First Model Railroading Clinic

It's funny how small, seemingly innocuous things can open up whole new experiences.  You never know what's around the corner.

Barry Silverthorn, producer of Trainmasters.tv, reached out via one of the Yahoo groups I belong to looking for someone willing to give a clinic or two on short notice, as he'd had a cancellation.  Despite never having given a model railroading clinic before, it took me about half a second to decide that I should respond to him and offer my services.

I've had so much fun, and learnt such a great deal, in creating the Pine Street Spur modules as well as implementing Dead Rail, that I couldn't pass up the opportunity to share it with others.

Barry was gracious enough to take a flier on me, so I had three days to prepare my modules and models for the Quinte train show.  Walking through the genesis of the Pine Street Spur would be easy, and I quickly cut some wood to be able to demonstrate the various stages of building the lightweight, "waffle"-type benchwork that I had used.

The second clinic was to be an introduction to battery-operated, wireless control of my locomotives, also known as Dead Rail.  Being the perfectionist that I am, I decided to improve my battery car, but as things always seem to go, I also managed to short out my receiver.  It just stopped working.  Naturally, there was not enough time to get a replacement from Litchfield Station.  Nothing like a little stress test before the big day.

In the end, despite Duncan McCree's best long-distance troubleshooting efforts (thank you, Duncan!), we could not get trains moving before the clinic, so we ended up just having an audience discussion, with plans to go back to the Trainmasters studio once I've installed the replacement receiver.  I'm very much looking forward to it!

The show itself was everything I had hoped it would be.  It was an eye-opening experience to watch Barry orchestrate the taping, and a true pleasure to meet some of the folks in the hobby that I've admired, learnt from, and enjoyed listening to.  It was just plain fun to talk about what I'd created, how it had come to take it's present form, and to answer questions based on the experiences I've had building the Pine Street Spur.

If you ever have the opportunity, I would whole-heartedly recommend sharing your particular skills or accomplishments with others.  In fact, make sure you seek out the opportunities.  Getting out there amongst your friends and peers is the best way to improve your own modelling, help others, and experience that wonderful feeling that sharing with others gives.  You know it from when you help someone in need, or give a present to a child, and it's really not that different when you stand in front of other model railroaders and talk about how to weather, build, detail, or conceptualize a portion of this great hobby that you are comfortable with.  You don't have to be the best, because the simple fact of sharing raises everybody's game.  So get out there!

Now I have two spurs

It didn't take too long after moving in to our new home before plans were hatched on how to fit the Waterloo spur into the basement.  Not just part of the basement, all of the basement.  But one has to be reasonable and work in achievable chunks, so I started with preparing the pre-studded 14' x 12' room with electrical outlets, lighting, and drywall.  This would be where the end of the branch, Elmira, will be located.

I couldn't get too excited about mudding the drywall, so the spur was hung up and I now knew where I needed to cut in bridge pieces required because the existing modules were not an exact fit into the new space.

Next up, organizing all those magazines and hanging up the last couple of modules.  Once they're all set, I'll stack them in the middle of the room and finish the walls.  This will involve coving the upper portion of the corners and then completing the mudding and painting.  I also have to figure out the layout lighting, valance, and ceiling tiles.  This should keep me busy for a while.

A more difficult project will be going back to each module and re-laying the rail.  I've found that ACC does not do a great job of holding the rail securely.  There are stretches where the rail has completely popped out of the tie strips.  I'm going to give Pliobond a try, perhaps reinforced with PC board ties at regular intervals.  Certainly the turnouts are all going to be rebuilt the Joe Fugate hybrid way.  And I think I will add PC board ties epoxied to wood risers at the module joints, based on my experience with the Pine Street spur.

Ah yes, the other "Spur" in my basement.  It has found a home in the room on the other side of the wall from Elmira.  I built supports to hold the Pine Street modules over a bookshelf that I had built to hold my model railroading magazines.  Plans are to hang a stretch of drywall from the ceiling to form a backdrop, and to add lighting.  More details will be forthcoming in a separate post later. 

Starting up again - new home, second layout, Dead Rail experiment

It's been a while since I posted an entry, quite a while.  Once we decided in January 2014 that we would move this year, all work on the layout effectively ended.  Now we're in a new home in the model railroad mecca of Beamsville, ON (no, really, we have a fantastic hobby shop in town and some of the best modellers around), and work has resumed.

When we left our home, I had installed all the modules in our family room on a metal shelf bracket system and laid the track through most of Elmira.  A lighting valance hiding T5 fluorescent bulbs was also installed.  It looked very promising, as shown in this in-progress view:

However, I ran into problems with the trackwork, primarily related to the rail popping off the CV ties strips.  We'll get into that issue in another post.

We moved into a home with an unfinished basement, so naturally I was paralyzed again reconsidering how to best adapt the track plan to my new space, even my choice of prototype was up for grabs.  Over the summer I did make a set of three very lightweight modules to build a scale model of CN's Pine Street spur following an inspiration in Trevor Marshall's Achievable Layouts blog (http://themodelrailwayshow.com/LayoutDesign/?p=2070).  Three turnouts in 12 ft and I could model the mill complex in exact scale length.

I'm still undecided on whether to complete that concept, but with a Tam Valley DRS receiver and transmitter expected any day now, I can always lay the track down held together only with rail joiners and a few tacks, and operate and experiment to my heart's content.  I may still build this as something to take to shows, as Trevor suggested, if only to demonstrate the battery operation to the masses.

For now I'm putting up the drywall in the first basement room to be finished.  Nominally it will be a guest room, but practically speaking it will become the home of Elmira, ON on the CNR ca. 1988.  As it should be.  Questions abound as to layout height (I'm thinking high, i.e. 60"), room & layout lighting (LED strip vs. T5), duckunders, how much to intrude into the room space (i.e. along three walls or go for all four) and the aforementioned question of reliable track laying.  And I suppose also of whether to wire the layout for conventional DCC operation.  All things to be considered in due time.  If you have any thoughts and experiences to share regarding the above, I'd love to hear about and discuss them with you.

ttfn