Realistic control stand throttle

There is a valid movement for more realistic controls for DCC locomotives.  The DCC control system is 20 years old and yet we do not yet have a throttle that equals the control functionality and ergonomic of the TAT V throttle from the early 90s.  Sound decoders are now advancing steadily with a whole new generation being released this year.  Throttles have not really advanced much in the last decade.  Yes, we have wireless, but there has not been much new since the UT4 from Digitrax.  The new throttle ESU/Piko/? throttles from Europe may eventually gain wide enough distribution to help push the hobby forward, but it is still limited in the analog interface that mimics a real control stand.



I wish to applaud the guys working on the new control stand throttle which may finally advance the throttle to match our decoders and look forward to trying one out in the future.

Weekend Reading Material

Most model railroaders in the dominant scales of HO and N would be hard pressed to name an S Scale layout they had seen in person.  I am talking about S Scale and not American Flyer which is still fun but usually is considered part of the toy trains realm. So when folks hear 'S Scale' they tend to tune out the message.  Perhaps it is time to listen up and look what is going on in S Scale.  One of my favorite publications is the S Scale Resource.  This is a free publication and worth the time to peruse the every other month issues.  The new issue has a large point to point layout designed for operation in it.  This should make us rethink our preconceived notions of what is S Scale.  Follow this link to the current issue.

Philip

Modeling the 1920s and frieght cars

Many modelers are rediscovering one of the earlier eras of trains when their were large amounts of trains everywhere and the railroads were the glue that held together the nation.  The real challenge for those in this era is finding appropriate cars.  A blog post at this link give a list of Westerfield models that are appropriate for the era. 

Cobblestone Streets for Scenery or Display

When we present our contest level models at a meeting or show it is common to just place them on a table.  Military modelers place their models on  a wooden base with scenery on top to place the model in context.  Cobblestone streets are not common in most of the US now but were more so earlier in the last century particularly in port areas.  Vallejo (my favorite paints) has a clinic on their Facebook page that teaches you step by step how to make the streets.  Add some rail and you have an excellent place to place that resin or wood kit.

Simplification in Planning

Though I have many friends who want to build the basement empire and it has been my dream it is time to realize that the dream must end.  Something between the one lead and a couple sidings of the recent past and the empire is probably closer to a satisfying reality. 

Even with the issues of wanting a longer run I have come to realize that I will never have in my current a long enough run to implement Timetable and Train Order operation.  The general rule of thumb is that it takes 8 plus scale miles of track with 10 -12 be optimal by my reckoning to give enough distance without introducing boredom of the endless run.

Where does that leave me?  I need to settle on a design that gives more in a smaller space.  This typically means a switching operation using a nodal design.  A nodal design is one main yard where all on layout traffic originates and terminates for all jobs.

Settling this design parameter should make the next step simplify the next step. 

Trends influencing my thinking

There are several friends who via email are gently nudging me, well OK they are pushing me, to make a reality check and start building a layout  As with most of us I have O Scale tastes with an N Scale space.  O Scale is like a drug in that you go to a large layout and it just feels so good, operates so well, and is impressive but the reality is the real estate for most is beyond their means unless they are willing to do a switching layout.

This is why most folks end up in HO which is the not too big not too small scale for most folks.  It is just right and why it is the dominant scale today even with it ceding some of its lead to N Scale in recent years.  The HO market is suffering from the dual hit that the seniors in the hobby can no longer see well enough and the younger crowd wants more prototype length trains which require a lot of real estate.

The older crowd is either simplifying their HO layouts, stepping into On30 or even rediscovering O Scale.  This has appeal as I am at the bottom edge of that age range though the real estate beast rears its ugly head again. 

S Scale is really the ultimate solution as the best balance of size and space. It only takes up 33 percent more space than HO but it currently lacks the product depth of HO, N or O.  The demise of S Helper Service as it was absorbed by MTH is a strong point of concern with MTHs real focus on the toy train in S and not scale market even as they venture into HO.

The Sn3 niche includes one major manufacturer which is PBL.  They make some of the nicest locomotives in any scale but the price tag is just more than my budget will allow.  Their car kits make some of the most beautiful recreations of cars in any scale as I will attest from a caboose kit that I have mostly finished before setting it aside.

The N direction has appeal for what one can fit into the space but the ability to see the product and to detail and operate it raises concerns for many and particularly for my self as my vision and motor dexterity should decline over the next 20 years as it does with most as they enter senior status.  Even with these concerns seeing layouts like Mark Dance's Columbia & Western attest to the ability to operate in a prototype manner in N Scale.

What ties all these sections together for is finding the balance to operate as I want with available models in the constraint of space along with availability of models.  Which scale gives me the balance?  Some of that will be answered once the prototype is picked in the near future. 

To use the analogy from the computer world in that you buy the hardware that runs your software in the model train world you buy the scale equipment that allows you to run the trains you want the way you want.

Point Worth Pondering

As I work through this process of deciding what to do next I keep reading various blogs about layouts.  Lance Mindheim wrote recently some advice in his blog that a smaller layout in closet in a smaller scale is better than no layout at all.  In addition building something sooner is better than waiting for the perfect plan and combination.  Take a read by following this link

New Layout - Same Room

For the last 10 plus years I have been collecting trains that interest me in several scales but mostly I have been in O Scale with a minimalist blueboard layout of a lead and a couple of tracks that I would shift with my trusty Atlas 0-6-0 switcher.  The old is now gone and I want to reduce the hobby shop in the basement and at the same time build something more than a very bare minimalist layout.  The next layout can be of any scale or gauge with no prototype yet chosen.   As I work through this process I will commit to this forum the process to help myself focus my thoughts and hopefully help another poor soul out of their paralysis.  The starting point is usually the room.

The room is shown below.  There is a non load bearing wall between the two parallel is shown between the wall and the air handler.  The post is the circle is the support pole 5 feet from the wall.  All squares are one foot.  There is a PDF of the plan here  Future posts will deal with prototype or freelance choice and the given and druthers of the layout.

The Underserved in the Hobby

As the centralized structure of the hobby has been taken apart little by little and the new structure has yet to be built we are at a loss many times to know how the hobby is going.  Lance Mindheim who builds layouts and has written several books about the hobby has hit upon a point where a missing group of the hobby sits which can be easily overlooked today.  Those of us who enjoy the social aspects of the hobby in sharing what we work on, operating a layout, or just a meal talking about our favorite subject need to find ways to reach these advanced beginners.  In this group are the future of the hobby, our future operators and hopefully future friends.  Please take a look at his blog post

Innovation by Rapido

Rapido is a Canadian model train supplier who is innovating for the hobby by solving long standing annoying problems.  The two problems are the remote uncoupling by magnets and switch machines with targets.  The Kadee design for electro-magnetic uncoupling is 30+ years old and requires major surgery to your roadbed and sub roadbed.  The new Rapido solution takes less space and uses a blue LED to mark the spot for uncoupling.  An obvious solution that results in a "why didn't I think of that" moments.  The second solution is the new switch machine with an integrated switch stand.  This item will solve the issue of knowing which way the turnout is thrown in a yard ladder.  The other operational help is when you are coming down the mainline and you need to make sure the last operator returned the points to normal when they finished using the siding.  Take the link below and review the products.

Rapido Railcrew

Historical Societies and the Cost of Modeling Part 1

The Historical Society is a stated feature of the model railroading hobby.  These societies exist for every major and many minor railroads of the pre-1970 era.  There are even societies for roads such as Penn Central, Conrail and CSX along with at least one for a model railroad.  The desire to save and preserve the past is part of the human spirit with many of these societies started by those who saw that past slipping away.  Railfans, employees and amateur historians were the initial founders along with some modelers.  Each of these historical societies has sort to bring up the standard of their publications and work which costs money.  The raising of the standard has raised the cost of membership for those who want to learn the history and apply it to their modeling.  In my area of Virginia there are several key roads and others within a two hour radius.  Once you add others that one remembers seeing or hearing about growing up the list becomes quite long.  The cost of keeping membership up in all these societies is now past the tipping point and cutting back becomes a necessity.  It is not that any of these societies are unworthy there is just too much of a good thing.   The need to rationalize the cost of the hobby to a lower level means re-examing these memberships and the cost of the additional research material beyond the society magazine.

Part 2 will be a discussion of the interplay between these two cost areas and the choice of modeling subjects.

Railroads Societies belonged to over the last 20 years:

Active Membership

NKP
Southern Railway
N&W
ETWNC
RF&P
Hawaiian Railway Society

Inactive or not planning to renew

Milwaukee Road
Denver & Rio Grande Western
ATSF
Chesapeake & Ohio
Western Maryland
New York Central
NRHS
PRR
EBT

Simplification and Post DCC?

The need to simplify is a strong trend in the hobby noted by David Barrow, Lance Mindheim, Mike Cougill and Trevor Marshall among others.  They speak along this line for size of layout and simplifying the complexity of the physical layout while increasing the purity of the operation.  They are looking for better couplers, better rules, better paperwork and operations to improving fun and faithfulness to the prototype.  What areas are left to apply this perspective?

What they have not seen and we have not seen is a simplification to the operations control system.  DCC is a 20+ year old standard that came into being before Windows 95.  When you see this from a perspective of the computer industry it is apparent that while the decoders are significantly better and more full featured the backbone of the systems is still ancient technology.  The wireless system used by these systems and the control interfaces are still from a generation ago.  There are exceptions.

Lenz does allow you to use a single box to interface with a wireless router and use of small devices like an iPhone.  There are a number of wireless vendors who are making units usually for use with a battery powered system.  NCE recently released its own plug in receiver for use with those wireless vendors.  The question is whether any of these represent the next generation of control systems.

Bachmann has announced what an alternative path of using bluetooth to control the locomotive and this will be coming to their HO locomotives in 2015.  This may represent a new approach to the whole question depending on how well implemented is the system design.  The system is not Bachmann's design but they deserve credit having the vision for trying a new path.  The standard, software and equipment is made by a company named BlueRail.  The links to the announcements and websites are as follows:

Bachmann

BlueRail

Take a look at the video on the BlueRail site and see the possibility.

It's TIme

The analysis paralysis which has griped my railroading of the last few years has convinced me that it is time to move on and end this blog.  I will be deleting this blog after Sept 30 and hope that someone else will find the name useful.

Change can be good to re-invigorate the hobby.  I will be going forward to a project that was on the back burner for a while and which always has had strong pull for me and I knew that I would build eventually.  The next project will be the Ma & Pa in the 1920s with a focus on the first half of the decade.  I have a new blog for this project maandrr.blogspot.com  Please note the double a with 'and' being spelled out.

Thanks for all those who have followed my ramblings and particularly Bernie, Al and Thom.

Forward Ho!

Simplicity and Layout Planning

One of the emerging themes in the model railroad world is the call to simplicity.  A recent blog post by Lance Mindheim on September 17, 2012 on the one switch layout.  The pressure to build the empire is hard to resist.  When you read the magazines there is a natural reaction among many that 'I can do that!!' or 'I can do that better'.  While the reaction is natural the tendency to overlook the costs of those empires and the delayed fun is big.  What is the cost of a large layout.  A double deck layout replicating the operations of a division of a railroad in a 1000 plus square foot basement would require tremendous resources.  You may think that I overstate the issue, but a typical mid size division could easily require 30 locos minimum to run just 3 through passenger and 3 through freights each way not including switchers, local passenger trains and way freight trains.  If you are running in the steam era then you may need to triple that number to allow for changing the engine upon the trains arrival and departure from each end of the layout. 

Over the last twenty years I have never finished anything but modules.  Usually my layouts consist of modules set up to either run in circles or back and forth.  In O Scale I have seen set up track temporarily with a switch or two and a lead.  Running an Atlas O Scale 0-6-0 USRA switcher and switching cars is fun even with a short track for O Scale and a few cars.  The very full bass sound adds a dimension not available in smaller scales due to speaker size.  

Perhaps my constant yearning and hoarding of materials and items for a large layout is just wrong headed thinking when I have had in front of me an answer all the time.  A smaller layout with less maintenance and easy expansion would give satisfaction now and in the future. Build it using LED (Layout Element Dominoes) which I will go into in a future post will allow things to keep moving.

Time to go play

Discussions with Retired Railroaders

Retired Railroaders are  one of the best resources to understand any line and how it operated.  There are several retired Southern men in the local area.  They share their knowledge willingly and worked on the B line during their careers. They maintain that in their time there was plenty of traffic on the line. This encompassed periodic times from 60's to the early 21st Century.  Traffic in the modern time ended short of Harrisonburg with interchange.  Prior to the merger there was interchange with the C&W, N&W, B&O and the Southern (Manassas).  To include these locations except Manassas as stub end tracks would generate traffic in modern times while they become freight points in earlier times.  The various grain storage customers and co-ops generated much of the modern traffic as they would have in an earlier era.

More to come.

Choices of Towns Part 1

Model Railroads are always about choices.  Selective compression is not a question of if but of how much and where we compress.  The first choice in compression is what to include and what to leave out.  The list should include 5 towns.  The first 3 are the easy ones for me.

Manassas
Strasburg
Harrisonburg

The next two are going to be more complicated.

Prototype Choices and Balance

The reality check that comes with layout planning is sometimes hard food to digest especially when you have a wide area of interest and dreams of empire.  Shoehorning O Scale into a 20 by 20 area is difficult at best and almost impossible at worst.  Previous posts were focused on City Point as a prototype but this proved to have issues due to the limited time frame and the lack of sidings for switching.  Numerous operating sessions have convinced me that it is a combination of running and switching will hold the interest.  In previous posts and on other forums the B-Line of the Southern or the Manassas Gap RR keeps coming up as one of my circles of interest. 

The strength of the B Line is that is its minimal changes from the 1850s to the 1990s.  My space will allow 4 to 5 switching points or towns with connecting track.  Interchange tracks allow movement of cars on and off the line.  In earlier periods when the connecting lines of the N&W, B&O and C&W were not there then the interchange tracks will become team tracks.  Buildings will be built on foam core bases and made removable to change eras.  The only real issue will be the track work.  More modern track work uses points and this may be a compromise I will just have to accept.  The other item that will probably be an anomaly for the ACW era is the connection to Harrisonburg.   This will allow the layout to function in full form through any era.

Next Post will deal with the towns or switching points that I want to focus upon.  If you have any suggestions please let me know.  

Rethinking Scales?

The last 2 years have seen a growth in my interest in operating as the driving force of my next layout.  Most of my regular operating has come from Keith Stillman's Easton & Potomac.  This layout packs an incredible amount operation in a tight space. The layout is freelance 1925 with mostly 2-8-0 and 4-6-0 locomotives and 36 ft freight cars.  The cars look good on his 24" radius.  It keeps a crew of 8 busy and the lunch beforehand is always delicious.

Several attempts to draw up a suitable track plan for a Civil War era layout have ended in doubts about the viability of the project.  The original goal was a City Point layout for the USMRR.  Bernie's original chapter in his Mid-Size layout book raised interest of this line as a 'doable' prototype.  The real challenge is that the trains are run as an out and back with no real spotting of cars on sidings.  All the switching is done in the City Point yard area.  I plan to give another attempt to come up with a plan and visualize the operations flow.  A more generic discussion of scale doubts follows

The doubts right now are the combination of two factors.

The first is the compressing of O scale in my space that gives enough operation to keep 2 to 4 operators busy.  My original view was that early O scale would afford more moderate 30 to36 inches in radius. My recent thinking is that this needs to be 40 to 45 inch radius  This changes the dynamic of the layout to a loop in my modest 13 by 20 space with another wall of 16 feet in length.  The challenge here is fitting in mainline operations.  Really I am down to a switching operation.  The question here is that enough operation.


The second item is the issue of motive power availability in O Scale.  There are few choices in this niche hobby.  The next loco in 2012 is the Yonah.   SMR makes a great product and I wish that I had bought several of them earlier.  My only one is a 3 rail Texas that is undergoing conversion to 2 rail.  The trouble is that any layout will require 8 to 10 locomotives to have a full roster.  The time and cost is gives one pause, but more so the availability of the locomotives.  Am I willing to switch to HO and use Bachmann 4-4-0.  Reliability of so small of a loco is one that makes me wonder. 


Enough musing for now

Weekend Ops Session

Had a great time Saturday operating on the second ops session on Jerry Ritter's Hudson and Ohio.  This HO layout is the second version of the H&O that I have had the pleasure of operating.  Jerry has really thought this design through and is now in the testing phase of the operational scheme.  It is a pleasure to say that I have operated at two ops session and one bull session.  Of course, we know that the real draw for these sessions is the lunch that Barb prepares so well.

Our host Jerry giving the group his orientation session for the new guys and an update on the changes from the last session.









The crew works through the cards as George is yardmaster, Doug is the Passenger yardmaster and Jerry is working Blackpole.  Jerry may be the only one who knows his way around Blackpole, but the rest of us are determined to catch up.

Side trip to On30 on the road to a layout

For a while I have been a member of the James River Division of the NMRA's On30 group.  One of the things that you are supposed to do is bring a module to the meets.  This task has become the butt of good kidding when I never seem to have one.  Finally, I decided that this needed to end so a new module is under construction.  The junction module consists of one mainline track splitting into two mainlines while going through a #2.5 wye which is equivalent to a #5 turnout. The turnout is a Walther's code 83 with modified ties.  This is an interim step until I obtain some low profile ties. The rest of the track is Micro Engineering On30 code 83 flex. The track work should be done tonight with the wiring going in on Friday night to be ready for Saturday's get together. 

 I may not connect it since it won't be fully tested by then, but feedback is important.   

Pictures will follow.