December photos and YouTube Video

I haven't updated my blog in quite a while. My work got exceptionally busy during August and time has been quite precious. When I have found a few moments, I've simply enjoyed running trains. Honestly, the current keepers and decoders in these locomotives make driving them so much fun.

Everything in New Zealand typically shuts down for a couple of weeks over Christmas and so I've enjoyed the first couple of days of my holiday tinkering on the layout, making a video and taking some photos.

One of my readers, Alex, requested a shot of Jupiter in the snow at Erewhon. I hope this photo was what you were after Alex.

Jupiter in Erewhon

More Jupiter

Firefly leaves Cass

119 heading toward the cut

Mountaineer at Teresaton. The fence on the left is new. More about that later.

I also spent a little time creating a video of Griffin pulling out with a heavy train on frosty rails. I love hearing steam locomotives struggling for grip, but there isn't really a way to capture this in our modelling. The Tsunami 2 decoders do have a wheel slip sound effect, which sounds great. But of course, it cannot simulate actual wheel slip. That is a function physics, and we spend a lot of time weighting our models to eliminate wheel-slip!

I set up a scene with Griffin and a few cars. Another locomotive was attached to the rear of the train to provide some resistance. I used the second locomotive, which was muted, to control the actual train speed. I used the switching mode function on Griffin, which overrides the momentum feature. This meant Griffin could strain away at the head of the train, slipping her drivers and creating a good show.

Unfortunately, I accidentally uploaded the raw footage instead of the finished video, so I deleted it and have uploaded it again. My apologies to those who left comments on the original video, they were deleted when I removed it. I hope the final product is a more interesting watch!