2018 photos

I haven't been working on the layout too much lately. Though, I have been working on bits and pieces here and there.We've had a very hot summer and it has often been too warm in the garage to work on the layout.

The heat also caused some expansion of the rails. All my rails are soldered together for electrical conductivity. Because the rails had no room to expand they kinked in several places around the layout. It wasn't really a problem, however, I noticed that some of my more temperamental rolling stock started having more derailments.

Now that the temperature has returned to normal, the trains are behaving themselves again and operations are more enjoyable.

At the start of each year, I usually take some photos of the layout. I often use helicon focus to stack several images together to get a greater depth of field. I've been working on a few today so here they are.

Leviathan hauls are passenger train out of the redwood grove and into Erewhon Tunnel

Leviathan hauling her passenger train through the redwood grove

A family waits for their passenger train.

Firefly simmers in Erewhon yard under the silent mountain peaks.

New headlight for Leviathan

Leviathan is the largest locomotive on the Thoroughfare Gap Railroad. She is a Baldwin ten wheeler, used in heavy freight and also in passenger service. The model is a Bachmann 4-6-0 with Tsunami sound. I have backdated the model a bit with some simple modifications. I repainted it, moved the Westinghouse pump to the driver's side, gave it a wood cab, removed the generator and changed the headlight to an oil burning model.

The headlights in these models are lit by an LED mounted inside the boiler. The light is transmitted to the headlight by a light bar. This light output from this arrangement was always too dim for my liking, and the LED that came in the locomotive gave a cool white light.

I replaced the light with a 1.8mm warm white LED. I drilled out the headlight and mounted the LED inside the headlight box. This required some minor modification of the frame to accommodate the wiring. I think the final result was worth it.  Let me know what you think.

Leviathan simmers outside the Erewhon engine house.

Erewhon blanketed with snow

Erewhon is the operating staging yard on my Thoroughfare Gap Railroad. It is occupies a set of shelves adjoining the layout.

I really wanted to try modelling a snow bound scene for something different. For my layout, Erewhon is located in the mountains, a staging point between the rest of the outside world and the my Thoroughfare Gap Railroad. It has a small engine house and a turntable for looking after the locomotives.

I need to add some more conifer trees at various points in the scene but otherwise I feel it is largely complete. I have thought about including a coaling tower and water tower but I don't really have room. I may include these on the backdrop at some stage 'in the distance'.

 

A mirror adds to the illusion of distance. The ties under the turnouts had rotted out, the track gang replaced them with new ones.

 

The engine  house at Erewhon. This a laser cut kit made locally using plans from makecnc.com.

Blog resurrection

It's been over a year since I have posted anything at all. That does mean I've not been working on the railroad.

One of my last posts was about about staging yard which was about to be sceniced, I'll post some photos of that soon.

I've also been making redwood trees, troubleshooting derailments and replacing trucks and wheelsets on older rolling stock.

More to follow soon.

I'm going to try to make a blog post every two weeks. It may just be short and sweet but it will make a consistent record of the layout.

Luke

Erewhon extension

I've finally started the final extension for the town of Erewhon  (nowhere backwards). To date Erewhon has been a temporary staging module with three tracks and a turntable. It is turning into a more permanent section built into the shelving unit that sits next to the layout.

It features a long passing track and four yard tracks as well as short caboose track, turntable with three locomotive tracks off the turntable.

The plan is to model it as a snow bound scene but I'm unsure how snowy as of yet.there will be some low relief buildings along the backdrop.

The intention is for it to operate like a very basic yard or like an operating staging yard where all equipment can remain on the layout and won't require handling.

The railroad

The Thoroughfare Gap Railroad connects the settlements of Teresaton and Cass with Erewhon (staging) which goes on to interchange with the Union Pacific transcontinental mainline. I haven't settled on an exact locale for the meeting point which does give me some modelling license. I've found it easier to not pick an exact location as it allows to me model scenes that I want to include. 

The layout started life 9 years ago as a 1200x2000mm (4x6.5 feet) table layout which focused on rugged, arid canyon scenery. To begin with it was more of a rail fanning layout with some switching interest at the end of the line. I also enjoy the bush and mountains, so when I discovered the desire to operate my railroad in a more realistic point to point manner I found the space to build an extension around the walls, essentially using the table layout as a double sided peninsula. The extension models both a deciduous and redwood forest in seperate scenery areas and includes a logging area and sawmill as well as the small town of Cass. Presently the trains travel out onto a temporary staging area representing Erewhon (nowhere spelt backwards). I plan to build a more permanent section that would model some of Erewhon and I'm interested in exploring making all of part of this a snow scene.

Two lumberjacks pose the stump of a recently felled redwood. 

The line coming into Teresaton. A cattle drive approaches the coral.

Teresaton's main street

The first extension, the logging area and redwood forest before the forest.

The Thoroughfare Gap Railroad

Currently the layout has been eight years in  the making, and has grown from a 4x7 foot design to a point to point style that travels  around two of the garage walls. I've learnt a lot in that time and certainly the vision for the layout has continued to evolve.  As they say,it is never finished. 

I started this railroad in my mid 20s after having been away from model railroading since my early teens. A lot had changed, access to information on the Internet for one, and online shopping meant accessing ho equipment of American prototypes was a whole lot easier and faster (I live in New Zealand). DCC and on board sound we're the norm and there were a lot more TOC19 (turn of the 19th century) themed products available.

I was bitten by the early rail bug when I was younger, my father was interested in the history of the American Civil War and the Old West and passed his fascination of this time period on to me. He paints 25mm war gaming figures and has painted all the figures for my layout and some of the structures.

My first steam locomotive was a Bachmann 4-4-0 model of 119 I received for Christmas as a child, a model I still owned until just recently. The roster now stands at five operating steam locomotives plus Thomas the tank engine for the kids.

I've recently converted the layout to DCC using a Sprog and an old laptop and have equipped all the locomotives with tsunami sound decoders. This has been an exciting addition and has seemingly expanded the operating potential of the layout. The layout is small and being able to run two locomotives easily on the same track without tricky block control has meant I can fit in more train movements.

The real benefit I've seen of converting to DCC is when visitors come to the layout. Most of my visitors are not model railroaders and are intrigued to see the "train set" as they call it. Being able to hand them a smart phone throttle, give them a few pointers and away they go really engages them. Before hand they had to understand the blocks and power districts of the DC block control, now they just run. The controls are simple and straightforward. I will through the switches for them to begin with but most pick it up in five minutes or so and I can leave them to it and start to run to other train movements. It seems to me that a smart phone is something we are all familiar with, and all the buttons actually say what they do, there is no guessing what F11 does as you might with a specialist DCC throttle.

I held out against DCC as long as I could. I've been trying to building this layout on a budget using what I had and for a large part that has been a successful paradigm. But when I purchased the two sound value new tooled 4-4-0's by Bachmann I new I had to do something. When they arrived the chuffing was out of sync (you'd wonder why that couldn't be set right at the factory) and I starting looking for another layout owner with DCC to change the CVs for me. I could only find a train store 40 mins down the road that offered DCC installs. I then found the Sprog, and figured for NZ$100 I could do all my own programming (which was good seeing as I had more decoders on the way for my other engines). I already had some old smart phone handsets and the old house laptop had also been superseded by a desktop machine so it could be relegated to the layout room.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and I wish I had converted sooner!