B&OCT in N Scale -- Back in action

 I'm back to work on the B&OCT in N Scale. I solved a problem with the servo controller at the entrance to the Barr Yard staging yard. 

This is the entrance to Barr Yard - looking away from the controller. 

Basically, some wire connections had unconnected. They are reconnected and taped together.

The problematic connections are now taped together with green electrical tape. The controller is working fine.  

Next up -- one more round of locomotive testing and then . . . installation of optical detectors. Look for more updates soon.

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What's going on with the logging layout; an amazing tour of the Richmond Pacific; and a friend joins the blogging world

Hi.

It is good to be sitting at the keyboard, again. Since the December post life has been a whirlwind. The Bay Area Layout Design and Ops SIG meet is now in the rear view mirror. It was a lot of hard work and a lot of fun. A couple of things to catch up on. The latest with the logging layout, a very cool tour of the Richmond Pacific Railroad and a good friend joins the blogosphere.

Let's start with an update on the logging layout. I dusted off the layout with the expectation that I'd have it ready for ops or at least an open house during the SIG meet. As I mentioned before, I'm not giving up N Scale. 

All of my N Scale projects -- the B&OCT and Takadanobaba -- were halted by some kind of speed bump or another. The solutions were beyond me.

I needed a win. I got that with this project. The track was in good shape. I have two Shays, but the layout can only handle one. 

The time spent working in a different scale was not wasted. It was an opportunity to dust off old modeling skills or work on new ones. This included: scratchbuilding rolling stock,

Scratchbuilt flatcar carrying an AHM Barnhardt loader

kitbashing structures and throwing together small detail projects.

Scratchbuilt loading dock at Monroe Bros. Milling & Lumber

Coal and sand house with rack of spare wheels adjacent to the engine terminal 

Penstock on scratchbuilt platform (a re-used flatcar that didn't turn out quite right)

All of this has proven that I have the skills needed in other modeling projects. I also learned that I don't have to be afraid to jump into the unknown.

A fundamental premise of the logging layout is that it will be "good enough". It has to look good, but doesn't have to be perfect -- except for the track. This layout has to work. The locomotive and rolling stock need to stay on the tracks -- unless yours truly goes against a switch. Hmmph!!

Here are a few pictures of the layout in its current state (some have been previously posted on Facebook):

Testing the Shay. It came back from the repair shop with a hitch in its git along. Seemed to work fine on the loop of Atlas Snap Track. 

Here's the Shay crossing Humberson Lane. 

The Shay has crossed Humberson Lane and is creeping onto Bizjak Bridge, which crosses Zadroga Creek. Need to glue the abutments and add rocks to the creek bed. Also need to add a couple of guys fishing in the creek.

Here's the Shay and bobber caboose approaching Bizjak Bridge. Note the bridge planking. Boy, do the Shay and bobber need weathering!

Trees flanking Humberson Lane. More scenery to be added. 

Here we are at the right end of the layout. The shell of Monroe Brothers Lumber looks forlorn. A roof and more structure are still to come.

Wow, Humberson Lane really looks like it curves behind the trees on the left.

On the Saturday night of the SIG meet, the layout was open for visitors. The weather was kind of crappy and only three people showed. It was a good opportunity to get a few projects done. 

Speaking of the SIG meet . . .

It ran from Friday, Feb. 3 to Sunday, Feb. 5. Friday's events included an ops session, a tour of the Richmond Pacific Railroad (RP) and a dinner in Richmond. 

The Richmond Pacific tour was amazing. It was the first time that the railroad had been open for a public tour. They rolled out the red carpet. Our host gave us a 45-minute overview of the railroad in the Headquarters' conference room. 

The Richmond Pacific system map in the Headquarters conference room

They then took all 19 of us on tour of the railroad via caboose hop. 

The train awaits

As we approached the train we were told that there was one space (one open seat) in the locomotive cab and everyone else had to cram into the caboose. Who should go? I was pleasantly surprised to be nominated by the group to take the locomotive spot. I didn't waste any time climbing aboard. 

The view from the front porch of Richmond Pacific GP-15 #424.

Manny, the engineer. A very cool dude, who was willing to tolerate a model railroader and railfan in his cab. I was not allowed to blow the whistle.

The view looking forward from the cab. Very cool.

Were I not interested in Chicago and the B&OCT, I'd be a Richmond Pacific modeler. That is left to my friend, Steven Cox. He's been interested in the RP for a long time. Its got a lot of appeal: busy industrial switching, connections to two class 1 railroads (Union Pacific [UP] and BNSF -- if you backdate its the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe) and lots of Amtrak and Amtrak California traffic on the UP tracks.

Steven's inspiration is Stege Interlocking and Stege Wye. This is the interchange point between the RP and UP.  Stege Wye is elevated and two of the legs cross Interstate 580. The interlocking is compass south of the Wye.

Here's a photo from the cab of our train on the north leg of the wye. 

A big thanks to our train crew and host, Jeff. This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

And finally, welcome to the blogosphere -- Ken Koren. Ken is a friend from when I lived in Chicago in the 1990s. He build a series of layouts first in his house in Berwyn, Ill., and later in LaGrange Park, Ill.

 Last year he and his wife left Chicago for Rockville, Ind. He's starting a new layout The Rockville Western and blogging about his experience. The Rockville Western is a division of his previous layout the Chicago & Western Illinois. Good luck Ken. So far, you've been far more prolific than me. 

A logging layout? Have you gone mad? No! I'm working on inspiration. Also, sign up for the Bay Area SIG meet!

It's been a while since I've posted and it may be quite a surprise to read that in the interim I have been making good progress on my logging layout!

What???

That makes no sense. This blog is about building the B&OCT in N scale.

Bear with me. 

The past year has been littered with a number of events that got me off my main thesis.

In November 2021, I had rotator cuff surgery. It was when I was spending hours icing my left shoulder that I took a dive down the Japanese railroad and model railroad rabbit hole on Netflix and YouTube. I have a layout plan in the works. 

I was making good progress in the shoulder surgery recovery, when in March 2022, I was hit by a car while riding my bike. That sent me back to the recuperation zone. I was not doing a whole lot of anything.

A cortisone shot in my right shoulder in early August accelerated my recovery. It opened the door for me to resume more than arm-chair model railroad activities. I participated in an ops session on the Central Vermont and discovered that my ops skills were horribly rusty. Nearly fossilized. I had to do something to rebuild those skills. It was embarrassing. 

Around this time, I started to work on the final testing of the Barr Staging. I was snake bit in that I could not find an Atlas locomotive in my roundhouse that could be used for that task. I had four locomotives ready at hand -- each one had some kind of problem. Fixing those turned out to be beyond my abilities. I needed some outside help. I got bogged down and lost momentum.

Concurrently, planning for the 2023 PCR San Francisco Bay Area Layout Design & Operations Weekend Meet was ramping up. I'm the clinics chair. 

With all this my the plate, the feeling was of shoveling sand against the tide and losing.

I needed a win. 

That's what brought me back to the long-idle HO logging layout. I originally pulled this 12-inch by eight-foot layout together in 2006 when living in an apartment after my first marriage fell apart. I have a thing for Shays. The pike would feature this locomotive engaged in slow-speed switching. Lots of fun to watch the operations and the locomotive do its thing.

The layout reached the final stages of track work. But, life interceded -- a new marriage, moving to a new house, raising kids, work, another layout (N scale), etc. 

The logging layout (seen on the lower right) once occupied the space where the shelves were installed on the far wall.

16 years later, the logging layout was occupying space intended for storage shelves in the garage. It had to be moved. It was put on shelving brackets that will not see B&OCT benchwork for years. That move brought the layout down to a more accessible level. And the lightbulb lit!!!

Here was my "WIN"! 

Could I get this in shape to host an ops session for the SIG meet? Possibly. 

My goal: create a good-enough layout that will be fun to operate. 

My favorite steam locomotive - the Shay - at rest on the locomotive service track.

I checked out the track and it was mostly working. There was one spot where the Shay regularly stalled and another where it regularly derailed. Both problems have been resolved. Check!

Looking down the length of the logging layout from the yard. This is a small, but busy railroad.

The hills are coming alive. A look down the layout from the log loading area. The aluminum foil tacked to the bottom of the above shelves will help reflect light from to-be installed valance lighting.  

How about the scenery? Initial landforms were in place and a first coat of Sculptamold was in place. This was a good base from which to start. I had plenty of scenery material on hand. Check!

How about structures? They need work. The basic forms are in pieces needing to be painted. Cold weather has temporarily shut down spraying operations. 

The ops plan? It was an idea in my head, not formally fleshed out. A couple of visits with Jim Radkey resulted in the creation of a challenging ops scheme. This should be a fun layout for one or two SIG meet operators. 

LET'S PAUSE FOR A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS:

The PCR and Layout Design Special Interest Group will be hosting a meet the weekend of Feb. 3-5, 2023. That will not interfere with the end of the NFL playoffs because the event will be held on the bye week between the conference championship playoff games and the Super Bowl. 

The meet will be hosted in person at the Golden State Model Railroad Club in Point Richmond, CA. On Friday, Feb. 3, 2023, the meet has a tour scheduled at the Richmond Pacific Railroad. That will be followed by a dinner featuring a presentation from Justin Fox, president of the Southern Pacific Retired Executives Club. 

Saturday, Feb. 4 will feature at day of clinics and a layout design challenge at the Club. This activity will be presented in person. It will also be available virtually for folks out of town or who are not comfortable coming to a large gathering. That will be followed by layout tours. Those attending in person will get a box lunch -- provided in the registration cost. 

Sunday, Feb. 5 is a day of operations.

The early-bird in-person price is $35.00 until January 1, and $40.00 after. In-person tickets include box lunch. Because of space limits at the museum, in-person attendance is limited.

The early-bird virtual price is $15.00 until January 1, and $20.00 after.

You can register here: http://www.bayldops.com/

Circling back -- how does this logging layout relate to the B&OCT in N Scale or the Takadanobaba in Alameda? I got some easy wins. The scenery is coming along. A number of easy detail projects are mostly done. The layout is workable. The model railroad juices are flowing. I'm more prepared to tackle those larger projects than I have been for a while. 

Hope to see you at the SIG meet.

Takadanobaba's detection lessons will be applied to the B&OCT

 Train operations on the Takadanobaba will be automated.

Unlike the B&OCT, which will feature a hands on operator action, this is a display layout. My primary goal is to turn it on and watch the trains go back and forth. Hopefully, I'll have a decent scenic facade to make this realistic. (More on this in the future.)

Takadanobaba track diagram. The blue rectangle is an overhead pedestrian bridge connecting the two active stations on the layout.

Here's the concept: The scenic portion of the layout will have six through tracks -- grouped as three pairs of parallel commuter lines. These are the Yamanote Line, the Yamanote Freight Line and the Seibu-Shinjuku line. On the Yamanote and Seibu-Shinjuku Lines trains will stop at platforms in the scenic portion. After stopping at the station, the trains will exit off the layout onto a sector plate in staging. There, they will stop, the sector plate will shift to the other line, the train will reverse direction, head out of staging, stopping at the on-line station, as applicable and continue on to the staging area at the other end of the layout -- roughly 4.5 ft away. Rinse and repeat. 

A key given is: the trains must stop exactly at the right spot (either at the station or on the sector plate), slow and accelerate realistically. I've seen videos of similar Kato trains. They run well, but are fast. I need to work on the performance of the trains. 

How do I execute on this? 

I think with today's inexpensive and small computers, the process can be accomplished with: track detection, on-train DCC control, a Digitrax detection decoder, a Raspberry pi and JMRI warrants. If this paragraph makes it sound like I know what I'm doing, I don't. The pool is deep and I only dipped a toe in the water. I need to learn a lot more. This will be fun -- a non-tech nerd learning about tech!

After cogitating on this subject, I realized that my investment in learning will pay additional dividends: a similar set up will solve a big problem that I have struggled with on the B&OCT. 

This problem is that I have a need for a large volume of overhead trains to keep things interesting for dispatchers and tower operators. (Think of them as rolling scenery.) My space is limited. If I had an operator for each one of those trains, the layout room would become so congested that I'd have to go outside just to change my mind.

The solution appeared as I read about JMRI warrants and the writing discussed detection and signals. The B&OCT mainline will be fully detected and signaled. Those signals function as a part of the warrant instructions and I could automate a whole bunch of those scenery trains. They would automatically traverse the layout. 

One payoff is that they will give the tower operators a lot more work to do. The tower operators will have lineup sheets with simulated crossing traffic. That's kind of boring. Now, they'll have more actual mainline traffic. My work on Takadanobaba will be the test bed for the B&OCT. Mission accomplished x2. 

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Takadanobaba Station in Alameda: a new blog about modeling Tokyo commuter trains

I've started a new blog about my adventures in modeling Japanese commuter trains in not-quite N scale.

Please check out the first installment at https://takadanobaba-station-in-alameda.blogspot.com/

I'll keep writing about the B&OCT in N scale. That project has many posts and a lot of work ahead.

Watching “Midnight Diner” rekindled a long-forgotten railroad passion

I’ve been watching a lot of TV lately. That’s because I’m recovering from rotator cuff surgery on my left shoulder. That has limited a lot of my activities. One of the programs I found recently is “Midnight Diner”.

It’s a slice-of-life show set at a Tokyo izakaya in the Shinjuku Prefecture. An izakaya is a bar that serves drinks and snacks. The one in the Netflix show is open from Midnight to 7 am. Hence, the name. The show is like a more somber version of Cheers. There’s no laugh track. It’s also a foodie show in that the featured character or characters orders a dish of the episode. It's more than just ramen or sushi. 

What does this have to do with trains?

 

The railroad connection occurs during the opening credits. A camera is mounted in a car driving through Tokyo at night. Early in the shot, the car approaches and passes under the railroad tracks just north of the Shinjuku railroad station. Later, an overhead shot shows more trains.

Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories screen capture

Seeing those trains got me thinking about Japanese railroads. I didn’t know much about them aside from the Bullet Train or “Shinkansen”. When I was 6-years old, my parents took a trip to Japan. They brought back a pamphlet about the bullet train. I wore it out, paging through it and poring over the pictures. I don’t know what happened to it. 

JR East Yamanote Line commuter trains

The show exposed me to a less-glamorous aspect of Japanese railroads: the commuter train. Tokyo is teeming with them, as I found out. 

On reflection, it makes sense that I’m attracted to these trains. My American model railroad interest is in  Chicago terminal railroading. It’s gritty railroading. It is industrial switching, yard ops and transfer runs. My prototype, the B&OCT, hosted some B&O and C&O long-distance passenger trains. The B&O’s Capitol Limited was the most glamorous. No commuter trains, however. 

Back to Japanese trains and “Midnight Diner. In a five-second shot in the opening credits, I saw several trains pass on the bridge over the road. That was typical rail traffic, I learned. Shinjuku Station is the busiest railroad station in the world. This led me to start checking out YouTube videos and plunged down a rabbit hole. There’s a whole world of Tokyo train videos. I have yet to watch them all. I do have a life. I also started looking at web pages about modeling Japanese trains. So far, I have found a lot less material. I think there’s a lot written in Japanese that’s not showing in my browser. 

Ultimately, I started researching whether Japanese model trains are available in the U.S. Not really. 

There’s a lot available in N scale from Kato and Tomix in Japan. N scale is very popular in Japan given the lack of living space and accompanying hobby space. On this side of the Pacific Ocean, most retailers don’t carry Japanese prototype models. The access hatch to the Japanese model train market is eBay. I found all kinds of stuff available for international shipping. My itchy trigger finger went to work and I bought a model commuter train. 

Now, I need a layout for it. It won’t run on the B&OCT. 

JR East Yamanote Line map

My idea is to build a small display layout. It would feature a single station serving two train lines. The operational feature will be the arrival and departure of trains from this station. There’s no switching or changing tracks. 

I’m thinking of modeling the Takadanobaba station. It’s a stop and transfer point on both the JR East’s busy Yamanote Line and the Seibu-Shinjuku Railway. The Yamanote Line serves an island-platform station. The Seibu line serves a two-platform station with the platforms on the east side of each track. There’s a connection between the two stations via a pedestrian bridge. That overhead passageway also crosses another two JR East tracks that carry trains on the Saikyo Line and Shonan-Shinjuku Line. The Siebu-Shinjuku Railway is run by an independent company and offers suburban service. 

The JR East's Yamanote Line is a circular 21.4 mile double-tracked line serving 30 stations. (see map) There are 50 trains constantly circling on this line, which during rush hour has 2-minute headways. The only comparable prototype in the U.S. might be the Chicago Transit Authority’s loop trackage in downtown Chicago. It serves eight stations over 1.79 miles. But, there is no longer a dedicated local train circulating. 

A small display layout could be a valuable learning experience for me. It will give me a chance to try scenery on a limited scale. Since we’re in Tokyo, the emphasis will be urban scenery (structures . . . and lots of them). I’m thinking of adding sound, semi- or fully automatic operations. Lots of lights and details. 

My goal is not faithfully replicating the prototype. I don’t have the space. I want a reasonable representation. All the important elements will be captured. I’m going for the effect. I’d like the viewer to think they’re looking at a miniature slice of Tokyo. Can I accurately represent Japanese architecture? Can I replicate the density? Google Earth and Google Maps street view are invaluable resources in my research. 

One interesting fact about the Tokyo commuter train system: it runs on narrow gauge track. I will not be modeling Nn3, but rather the trains are made to run on standard gauge N scale track. The models are closer to 1:150 scale, rather than the standard gauge 1:160 N scale.

Kato Seibu Line 40000 Series commuter train

I'm eager to get started, because a Seibu Line train that I ordered, arrived on Wednesday. I have a few details to add to my concept document, which I'll share soon. Rough track planning has started. I  discovered that I may have less scenic space available than I thought. 

Enough talk. It's time to roll up my sleeves and get started. 

Layout-ready rolling stock

The first two layout ready cars have been completed!!! Prepping them took longer than I expected as I reached a major fork in the road. That fork was the question as to whether I would body-mount couplers on my rolling stock. N-scale freight cars are commonly sold with truck-mounted couplers. They don't work particularly well when cars are shoved. As I have decided to step up my game with this layout and shoot for the highest quality of work and reliability that led me to decide to body-mount couplers. Enter Stephen Van Meter: A much-more experienced N-scaler in town. He offered to help. And I needed it. On November 10 I had surgery to repair my torn rotator cuff on my left shoulder. (Thank goodness I am a righty.) I'm currently in a sling and will be for a couple more weeks. The total recovery is six months. Anyway, Stephen and Bob Moore both offered to help with modeling projects as I heal. I can't do a whole lot. I asked Steve to help with couplers. Last week, I went to his house to see how the magic is done. The conversion job was not as hard as I feared. Earlier this year I decided that Micro Trains couplers and trucks would be the standard on my layout. For existing Micro Trains cars, I can cut off the coupler box from the car's trucks and mount them using itty bitty screws. That will save time and money. The other part of stepping up my game has included being more organized.

That's what the above picture is about. Not only is it the start of a rolling stock inventory, it helps me keep track of what needs to be done to a car before its ready to be put on the rails. The extra-long green rows contain the data for the cars pictured at the top of ths entry. Two down -- a couple hundred more to go!