It has been a while since I reported my activities on the room my model railroad is in. I have not been as busy as I should be, mainly because my brother has not had space in his schedule to visit. I have been working on the railroad... in his absence.
I have not looked back at other reports to see where I left off, so some of these may repeat what was covered before.
I actually sorted through boxes that was once in the train room, seeing what can be disposed of, what can be concentrated, and what can go elsewhere. I got rid of two trash bags worth of papers that were dumped into boxes and stowed away, to get them out of sight. In the process, I have emptied a whole bunch of boxes that won't have to go back into the train room closet. None of the boxes were completely full I have gotten to the point where I am digging through the bins and boxes of train stuff. Consolidating is making a difference in being able to find materials later.
I have come to the conclusion that I might not have to purchase anything else again for the railroad. Well, I might need some trees, but they can be made from scratch with little problems and actually look like trees. I have a library of train magazines that tell all about how that can be done using different materials for different kinds of trees.
One thing we needed were momentary switches for the Atlas Snap Action turnouts we use. The yard extension turnouts are all operated manually right now, reaching over the cars and moving the lever on the switch motor. Atlas Snap track switch motors have that great option of moving them manually.
I had purchased a couple of the momentary switches and they were more expensive than I wanted to spend. I was not sure if I wanted to buy any more. These buttons are designed that, you slide the button over to the other position, then push down and it sends the signal for the turnout to move in that direction. These can be used with other devices that call for momentary application of power. While digging through my stuff, I found a bunch of them, with wires and screws. We may need a couple more, but won't worry about that now. I will know when we get to that point. It was fun to find those.
I have gathered some empty coffee containers from at work. I emptied a bin in my sorting, and filled several of those containers with little lost parts details. None of them are full yet, but I have enough people for the layout. I have some little soldiers that I can modify and paint if needed, plus some civilians in various poses. I also have chickens, horses and cows, among my collection. I have loads of trucks and quite a few scale sized cars. I had found out that with various toys, whether it be animals, or vehicles, They tend to make them with the same amount of material. It is like they are made by weight. One simply has to measure the animals of a set to find the ones that are of the right scale. Elephants, cows and dogs are the same size, so one simply measures them. For one project, the elephant would be the right size, for another project, the dog might be. One simply measure to see what fits. Of course, I am working at 1/8th inch equals a foot, scale, so toy animals are not going to fit my railroad unless they are made for it.
With Hot wheels, Match Box and other similar car toys, I had found that they essentially use the same wheel base and same sized tires. It turned out that their big trucks are roughly the right size for what I am doing. They won't survive someone with a scale rule, but they are close enough to pass muster at a glance, and a hell of a lot cheaper than actual scale vehicles available at hobby stores.
Many Die-Cast cars are the right size too. I had gotten some actual scale cars, just the body shell with the wheels, and then got some Die-cast cars that were also the same style and they were very acceptable in size. I am not a purist and am quite satisfied with ACCEPTABLE, and not worry about perfect. Of course, the modelers among us can take these cars, and make interiors, add details, paint them, and make them look even closer to real, and they are still cheaper than the scale stuff since many of those modelers would modify the commercial pieces anyway. That was another aspect of the hobby I was aiming for when I had started building structures. I was not skilled enough at that time to actually take the plunge. I have a couple boxes of regular, well-worn non-scale cars. I guess I will store them until my grandnephew is old enough to play with them. I had accumulated them in my search for the right scale trucks, and got them from my brother’s kids when they went on to other interests.
I have run across a whole lot of tools and parts. I am concentrating them in one general area. That brings me up to something I do not remember if I reported.
Previously I had brought into the train room, two small two-drawer units to hold spare train stuff, mostly broken or retired railroad cars. A few weeks back, I got an idea. I dragged out a dresser out of my bed room, that I was not using. It had some water damage from a leak and I just ignored it.
I got that in place in the train room, moved the contents of the other two units into it. The two bottom drawers are holding what the two other units held and there is plenty more room if I stack things. I still have two more drawers to fill. I have not decided what would be best in there, so I have held off. I could not put the dresser against the wall, because of a wing wall of the closet and the leg of the railroad layout. I also could not put it underneath the railroad as we are really trying to keep that clear for some work we have planned.
Years ago, I got hold of some material called GATERFOAM, which is foam with wood fiber veneer sandwiching it. It is used in the graphics industry, such as for court cases, as backing for pictures.
I took some of the GATERFOAM and screwed the sheets to the top of the dresser so it spans back to the wall. this gives me sort of a work bench along with the storage below. I have some plastic sheeting somewhere but have not found the roll. I will attach that over the top, to protect against spills.
In the dresser, there was a section with a side swinging door. I think it was for holding pants or something like that. I filled that with almost all the barges we have made for the layout.
The barges are simply two by sixes, with wood along the top edge to act like rails, two tracks down the center, and blocks at one end that was to have couplers on them to help hold the cars in place when the barges are moved.
Our plan was to rotate the barges so we can have a good mix of cars, none of the cars would sit in storage, or sit on the layout forever, and give us another operation, loading and unloading barges. I stacked the barges, up on end, into the space in the dresser and they all fit, except for two extra long barges my brother had made.
This gets them out of sight, out of the way, and still easily accessible.
BTW, the two drawer sets are in my bedroom and being used now. Great decision.
In sorting through stuff, I have found detail parts my brother purchased to add to engines, rolling stock, around the layout. I have found many building structure kits, a few have not been built yet. I have enough bridge piers to do most of my layout raised up (I hate hills on the railroad so I will never use them). I have one set still in the box. I then have what looks like three more sets I stacked together in a small box. They are all together now. I am also finding pieces here and there in my digging through other boxes and adding them to the set when I can.
I still have more boxes to dig through. and check out some other bins to see what they have and what might be consolidated. I am making headway.
One problem with this project is that things I think we will need in the near future, gets stacked on top the railroad. it is now a mess. Eventually, I will have everything where they belong. I might not be able to put my hands directly on something I need, I will have a better chance of finding them, or knowing quickly that I don't have them.
I have purchased some items for the railroad over the past two months. I had gone to a model railroad swap meet and picked up some left hand and right hand switch motors for the atlas switches. A set of five each. Mom had purchased a big roll of flux core electrical solder at a yard sale and my brother had me make a spool out of wood, something quick and rough, and we wound about fifteen feet of the solder onto my spool so we can now solder wire on the layout. The soldier I had, needed a flux as it was solid core, and I have not run across the bottle of liquid flux my brother was using. I also got some speaker wire at a yard sale, along with purchasing a small spool of wire. These are to connect the switches to the turnouts.
I drew the control panel for the switch yard, with the momentary buttons drawn to scale. I gave the pictures to my brother and he was going to make it out of sheet metal. I do drawings for a living and have a similar version of the program at home. The drawing part is easy for me.
Switch-yard control panel graphic with the Atlas Snap Action switches drawn to scale. t
All of this adds up to getting a step closer to having the railroad operating. The big thing is to get things sorted, collated, and in place. It takes time.
Because of all this, I have, been working on the railroad.
Model Railroading Because of the holiday, My brother was unable to come over this week and I really did not get to do much of anything in the train room.Sunday, we talked trains while we were working wood. Our discussion was on how the railroad should be operated. We explored nearly a couple dozen ways to move the cars around the layout, and even where on the map the different sidings should be, which would effect the operations of the layout.WE came to one big conclusion. We have one well designed track plan (layout). It fit every operation option we explored and there are more we could come up with if we put our minds to it, or were willing to go more complicated. Our track plan is based on moving and placing cars, switching, and not just seeing trains run around the track in circles. We can do that, but that is not what our layout was really designed for. Watching or listening to trains run laps is soothing and calming, but it does not keep you interacting with the railroad. The trick to keep a model railroad layout alive is to get you constantly interacting with it when you are around it. That is where switching comes in handy. You are not watching trains run, you are actually part of the action, making decisions, dealing with simple problems. It becomes challenging.One can look at a model railroad like a game, where you design and build the game board (the track plan) and you then make up the rules at which the game can be played. What we found to make things minimum interesting, was to choose a start point on your railroad, and make up your train. Write on a piece of paper where each car will be dropped off on the layout. Then look over the layout and write down which cars will be picked up. then run your train, swapping the cars as you go. You make sure other cars you are not taking, go back to the spot they were at. You will find yourself with a challenging game. Cars will not be where you want them to be, and you might have to stop and figure out which car is going where. One can get complicated on the switching, where you have trains running by, following clock time, having trains meet to exchange passengers and cars, have cards made that tell each car a destination and then where to go from there. We could change the order that our sidings are visited, how many laps one does between stops, Whether we run one train with one of us as the engineer and the other as the conductor making the decisions on the moves or each running separate trains. A well designed track plan allows one to explore every one of these decisions as they come to you. I have explored many hobbies over the years. Except for Woodworking, in which sales pays for the tools, model railroading is the cheapest hobby when one divides the costs over the pleasurable hours and years the materials will last. I have a saying for every other hobby I have been involved in. "I need to get into something cheaper like diamond or gold collecting.”
Railroading Over the week, I got nearly everything, except for some debris, out of the train room. My brother came over today for the first time in years. Our main thing was to get a feel for what we had, what we needed, and what we should do next. One project between now and next week, is to locate tools we are going to need to do the work at hand. I have to locate the soldering iron and the palm sander first thing. We can lay some track with those on hand. The soldering iron is to solder the rails of the track sections together, and to solder wires to the tracks. The palm sander is for the cork road bed. We glue down the cork first, then we use the sander to even it out, to make it smooth. Then we glue the tracks down to the cork. Our last act is to use a track gauge and super glue the rails into gauge so they are not going to move out of gauge. It is not uncommon for rails to lean in or out or get loose. That can cause derailments. No one wants that. Super-gluing the rails into gauge solves that problem. This is a PERMANENT railroad layout. My layout is built with ATLAS SNAP TRACK SWITCHES. These are thought of as really cheap switches. We found that once fixed in gauge, they are excellent switches. We also like the snap motors that go with them. They look nothing like anything in the real world, but they are nearly idiot resistant and very easy to get working. Years ago, my brother installed slow motion under table switch motors. It took a couple hours to install each one and he never could get them working right. I found I need to look at the contents of the bins beneath the switch yard and also empty a couple shelves there. I have no idea what all that stuff is. My brother will aim for coming over every Wednesday, but there will be days it won't happen. He is an independent contractor and many times works real late at night. If that happens, he won't be coming over. My brother pointed out that I left off a crossing switch in my drawing from the inner loop of the layout and the outer loop. In the accompanying picture, show how my railroad layout developed. I saw a model railroad layout in a hobby shop, using MARKLIN products, which is made in Germany. I loved the railroad layout. I drew it up, making a few changes, and purchased the track. My brother built the layout for me. For those not into trains, a Run-a-round is a way for an engine to get to the other end of a car, or string of cars. They run around them. The second picture is what I came up with for my design with the modifications. I considered this to be the perfect model railroad layout, better than anything I had ever seen in a magazine. We had one track coming off the outer oval to leave the 4x8.
The third picture shows modifications we made to the layout just before we stopped model railroading. We added a switch to the outside of the outer oval to create a run-a-round. WE can now turn our trains around so they can push or pull off the layout as needed. This made the best railroad layout I have ever seen, even better. That is what happened this week. Will see what happens over the coming week.
I dug into my train room a few times this week, moving the stored stuff elsewhere. I still have a mess against the wall, and the floor is still a mess, but I have made headway. I will be doing more this week. Because the closet was almost completely empty, I took all the structures off the railroad and put them on the closet shelf.
This got them out the way. Also, handling them showed me what can be used again as soon as I am ready to "redecorate" the layout, and what needs to be rebuilt. Most of the buildings I personally built, were tiny and I used a lot of glue. Several of the buildings I got at yard sales or were given to me started coming apart with walls separating. I have no idea when I will ever get time to the structures that need repairs or rebuilding. With the railroad layout surface clear, I took my battery powered circular saw and tried to cut a slot. that little saw had very little power. I had not yet cut all the way through the three quarter inch plywood when it ran out of energy. It is second- hand, small, and not really powerful I will keep trying to cut the wood over time, but this one time was enough for the moment. It tells me that I should bring in an electric circular saw or be patient, or even accept the 4x8 as one big sheet as it is. 
I need to vacuum and scrub the entire railroad surface. I have screws, bits of wires, and lots of dirt on top, along with plaster from previous scenery and other projects. I will do so later, but after I give up on,,, I mean finish cutting the slot in the railroad. I want to wait until the worst of the mess is done before I do serious cleaning on the railroad surfaces.
The brick on the corner there, is an important track laying tool. You need the track held in place while the glue dries. It also can be used to hold pieces of projects in place till glue dries as it does not move easily.
My brother and I have been involved in model railroading since the 80s. My brother was the driving force for years, and still does most of the technical and electrical work around the layout. Years ago, My brother used to drop by each week on Wednesday. He would be between jobs and stop by before heading home. Some years ago, my nephew then started working with him. My nephew worked three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, about twelve hours a day. That killed the chances of my brother coming to visit. Since my nephew was living with him. My brother would have to go home, then come back out. That is always a pain. I tend to plan to never stop at home while I am out and about. It is hard to get out of the house again. The model railroad became a shelf, rather than a model railroad. The last time I ran it was three years ago. The cars derailed when I was not looking. My nephew is finally moving into his own place, which happens to be his Mother In Law's old place, which happens to be about a block away. My brother, in about a month, will be coming to visit to do model railroading again. I now have a project. I have to clean out the train room, get the railroad layout cleaned up, and ready for work. 
This picture is how it looks after I pulled about half the stuff out of the room. AS you can see, I have more to do. I will empty the closet clear the floor. I will remove the junk from the tops of the railroad. Finally, I will remove the structures (which are just setting in place, not permanent, and move the cars if necessary, from the layout so I can do a little work. I will vacuum the layout clean, clean the tracks with a track eraser, after I cut a slit down the center of the railroad layout. This is a four foot by eight foot railroad layout was really difficult to get up into my fourth floor apartment. I want to cut a slit down the center so that when it has to be moved, It will be easy to separate the two sections so that I will be moving two eight by two foot wide sections, rather than one big four by eight piece. Just separating two pieces of track and a few wires, and then removing them from the frame it is on, is all that is needed.
I will also use that slit to put a low view block, designed to aid in the belief that there are two different cities there. 
This drawing is what my model rail road layout and room looks like The section along the upper wall of the drawing is on a shelf of an metal industrial shelving unit. After that work is done, I will locate my structures, the industries of the layouts which are just setting on the layout, so that we have places for our trains to visit. I will cover more on this railroad layout and my model railroading later, along with news of my cleaning project.
