Benchwork, Trackwork, Wiring / Electronics

Staging Yard wired…

April 23, 2017 admin Leave a comment

I also got the staging yard wired up. I know that I may have led you to believe that I had wired this up before when you saw the photo of a switch and LED lit in a previous post. What I had done was a quick hook up with jumper wires in that shot to see if things would work.

The staging yard is eight tracks wide with three to four 3ft sections of flex track per yard track. I wired each section of flex track individually to make sure there would be no dead sections because of a loose rail joiner. In another word there are a lot of wires pulled to the switches. I have a picture of all the wires pulled to a hole in the fascia, but it’s one of those that is sideways and for whatever reason can’t be corrected.

I then installed all the switches and LED indicators in the fascia and wired those up before mating the fascia to the yard wires.

Back of the yard panel – wired and ready to hooked to the yard.

I should also note that before installing the switches and LED’s that I painted all the fascia panels and used RC striping tape to indicate the track.

I then joined the two and screwed the fascia in place.

Track power switches and indicator LED’s.

Side note: The reason for the oddness in the way the tracks are laid out in the diagram on the fascia is – I had six switches controlling six turnouts, thus when I laid out the track diagram I did it for six tracks. I didn’t figure out till after I drilled the first six holes for switches and LED’s that six turnouts feed into eight tracks. So the above layout is an effort to save the work I had into the fascia.

Along with the track numbers I also added the capacity of each track as measured in forty foot cars as they were most prevalent at the time.

UP-5 panel for the yard and the yard track numbers with track capacity in 40 ft car lengths.

I took the track diagram as far as the New Brighton yard as I have not completely figured it out yet. More on that at a later date. But the track diagram up to that point does include the hidden siding for the power plant. You’ll notice that the tracks for this siding are in yellow. My plan is to have the main in white and the sidings in a different color. At this time most likely in all yellow.

Track diagram of the staging yard on the fascia.

Staging yard lead is in white, the storage tracks for the power plant are in yellow.

Well that’s what I’ve got for now, Till later…

On The Workbench, Structures

On the Workbench #6…

April 16, 2017 admin Leave a comment

While doing the big “cleaning of the workbench” I had to do something with all the kits I had stacked waiting their turn to be put together. Most were either more work then I wanted to do right now or weren’t relevant at this time. There were a handful that didn’t need a lot of work and were relevant, were involved but relevant or just something that sounded like fun.

First were the water towers for the towns of Jackson and Brandon. I had bought these when I was in Milwaukee from the Walther’s store. They were half price so I had picked up two. When I had opened them up when I got home I found that the reason they were half priced was because most of the wire cross bracing between the legs had fallen off. No problem, I cleaned off the old glue, glued back the pieces that were still in the package, cut new wire pieces for those that were missing and painted all the wire pieces silver. Then I added lettering. The finished towers…

Jackson’s water tower repaired and lettered.

Brandon’s water tower repaired and lettered.

Next up was the “Silver Plume Bakery” by Banta Model Works (bantamodelworks.com). My plan is to use it as… a bakery, in the town of Brandon. I got it because finding single story retail kits for a business district is hard. Most are two or more stories high. Not the thing for a small town. Plus the building has character. Being a laser cut kit I kind of expected the thing to fall together as that has been my experience with this type of kit. Not the case here. I would not recommend this kit as I had to do a lot of adjusting, filing and filling, plus a little scratch building to get the kit to work out.

I thought that maybe it was just me or perhaps this one kit, but I was watching Gerry Leone (bonavistarailroad.com) on MR video Plus and he was using the same kit as a hardware store and had different issues, but as troubling. I don’t know if it’s this one kit or their entire line, just be aware that you might have troubles with this line.

That said, I did get it almost all together. I made a counter and a display case for the retail portion of the store as it has huge windows and screams for some type of detain. I went online and found a wallpaper print typical of my time period and printed it out for the store. All that is left is a couple of chairs for the local clientele, lights and something to put in the display case (a picture of bakery delicacies) and then add the roof and it will be ready.

The bakery with the interior and wallpaper installed.

Last up was a Russell Snowplow, A Walther’s Kit (walthers.com). Pretty straight build, it has a fresh paint job on it. I’m not sure if a will leave it that way and show it receiving maintenance on one of the short tracks in the roundhouse or I will weather it and have it sitting outside waiting for winter. It could come down to how much time I have.

I have the road name on but have to come up with the other MOW markings.

That’s it for now, Till next time…

General

On The Workbench #5…

April 10, 2017 admin Leave a comment

For this edition of “On The Workbench” I’m not so much covering what’s happening on the workbench as much as what is happening with the workbench.

For Christmas one of my kids got me a bench top paint rack. Anyone who had seen my workbench would know that I needed one as the paint jars were kind of all over the place. I just didn’t realize that they had been down there and had paid attention to the mess.

Anyways the paint rack needed assembly and had ended up in the to-do pile. Bored, I was looking for something to do and figured I would put it together and see how useful it would be. I don’t know where they got it from, who was the manufacturer or even what country it was from. My guess would be Eastern Europe somewhere and the translation to English was horrendous. Luckily there were pictures and the overall kit was pretty simple and straight forward. Some carpenters glue, masking tape and a couple of clamps and it went together rather well. I don’t have any pictures of it going together.

As every modeler will tell you, no matter how big your workbench is you only ever seem to have 1 to 1 1/2 square feet to work on. In my case my workbench is 2′ x 8′, but I still only have 1sf to work on and the paint rack ended drying on the layout benchwork. Which meant if I wanted to get the paint rack on the bench I was going to have to do some cleaning.

The picture below is a bit misleading as I had done a bunch of cleaning before I took the picture.