Oldie but Goodie???

Here is a project that I am completing after a 20+ year hiatus.



This Main Line Models kit was "old school" when I bought it sometime in the mid eighties. The only pre-formed parts in the kit were the scribed and printed sides and ends, scribed wood for the floor and the end blocks for the body - everything else in the box was stripwood, wire, a few castings - and a single a sheet of instructions.



Even the roof was made up of seven individual pieces of wood; an addendum sheet in the box declared that the former milled roof had been replaced with seven pieces which had to be glued up to form the roof. Then each roof rib had to be measured, cut, formed and glued down; each is made up of three pieces.



The same with the undercarriage. Each piece had to be measured, cut and glued together; center sill, side sills and all of the stringers.



In my initial enthusiasm for assembling this kit I completed the roof and undercarriage, including the painting, the floor, the ends and one side; complete with outside bracing. At that point I estimated that I did not have enough "T" section stripwood to finish the other side; the kit went back in it's box "until I can order more stripwood" and there it languished for over 20 years.

Recently I resolved to finish this kit and I'm almost there. I did, in fact, have enough T-section stripwood to finish; although some other sizes were short. Somewhere along the way all of the grab irons were lost (if they were ever there, I cannot remember); so I have some replacement corner grabs on order which will let me finish the roof walks.

On the remaining work I'm going to cheat a little. Rather than use the couple of brake system castings and wire provided, I'm going to see if I can adapt an Intermountain brake set - all for better appearance, of course. And I'm going to use Intermountain ladders on the car sides and ends instead of the grab irons. Every photo of an OB wooden boxcar from the late steam era that I can find shows ladders instead of grabs. I believe that there was a change in the law at some point.

The Curved Turnout

April's project was a curved turnout for the downhill (eastbound) track on the Cheat River grade. This switch is not shown on the track plan as it is an afterthought conceived as the layout was building. It will lead a track into the area next to the water heater where there will be either a coal prep plant or the Alpha Portland Cement factory. Neither facility actually exists (or existed) on the Cheat River grade; although the cement plant is across the river (approximately opposite the Tray Run Viaduct) on the former M&K subdivision of the B&O.

Was a curved switch necessary in this location? No. But the diverging route of a conventional straight-legged turnout would not have fit smoothly into the 68.5" radius curve of the main track here. I decided on a curved turnout because later on I would need some elsewhere; so it seemed like an opportunity to give it a try.

Construction of the turnout started with a template that I drew in TurboCad. It took some doing to figure out how to draw this in TurboCad. The template shows the gauge lines and the centerlines of the two routes. I constructed and printed turnouts with curved legs ranging from 68.5"/153" to 68.5"/168.5". The latter switch seemed to fit the geometry of the space best and the larger radius was a gentle curve. Surprisingly the frog angle measured out to about a #6.



The template printed out on my Epson 13"x19" printer if I glued two sheets of ledger size paper end-to-end to make an 11"x33" sheet and using custom size on the printer. Staples would have printed it out for $2.98.

Here's the beginning of the turnout with the stock rails in place. (I should have cut, soldered and spiked the frog first, but I got ahead of myself).



Now the frog is in place.



Closure rails, wing rails and guard rails have been added and a truck runs smoothly.



Close-up of the points.



Close-up of the frog, guard rails, wing rails (yeah, yeah the wing rails are different length - doesn't bother me, does it bother you?). After soldering the guard rails in place and filling the gap with solder, I found that I had a Dremel cutter that cut a flangeway to the perfect width and depth; although it threw chips of solder all over the place.



Straps soldered in place, ready to go to the layout.



Here's the initial fitting on the ties and roadbed. I glued the ties on before spiking.



Here's the throwbar and the head blocks. The throwbar was made out of perforated printed circuit board material (perfboard); I know that I had solid PCB material somewhere, in fact, I had found it just a few weeks before; but for the life of me I don't know what I did with the bag of it. The perfboard will need reinforcement. I also made another mistake here, do you notice it? In my haste (enthusiasm?) I forgot to pre-drill a hole through the roadbed for a switch machine. I'll have to use a Caboose Industries manual machine in this location.



Ties finished, ready for spikes.



The critical center section of the turnout spiked down. Note the marks where the gaps will be cut around the frog.



Here are two of the gaps cut and then filled with styrene ACC'd in place and filed to the rail profile. I fill all of my gaps that are for electrical isolation only. In this case I wanted there to be little chance that the gap would shift over time thereby mis-aligning the rails at this critical point.



Finished. All that remains is to solder on power feeders, paint the ties and weather the rail.

Freebies!!

One of the things that I did during my "armchair" modelling phase was collect equipment and other items to eventually build my railroad. Some of the things that I collected were graphics of vintage advertising signs. Most model railroads are devoid of the posters and signs which were quite common in the years before Lady Bird Johnson's campaign to "beautify America" by eliminating outdoor advertising. Ads were plastered and painted on nearly every available surface.

The images that I collected come from various places around the Internet. I have pictures of vintage tin signs, the reproductions that are commonly sold at flea markets, etc. Online vendors also have ads cut out of magazines for sale and, of necessity, they post pictures of them. There are also websites devoted to vintage ads. Oil company memorabilia, maps and ads can also be readily found; all of these contain company logos. Car companies, some of them long gone like Studebaker and Nash, cosmetics (think about the once common Burma Shave roadside ads), food products (e.g. Heinz) and, for those of you old enough to remember, the once-ubiquitous cigarette and beer ads.

These resources are not difficult to find online, just do some creative searching using Google, etc. They are free for the taking (use "Save Picture As" in your browser). Using readily available photo-editing software the images can be manipulated into any type or size of advertising poster or billboard that you may want (for a free image editing program as powerful as Photoshop search online for the freeware program GIMP).

I have found some sites that are real gems which for the moment I'm keeping to myself. However here are some examples of goodies that you can find (click on any picture to get your own copy):

Here is an example of a once-common Smokey the Bear poster.

This was the symbol of the Phone Company before the breakup of Ma Bell.


Are you old enough to remember these once-famous trademarks? Radio Corporation of America (RCA) with it's mascot dog "Nipper" was once a producer of phonographs, radios and televisions. Nipper was hearing "His Master's Voice" emerging from the early phonograph.



Here is an example of a magazine ad which could be turned into a nice billboard by using image editing software.



Schlitz "The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous" was one of the first nationally-distributed beers. Another Schlitz tag line was "When You're Out of Schlitz, You're Out of Beer".

I won't post any cigarette ads for fear that the anti-smoking Nazis will come after me :-).

Work, Work Everywhere

I never really believed or understood until now. That is, I never understood why it took others decades to build a basement-filling model railroad. I had read about the process and procedures for, well, decades. It seemed straightforward enough. Open grid benchwork is simple, you can build several sections in a day, no? Ripping plywood for the subroadbed is only slightly more complicated; and flextrack should go down 1-2-3, right?

No.

Looking back almost three years after starting actual construction of the railroad, I still can't point to a single reason why all of the above is not true. I can point to dozens of reasons. Some of them are my own fault, some are due to circumstances and some of them just are.








The parts of the track plan highlighted in green are what I have accomplished since starting in the spring of 2007. Have I worked on the layout every available moment since the beginning? No. In 2007, part of the straightaway at the bottom was completed in between preparing for a major overseas trip. 2008 was the most productive year, I finished the bottom portion and constructed the first turn and S-curves to the right in a burst of activity from late July through Christmas. 2009 was dismal with only the curve at the lower left completed by Feb. of 2010; although a change of jobs partially accounted for the lack of progress.



Part of the problem resides with me. Reading about how to build a model railroad and actually doing it are two different things. So I work slowly and carefully. The plodding pace of work has been exacerbated by the Lords of Model Railroading offering their sage wisdom in the various magazines about how benchwork and trackwork and couplers must be perfect and woe will befall you if it is not so. Of course, all of these experts are working in the smaller scales where a millimeter of error is more important than it is in O Scale.

I also hate - hate - hate doing things over; I consider it to be the ultimate waste of time and money. As a result I spend more time planning and working slowly.

For all of the time it has taken, my track does seem to be smooth running. All of the equipment that I have run so far shows no wiggles as it passes over track joints, over the bridge and between sections of the benchwork.

Circumstances also contribute to the slow pace of work. The one that I run into most often is that I never have all of the materials at hand to finish a task in one sitting. It seems that no matter how much you plan in advance, you're always short on something.

For example, the weekend that you plan on building the next section of benchwork, neither Home Depot nor Lowes will have a good selection of dimensional lumber. Or after returning from he home center I've run short of one or two bolts to attach the legs.

And what about the O Scale items that you cannot get at the local hobby shop: 2-rail O scale track, roadbed, even rail joiners; if you run short on these, snail mail is your only option.

Then there are the things are involved with building a basement-filling model railroad. For example, there are thousands of parts to fabricate and thousands of operations to perform. Consider the simple task of building raisers for the roadbed, each has two pieces of wood to cut, four holes to drill and two screws and gluing. About ten operations for each one and there are hundreds to be built. Track wiring is similar, hundreds of feeders each having to be cut and soldered. And I haven't even started on scenery and structures.

Am I unhappy about all of this? Yes and No. Yes I am frustrated with the pace of the work and I wish that I had been able to follow John Armstrong's advice to get the mainline into operation early; but the geometry of the track plan and the basement does not allow for that. But no, there is tremendous satisfaction in doing a job and doing it well; and I will not compromise by dong something 'temporary' because they have a way of becoming permanent. I put in temporary bus wiring for the first several sections of benchwork and now I am reluctant to go back and fix it; I'll not repeat that mistake.

Onward.

Video of the Q4b

Here's a video of Sunset's Q4b. I changed the white balance of the camera between the two clips.

Laying Track on the Cheat River Grade

In the blog entry "To The West" (Nov. 2009) I showed the construction of the benchwork for the beginning of the Cheat River Grade. From Oct. 2009 to Feb. 2010 I laid the track on this section of benchwork. Why did it take so long to accomplish this task? Between October and February you have: Hunting Season (It comes but once a year!); Thanksgiving (and a field trip to Rowlesburg, WV to study the real railroad); Christmas (my order for flex track arrived towards the end of the vacation period) and, finally, the Springfield Train Show.

In addition, as I started this bit of work I got the bright idea to record my progress as a video tutorial on track laying. That meant that instead of being able to just go downstairs and do one or two operations on the next section of track, I had to wait until I had time to video my progress in more or less logical order. I did complete the outer track of the two-track grade during Christmas shutdown; but I was making the video of the inner track in the foreground and progress on that was paced by the recording.

Be that as it may, here is the result for you to see. Because it was recorded over five months, there are some continuity errors, mostly in the form of some repetition and one segment that had to be repositioned to show the proper sequence of operations.

For best results, click on the "Play" icon then click the "Pause" icon that replaces it and let the video buffer somewhat before returning to "Play". Yes, I know that it's a pain; but this is a 50+ minute tutorial that you didn't have to buy on DVD.



I started this video using my point-and-shoot still camera and had to finish the shooting using it. I now have an HD camcorder that I used at Springfield and I will use it for future documentaries of my railroad.

'O' Scale at the Springfield Show

The Amherst Railway Society Railroad Hobby Show, known throughout the Northeast as the "Springfield Show" was held Jan. 30-31, 2010 at the Eastern States Exposition (The Big 'E') in Springfield, Mass. Traditionally the show has been held in 3 large buildings and, over the last couple of years, has been expanded into a fourth large building. If you have never been to this show, you're missing a real treat. I know of no larger train show anywhere.

This is not an O Scale, 2-rail show; it's dominated by HO, Lionel, N and "G" in approximately that order; but everything from wooden push trains to live steam, historical societies and real railroads are represented. I still find it worthwhile to attend even after I moved from Connecticut to Virginia. There are scenery items, tools, books, videos, DCC and miscellany aplenty to browse through. I took me over five hours - non stop - the first day to walk through the entire show.

This year I brought along a brand-spanking new video camera to record the O Scale at the show. Unfortunately, a couple of the O Scale layouts that have traditionally been there were missing. Here are my results for you to enjoy. Please excuse some awkward panning and zooming, I'm still getting used to this, my first real camcorder (all of the other videos on this site were taken with a point-and-shoot still camera).

This first video is standard definition (reduced from the high-definition master copy) and should be able to be played by everyone. For all of the videos, click the play icon, then immedaitely click the pause icon. Let the video buffer fully before resuming play for the best playback. Try full screen mode with these videos, use the icon that appears in the lower right when your cursor hovers over the screen. With this standard definition video, click the scaling button (upper right) to make the picture fill your screen when in full screen mode.






The next pair of videos is the same material recorded in high definition, compressed to 6000 bps and then split into two parts to meet the maximum file size requirements of my video hosting service. Try as I might, I could not get hi-def video to play smoothly in Internet Explorer 7, even when I compressed it so much that it looked worse than the standard definition video. However, this video played well in the Firefox browser, version 3.0.17, with the Adobe Flash Player 10 plug-in. My recommendation for playing any of the hi-def videos is to get Firefox (it's free). It should play well with Firefox 3.6 which is the current version; if not, you can get 3.0.17 from download sites like filehippo.com.








The final pair of videos is compressed to 8000 bps and that bit rate is well above the recommendation of my video hosting service for displaying smooth video. This one will not play well with IE 7 either. If your computer did not play the other hi-def videos well, it will not play this one any better. However it plays OK on my laptop which has a dual core processor and an NVIDIA graphics card - again I used Firefox 3.0.17/Flash Player 10. If your computer and monitor is up to the task of displaying this video, you will be rewarded with the extra video quality.