secondary branch line with somewhere around 20 or 30 mph speed restriction at best, and not that much business beyond Frontier outside of grain harvest season.

I hand-laid the track that’s behind the wall on a single piece of subroadbed and slid it into place. Now that’s installed, I’ve had to align it crosswise so it is glued in one or two places and pretty much locked in, so it won’t come out that easily. Not my problem, I suppose.

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

At the end of 2015, there are about 92 feet of main track, handlaid, plus about 50 feet of sidings and spurs, handlaid, in the new part of the railroad. There are also about 50 feet of main track and sidings on the Conway Springs modules, which is mostly flextrack with handlaid turnouts, but not completely in service yet. Soon to be about 50 more feet of main track and sidings on the corridor extension, to be mostly flextrack. Not counting about 80 feet of sidings on the storage yard, flextrack with prefab turnouts.

Still in four disconnected sections, the longest being about 45 feet running length.

Ron Merrick

[princessclyne69]

I now have 15 feet of flextrack suspended along one side of the corridor. The hole in the wall now has the sides attached, and the top loosely set on but not attached. If that keeps down heat transfer from the attic to the train room, I’ll be happy. I’ll post photos soon.

This 15 feet of flextrack is headed toward empty air, for now, but I know I will need to end up at 46″ or so elevation above floor, and it’s about 40-1/2″ in the annex. So I planned for a continuous upgrade, and I’m at about two inches of lift in the fifteen feet. Only problem is — in adjusting the track that goes through the wall, I ended up with a half inch of downgrade, and now this subroadbed is pinned in place with the Masonite I used to wall in the passageway.

Kansas roadbeds have lots of vertical rise and fall, but I didn’t want this particular dip at this particular place, since I may need a lot more rise somewhere, before I’m done.

So I have an idea. I’ll get a very small, maybe 1/16″, extra-long drill bit and drill holes through the Homabed roadbed until I can separate about six to twelve inches of it from the subroadbed, and basically jack it upwards to where the grade is level. Never tried this before, but how hard can it be?* At least I have clear access to it from one side. I’ll be in Wichita tomorrow, so maybe I’ll visit my neighborhood Ace hardware and see what they have.

There’s not just fifteen feet of boring roadbed. I had built a small timber bridge from (ME?) (CVT?) bridge decking parts that I didn’t use in its originally intended position, so now it’s spliced in the middle of this run. Only about two feet of clearance from the bottom of the timbers to the plywood subroadbed, but in central Kansas that’s about all you get sometimes. Fit a piece of flextrack over it by cutting the proper number of ties out, and it dropped in perfectly. Then I just need a road crossing or two, maybe a cattle guard, and it becomes a pretty typical stretch of Kansas track.

Ron Merrick

* I believe these have been the last words of more than one unfortunate soul down through history…….

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