Wiring

The thing I've been spending most of my time on the for the past year or so is wiring. The track plan came with pretty detailed information, but the components are expensive. (As a friend said, "railway capital is always in short supply.") So I'd buy a couple of bits and install them, wait a couple of months, save, buy a couple more. Finally last fall I was able to buy some wire in bulk and had accumulated enough of the pieces to feel like I could begin wiring. At Thanksgiving I built that little shelf thing to hold the switching components and began attaching parts to it. With a little bit of Christmas money that came my way I was able to purchase the last couple of switches. So I think I have everything I need to finish wiring everything. (I did realize this afternoon that I need to change out one piece of plain track for a terminal section, but that should be a fairly inexpensive fix.)

I finally put something together today than had been puzzling me for several months. There are 12 sections of track in the layout each with its own power control. I have been able to spot in the plans where each was and understand how each was supposed to be wired, except for section 8. I couldn't find it anywhere. Finally today I found a lone "8" not-near-enough to the track in that section. Section 8 does not use a terminal track piece like in other sections but a pair of terminal joiners. Therefore, it looked different in the plan, with no clear link between the digit and the place where the terminal joiners go. I had never noticed the 8 positioned as it was, kind of orphaned from its track location. But today, finally, it all came together.

I have always been nervous working with electricity; the last time I messed with something around the house involving electricity, I called my dad to get him to talk me through it. Also I recently found a discussion board that includes a lengthy thread helping someone else who built this same layout. He encountered a problem and got lots of help, all of it in the discussion. That has been very helpful. The coolest thing I've got working is the turntable. I was able to get the electric control, so I can make it spin to each of the spurs by working a switch rather than using a hand crank.

Of course the big thing in model railroading is the transition over the past few years from direct electric modelling to digital. I'm definitely in the stone age camp. But digital does open up lots of possibilities. One obvious thing that some folks have encountered is the ability to have a locomotive equipped with a camera send a feed to a video monitor, so guests can get a "track-view" perspective of the layout. I've got no illusions. On top of everything else, the new stuff is very expensive. Maybe next time.

Layout

Still in the catching-up mode with this post. In this image you can see the layout of track. It's pretty much what I had in Richmond. It's on a 4' x 8' plywood base, painted gray. You can probably see the seam indicating where it used to be in two long halves. I'll be trying to disguise that later with scenery. The only big difference is that the table is now much higher than it could be in the attic on Junaluska Drive. It was about 14-inches because of the short height in the attic, and now is about 36-inches. And the legs all have wheels, so I can re-position it fairly easily.

This layout is from a book I got years ago; the layout is called the "Eastern Grand Trunk." I've had all the track and all the cork roadbed for some time. A couple of features are the 2 loops on one and and three on the other. Right now the whole thing operates off a single power lead, so I can have a single engine going in one direction. Ultimately I'll be able to run one train clock-wise and a second counter-clockwise thanks to some fancy wiring. This layout also includes a turn-table and a small switching yard in the center plus a couple of spurs.

Once all the "stuff" is out of the middle of the layout there should be pretty good space to add some nice scenery. I'll post images of all that later.

The early years

This is the train I got as a kid. It's a Lionel O-gauge train. I think these are all original pieces. There used to be a space satellite associated with the flatbed car, but it's long gone. Several years ago I had a shop clean up the loco and get it working again and got new (un-rusty) track and a new power supply. It works pretty well these days: it throws sparks just like it's supposed to. Even though the Christmas tree was up on a table this year (because of the new cat), we put the train underneath.

Model...

...railroading, that is. I got an HO train when I was 10-11, along with some track. I got it going, but never did much with it. It got tucked away and moved about for years. I finally hauled it out when we lived in Richmond. I started putting together a layout in the attic of our house on Junaluska Drive. It never really got that far, though. I struck it and packed it all away and brought everything on the move to Black Mountain. Here at least we had a little bit of space to put the layout. I mentioned this year that I was ready to add some scenery to the thing, and stuff magically appeared under the Christmas tree! When I was showing Greg and Kristen the layout, Greg mentioned that I had never blogged about the set-up. So herewith the genesis.

This was the first set of four cars I got, a locomotive and three pieces of rolling stock. The first batch of track I had made a simple oval. I had no switches nor scenery. But it was easy to set up and get working. I did at one point buy a book of track plans and picked the one I wanted to work on. But it was years before I actually did anything with it. When I began working on the layout in Richmond, the locomotive was no longer running; I had to pay about $25 to get someone to work it over and get it back in shape (it is again no longer working and needs a bit of an overhaul). The access to the attic in Richmond was very narrow (I don't think I have a single picture of the set-up in Richmond). The layout I wanted to build required a 4 x 8 foot piece of plywood for the base; so I had to halve that length-wise in order to get it into the attic, and then fashion it back together once it was there. That took 2-3 years. Over the course of time I managed to gather all the cork roadbed and track needed to my layout and a few new pieces of rolling stock, as well as a second locomotive. All that took another 6-7 years. You get the idea. More later...