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Motorcycle Factory

Buildings

I’m in the process of converting a Piko brewery into a motorcycle factory

The building doesn’t have a loading dock or other provision for getting motorcycles into the boxcars, so the first step was to raise it enough that the floor of the factory came out near railcar height. I accomplished this by building a box and topping it with a scored and painted piece of plastic to represent the wooden dock deck. Then I faced the lower portion with cast stone. There also wasn’t any way to get out the back of the building, so I added a roll-up freight door made ot styrene strips.


Continue reading Motorcycle Factory →

Lighting Buildings w/ Removable Roofs

Buildings

I have a few of the Pola buildings on my layout and am in the process of building a couple more. I enjoy detailing the interiors and I also like to add lights, which makes a removable roof important–it’s much more difficult to replace the lights or fix anything that goes wrong in a glued-shut structure (ask me how I know 🙂 ) However, this is tricky here in central Kansas, where the prairie winds regularly gust to 40mph and a roof can’t just sit on top of the walls. Continue reading Lighting Buildings w/ Removable Roofs →

Local Train Shop

General Backyard Stuff

It’s a funny thing–I got into garden railroading here in central Kansas, a couple hundred miles from the nearest big city–but it turns out that there’s a neat store “near” here in Wichita called Garden Railway Gizmos that carries plenty of large scale stuff. The owner, Claudia, is knowledgeable, friendly, and always a pleasure to do business with. If you happen to be in this area, you should check it out:
garde-railway-gizmos

Running the Mallet

DCC, Locomotives, Rolling Stock, Trains, Videos

Here’s my LGB 2085D Mallet pulling a rake of HSB coaches. Near the end of the video, you can clearly see the pulsed smoke until timing the smoke puffs to the sound card chuffs. Pretty cool

Of course, you’ll have to ignore the moon-like landscape in the background, as I’m all out of gardening funds for the moment 🙂

Working on RaspberryPi

DCC

One of my projects is to add JMRI programming (and possibly control through WiFi-enabled smartphones) to the track.

logo-jmri

I recently built a new RaspberryPi with a serial board and am testing JMRI. It’s a little slow, but definitely usable. If I switch my RaspbianOS to headless, I think that would fix most of the lag.

Bought a rake of coaches

Rolling Stock

Although I have some nice Piko and LGB stuff, my budget just can’t handle new (or even relatively lightly used) LGB rolling stock. However, I really wanted a set of passenger Cars to pull behind my LGB 2085D Mallet. A bit of searching showed me that the Newqida coaches, although not of LGB quality, could be painted and otherwise modified to give a good representation of Harz coaches appropriate to pull with my 0-6-6-0. Continue reading Bought a rake of coaches →

Kids train

Rolling Stock

Here are some cars that I gave the girls to paint. These are Hartland Locomotive Works gondolas from their “make and take” min collection. The caboose belongs to the boy–who I didn’t trust with paint.
kids-train