Landmark event.... well for me anyway.

I installed the first Tortoise switch today. As ever after some digging around on Google I found how to power route the frog and have the switch control the LED too.

I'm still waiting for the Cobalt switches I ordered to arrive, it's been 11 days now... anyway, I have another 2 Tortoise so I will be getting those installed tomorrow, hopefully now I've done one, the others will be easier.



As you can see I need to tidy up my wiring too. I can see now why nobody likes doing work under the benches...

I suppose I had better start thinking about where I'm going to place the control panel...

I got off work early today, which was nice, so I spent a couple of hours finishing the coal wagons I got from Dapol.

I ordered 5 transfer sets from Robbies Rolling Stock from the East Midlands selection of collieries around Notts/Derbyshire

I only buggered up one side and I managed to hide that with the weathering powder...

Once I painted the wagon bodies I gave the chassis (multiple) a dose of AIM weathering powder in Light Rust and Dark Earth. I assembled the wagons minus the wheels and sealed it all with a gentle coat of Testors Dullcote.

The end result is shown below, the flash has a tendency to over saturate the colours, so if it looks a bit too orange, the real thing doesn't look bad.

Any comments? Anything I've missed?

Landmark Event...

I installed my first set of points complete with Tortoise motor today. It took me way longer than I would have thought, many lessons learnt and I'm looking forward to the next lot being much smoother. I'm going to be wiring them up with BiPolar LED's to indicate routing. Any tips on how to do that?

I also applied some Robbies Rolling Stock transfers to some Dapol 7 Plank wagons.



As you can see I need to now paint the rest of the wagon body.

I was quite impressed how they came out.

Yesterday UPS brought me some more peco points, track and a set of track cutters, so it looks like I'm in business.

The trouble is I only had 2 hours sleep thanks to the week old baby..... and I have to go back to work tomorrow.

Let's see what I can do by the end of this week...

Hello

Welcome to the first of my posts about my very first adventure into railway modeling. I've always wanted to have a go at building a layout, but never had the time, space or money.



To be honest, I still don't really have the time, space or money; especially with the very recent birth of my first child, but I thought it was time to make a start.

I'm always curious about what makes people choose a certain location or time period for their model, so for those of you out there who think in a similar way, here's a bit of background.

I grew up in my early years in Middlesex, UK in the early 70's, so not much train related action there, but my father is a big train buff (he still is and is a proud active member of the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust and a very regular visitor to the Great Central preserved line at Loughborough)

Often when we were away on a family holiday we would go to the local preserved line. I've had many a trip on the Settle & Carlisle, North York Moors, Paignton and Dartmouth Steam Railway and the Severn Valley with my head stuck out of the window catching smut in my eyes. Great times.

I was lucky enough to be taken to the amazing Shildon 150 Cavalcade in 1975. Dozens of locos with the majority of them steaming past on a great sunny day, as a child that was a wonderful memory. There was 3 generations of us that day, my grandfather was there too.

In the late 70's the family moved upto Nottinghamshire where my grandfather lived a couple of fields away from the East Coast Main Line and we used to sit and watch the Deltics go screaming past at full tilt. (so it's no surprise I have a couple of sound enabled Class 55s in my collection)

Now in my early 40's it's time for me to have a go at building my own layout. A minor problem is that I emigrated to California over 2 years ago so I'm now over 5300 miles away so I cant really go and take pictures or look at the landscapes. As you can imagine I'm relying heavily on the internet and my fathers memory.

I've never done anything like this before, I never even built models as a child so I'm sure I will make many mistakes and my learning curve will be steep, but there are a lot of very helpful people out there and I'm sure I will picking up tips from this forum.

Like many of the modelers on here, I've never seen steam in daily mainline operations and I'm very thankful to my dad who worked as a signalman back in the 50's in a variety of signal boxes around the Notts/Derby border, as I have a direct line to how it actually was. So that is why I'm trying to model this period.

I'm sure many of the purists will cough and splutter at some of my choices in what I do, but this is a hobby for me, I don't make my living from it. I want it to be fun. I have no desire to be on an exhibition circuit or ensure the number of rivets on the tender is correct, (hats off to the people who do), but I will try to make it as realistic as I can.

It all started in May 2010 and here is what I plan to do:

The layout room is 9x9ft, I could have made it 9x14ft but I needed somewhere for my studio/sound mixing gear, so 9x9 it is.

I spent weeks trying to come up with a suitable plan and bought a fair few books for ideas, some of the US based layouts are huge. Especially the East Coast & Midwest based ones as they often are housed in basements the size of the house floorplan. Too many earthquakes for basements here in California, so mine is in a converted room I partitioned off from half the garage.

The plan is freelanced and is a continuous run double folded dumbbell with twin track mainline, a branch line going off to a Colliery (coal mine for any US readers) and a station based loosely around the ex-Midland Railway station in Chesterfield. (I wanted somewhere that I could have my mainline express trains to stop, so that ruled out places like Mansfield etc)

There will also be a goods yard and small motive power depot, possibly loosely based on Annesley or Kirkby in Ashfield. The colliery will be a loose representation of the now closed Sutton Colliery which was actually at Stanton Hill just outside Sutton in Ashfield. My great grandfather was colliery manager there for a while so there is another connection I want to make.

The layout is over 3 levels and yes, a couple of the gradients are way too steep for the purists but this is what I wanted to do. The bottom level with its UP and DOWN return loops is hidden and there will be some additional staging in there too.

The layout is DCC with Code 100 track, Peco Electrofrog points and a mixture of Cobalt & Tortoise switch machines. Why code 100? Well I have a few older models which I have converted to DCC and I didn't want to get the wheels re-profiled.

I'm using Metcalfe kits at the moment for my lineside buildings, maybe if I find I like what I'm doing building this layout I will eventually scratchbuild. I would certainly like to have a go.

I'm a big fan of the "weathered" look and I've been messing around with washes and powders. There are some really great powders here in the US made by AIM products. So all my buildings have been weathered so far with other additions such as scale rain gutters etc.

The baseboard (benchwork for USA) I cheated somewhat. I purchased some modular units from Sievers Benchwork here in the USA. They really are fantastic, it would have taken me months and months to achieve about 50% of the quality of these units and I really don't have the time or facilities to carry, saw, plane & drill yards and yards of wood.

The plywood for the sub-roadbed and major areas is 3/4" and the risers are a mix of 1x2" and 1x4"

This is a picture of the first 4x3ft module assembled.



and this is what the completed 9x9ft benchwork looks like, you can also see the start of the hidden return loops on the bottom. You can see the benchwork is pre-drilled to make running cables really easy.




In this next photo you can see the scale print outs I used to help me cutting out the plywood. The program I used was the excellent FREE XtrackCAD which is an Opensource application that will run on PC and MAC.

There is a bit of a learning curve, but I like the way you can print out your finished plan 1:1 so you can fix to your baseboard and cut. That saved me a lot of time with measuring and marking.



Here is a screen shot of XtrakCAD



I continued cutting up sheets of 8x4ft plywood and in the end I used 4 sheets. I probably could have got away with 3, but as I've said before this is all new to me so a few mistakes are allowed.

I had to wrestle with a fair few bad sheets in Home Depot, the quality control doesn't seem to be very consistent. Perhaps for my next layout I will go for a better quality... anyway, it's all in place now after several days worth of measuring, cutting and fitting and a few boxes of screws. I'm very glad I bought an electric screwdriver.

You can see the 3 levels in this picture here.



The hidden return loops and staging on the bottom, the middle section on this side of the layout will be in a tunnel, the goods yard and MPD off to the left and the yet to be built colliery section off to the right.

The very top section on this side is where the station is going to be. There is just enough room to fit a Duchess with 5 coaches, more would have been nice but there you go, I needed to use the rest of my garage for conventional garage stuff.

As you can see there is still a gap I need to fill in.

This picture below shows the view from the operators area. You can see the UP return loop and staging also the first section of track I laid. I tried out several types of underlay (roadbed as it's called here.) There is a product here called Homabed made from recycled newspaper. It had good sound deadening qualities, but some of this was negated once it and the track was glued in place.

I've also tried the Woodland Scenics trackbed product. It was easy to install, sounds good and is cheaper, so that is what I will be continuing with. The Homabed is grey in this picture and the Woodland Scenics stuff is black.

They both have a good angled edge to give a good representation of a shoulder when ballasted.



Here are some more construction shots showing various stages of the build.









I'm now at the stage where I have a continuous run of sub-roadbed and I'm ready to start laying the track.

I'm using Peco Electrofrog points, which of course along with everything else I'm having to have shipped from the UK. I'm using a selection of UK suppliers including Hattons, Rails of Sheffield and of course good old eBay.co.uk By the time I have the VAT deducted it more than pays for the shipping to the USA. (even more so when it hits 20% over there, the equivalent sales tax here is currently 8.25%)

One thing I have noticed here in the US is that the models are aimed at a different audience. It's increasingly difficult to find a model here that doesn't come with DCC fitted as standard and most now have sound too. The detail on the models here is impressive, I think the UK is catching up very fast though, however the models here are more expensive.

Anyway, I'm waffling now.

Here are a selection of pictures showing my attempts at weathering some of my models:



Class 08 showing tight clearance in the hidden loop



Jinty with mixed goods



Here you can see the Metcalfe signal box that I have painted the woodwork into a Midland red and dirtied it up a bit. Since taking this I've added guard rails and rain gutters/downpipes.



Another pic showing the weathered Jinty and the signal box.



I need to tone down this blokes trousers and yellow hair !!!



This one shows the engine shed before weathering and painting. There's that bloke again reading the notice board.



Lastly this is the DCC system I'm using, it's sold as the Gaugemaster Prodigy Advance in the UK. I'm still learning how it all works.

That's it for now, this is how far I have got in 3 months. I'm trying to find time to start laying the pointwork and the track. I have a deadline, my parents are coming out here to see their new grandson in October 2010. I have just under 3 months to get some trains running along with dealing with a newborn and a full time job.

I always did like a challenge....

Thanks for dropping by and taking the time to look. I hope to have an update within 2 weeks..

Feel free to comment.