Here’s my decoder testing setup–just on the carpet in my office.
Motorcycle Factory
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.
Dining Car Complete
I finished adding the rest of the dining car interior, including table cloths, food, a waiter and cook. Also a lot of other little stuff–glasses and bottles, boxes on the kitchen shelves, etc.
This is the waiter with the cheese plate
Continue reading Dining Car Complete
More Dining Car Progress
Here are a couple more shots. I’m especially fond of the waiter with the cheese tray.
Christmas Egg Liner
Here’s video of a Christmas Eggliner making the loop 🙂
Passenger Cars Almost Done
Here are the passenger cars (along with the LGB baggage car and kit-bashed dining car) passing along the mainline.
http://youtu.be/6F9KO8Gfdhk
Snow!
Lighting Buildings w/ Removable Roofs
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
Lots Going On, No Pictures
There are lots of things happening in the G Scale world here at DanzBB. I’ve made more progress on the Neqida passenger cars–they’re all painted, pinstriped, and I’ve put on metal wheel sets. I’ve also installed track power pick-ups in two of them, along with voltage regulators so I can get 5v for the LEDs.
Continue reading Lots Going On, No Pictures
Passenger Cars
Newqida coaches with new paint and interiors, including passengers. A lot of work went into these…
JMRI – What it is and why it’s good
JMRI is a handy tool for anyone running DCC. Essentially, it’s a computer interface for programming DCC decoders and controlling DCC command stations.
Continue reading JMRI – What it is and why it’s good
Restaurant Car Progress
Here’s an overview of the completed restaurant car interior. Next up, weather the roof, add lights, and other electronics.
NCE DCC
Here’s the NCE DCC system I bought, the PH-10R. It’s pretty nice–you get a 10amp booster, command station, and a radio unit so the cab can be used wirelessly. I think that it will be good for running the trains I want.
Dining car
I’ve started work on bashing one of the Newqida passenger cars I bought into a dining/restaurant car. Here’s a look in the window at some of the diners. More later
Local Train Shop
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:
CMS Storefront
This is the initial building of a set of Colorado Model Structures‘ Market Street buildings.
This particular unit is the corner store of the three-building set. I haven’t put on the door or done the windows yet, and the coreners are unfilled and it’s unpainted. But it gives you an idea of what it looks like.
Running the Mallet
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
One of my projects is to add JMRI programming (and possibly control through WiFi-enabled smartphones) to the track.
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
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
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.
