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Builder's Railroad Project: in the Beginning...

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  • Well done, Builder.

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    • Thanks! But of course the real test will be a month or so from now when TRAINS ACTUALLY RUN ON IT. Then I'll truly be happy.

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      • My American Beauty SC250 Resistance Soldering Unit arrived today. Everything is made in American. Even the foot switch controller is made in Connecticut. I will take it down to the shop tonight and give it a "road test". I'll take pictures and write a review when I've had a chance to learn how to use it. It produces only 2.5 volts at high current. It's also designed to not generate stray currents that can damage other electrical components.

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        • Resistance Soldering

          I just did the first test and it worked nicely. I soldered the rail joiners on the tracks leading into the open end of the swing gate. I wanted these tracks to be more secure than the pins would provide. The joints took about 8 seconds to complete. I had the control at 60%. At first I did 30% and it didn't bring the joint to heat in the maximum 20 second duty cycle recommendation. I could probably notch the power up a bit more since the rails have a lot of mass and you soldering to steel. I'm pleased with the workmanship and this things going to get a lot use.

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          • Work Continues:

            Started marking out and cutting Flexibed roadbed. I also installed the Ross Bed under the switches. I'm not gluing anything down yet... just getting everything in position. I don't want to separate the tracks any more than absolutely necessary so I'm just going to lift the track out of the way when I start gluing things down.

            I realigned the 3rd track from the front. The problem with the kink was the connecting track between the #8 cross-over switches being too short AND the #8 being in the wrong place. Moving the switch more to the right and adding the longer connecting track worked and the track is nice and straight leaving the switch. Unfortunately, my Victorian station is too wide to go between track 2 and 3, and will either have to go above track 3 or go somewhere else and I'll use a smaller footprint station to go in the inner-track spot.

            Here's the marking gauge in use.



            The gauge allows me to mark the outside edge of the Flexibed so I can place the roadbed without consideration of the track's placement above it. The rough texture beats the heck out of the Sharpie's tip, but it's a cheap price to pay to get the lines nice and straight. Oh... and I have been using the laser level to strike straight lines. The only drawback is that the room light need to be off to see it reflected off the center rail. It's a cheap Harbor Freight Tools item, and it shows. The laser exits the nose at an angle that is not in line with the unit itself. I don't believe that's the way it should be.

            Here's a couple of shots showing the Ross Bed under the switches, the Flexibed and the marked up OSB for the roadbed.



            On the top #8 switch in the above picture , you'll see a lot of wires coming out of it. In the previous layout I was using Ross relays on these switches to activate or de-activate the various center rails so they would work well with engines with short roller base distance. It is a significant complication, but may be necessary again. Also, sitting on the track is not a boxcar... it's a brick. I'm using bricks to weigh down and stabilize the track after it's straightened and being marked. I'm doing this instead of screwing blocks down over the track because it's just easier.



            Because I added the extra sidings, I was short some Ross Bed. I called Steve at Ross and ordered 1 each of a RH #100, a RH #4 and a RH O-96. I may also run out of the roadbed since my order was predicated on a slightly smaller design. I don't know the smallest quantity that Flexibed is offered, but I'll cross that bridge when and if I come to it.

            I also found out that if you're going to ballast Ross Bed, you don't have to paint it. That's a huge relief. I wasn't looking forward to painting it especially since the fit is tight unpainted and painting could make it worse.

            The only area that requires any particular care is fitting the roadbed to the angular rails in the long switches. You have to trim the roadbed pieces so they nest together correctly. With a new sharp blade in the utility knife, this stuff cuts very easily...much easier than their old Vinylbed product which was made with compressed vinyl particles.

            I'm off again tomorrow and will continue working my way around the pike. I'm also going to redesign the control panel graphics to accommodate the new trackage. I was going to make the same size as before... 30", but I'm going to enlarge it to 36" wide to give more room for switch controls.
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            • I've completed about 75% of the roadbed fitting and I'm happy to report that I'm just going to make it with the Flexibed that I bought. Since it comes in quantities of 12 strips, I ended up with enough extra to do the whole job.

              I also redid the artwork for the control panel. I now have 26 switches and therefore have used up all the letters in the alphabet, which obviously means I can never again buy any more switched. Yeah... right... like that's ever going to happen.

              I've got one area that's bugging me. The crossing in the center of the layout has a slight kink on the track that goes north and south. If I rotate the crossing to straighten it, the East-West track gets the same kink. There's something amiss in the geometry and I can't seem to find out where it is. I think I'll power up just that section of track and run several different locos through the area to see if anything derails. If they track through it, I won't worry about it. If they have a problem, I'm going to have to trace back from this point to see where I can add or remove some track to straighten the approach.



              The toggle switches still represent cab-control switches for each insulated block. Depending on when I purchase all the digital equipment, I may not need all those DPDT switches. I would just need them for the yard tracks that I'd want to isolate. Question: if you use Z4k tracks with the latest DCS, can you isolate sections with toggle switches?

              By the end of the weekend I should be ready to start gluing roadbed and track in place. I can't wait to run trains on this thing.
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              • Roadbed Fitted

                I finished fitting all of the roadbed and worked some more trying to de-kink that crossing. It's almost right, and it's about as good as I can get it without redoing a lot of track. My next step will be to glue it all down.

                I aligned everything pretty good using eye and the laser level. I just can't imagine how much work it's going to be to paint all this steel and ballast the layout, but it's going to happen.

                Here's the troublesome crossing from two views. Do you think the trains will have a problem going through it. I'm going to power up the segments and run some big iron through it and see what happens.



                Looking this way the run is straight. If I bend the crossing to straighten the other direction, this one gets crooked. I removed about half of the kink by reducing the size of the straight track leading in from the left and realigning the curve.



                Here's the overview showing all the track with roadbed underneath. Nothing is fastened down, but it looks ship shape.



                And here's a reverse shot of the main line showing how the alignment is.



                And lastly, here's a picture of the American Beauty SC250 Resistance Soldering Unit about which I've written this past week.



                I don't know if I'll be in the train room tomorrow. If not, the next work session will be later in the week. After gluing down, all the rails will be painted rail brown to simulate the rust that coats all railroad rails except the running surface. The light colored material under all the switches is Ross Bed from Ross Custom Switches who also made all the track on the layout. It doesn't need paint as long as I ballast it. I really don't want to paint it if I don't have to.
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                • Gluing has Commenced

                  My grandson and I started gluing track yesterday. We ran into a problem that we didn't think would happen. After all the careful fitting and tracing of the track and roadbed, we must have started gluing a little too far the right (swing gate end) and the 25 ft. run of straight track came out a quarter inch short of the switch at the left end. We had already glued in the first 12 ft section and it had already cured too much to rip it up. So we had to relax the track pin joints enough so it mated correctly at the left end. I found out where the 1/4" went... it showed up at the mating track at the swing gate. The track is firmly glued so I'll have to take out the Dremel and trim back the now-excess track. We'll have to be more careful moving forward.

                  We were challenged getting the switches into their respective Ross Bed urethane pads. We were using a soft mallet to tap them in, but this afternoon I found a much better way: using as quick clamp with the thick rubber jaws to squeeze the switch into all the nooks and crannies of the roadbed. We then used super glue to permanently hold the two parts together. The clamp puts more generalized pressure and doesn't damage either the switch or the roadbed.

                  We're having to plan out the gluing routing so we don't create a situation where it's too hard to get the track reconnected when everything around a section is glued down.

                  We're using Loctite's general purpose structural adhesive. I'm not partial to this brand or Liquid Nails, but since Loctite is made by Henkel, and Henkel is paying my retirement, I try to give them as much business as I can.

                  Here's the no. 1 grandson spreading the adhesive before gluing down the Flexibed. That stuff goes down like a dream. Very easy to get it to conform to curves—especially the wide ones I'm using—and sets up in about 10 minutes. These are iPhone pics so the quality isn't up to my usual standard. I only have a regular iPhone 4. The camera in the 4s or 5 is supposedly better.



                  Here's our "sophisticated gravity-fortified ballast & track restraining system" at work helping the track cure evenly. The previous owner of the house was the original owner and the house was a custom build. She was nice enough to leave a pile of bricks in the garage which have come in handy more than once. They also served as weights while gluing on the wing skins of the B-17 RC plan that I built.



                  Yesterday we completed the swing bridge and the two mainline straight sections in the front of the layout. We also experimented with super-elevating the outer curve track on the swing bridge. We glued a 20 gauge insulated wire to the roadbed about a 1/4" inside the outside tie edge using hot melt glue, then glued the track down with the Loctite adhesive. It looks and works nicely, but my grandson feels it's too much effort for the effect it gives, so we may not do it elsewhere. We reduced the elevation to zero about 3 inches from each end so the track won't be tilted when it has to mate up with the stationary sections of each end.

                  I also just received the last three pieces of Ross Bed that I was missing so I went downstairs after dinner and joined them to their switches. So all the switches are ready to be reinserted into the layout. After spending 3 hours to glue just that small section, we both realized how much work it's going to be to glue the rest of it.

                  I may have a source for the roofer's gravel to use as an inexpensive substitute for expensive model RR ballast. The roofing company, where I'm consulting, has it and will share it with me. They've got white, black and gray, which would make a nice mixture of lighter for mainline and darker for sidings and yards.

                  My grandson has also weighed in on where the town should go. He wants to put a mountain in the far right corner and would rather have the town on the front left corner in the big circle made by the return loop. Here's the revised plan...AGAIN!. It's actually where I originally had it. I like the mountain against the backdrop too! I'll name the town, "Hilltown" or "Circleville" or something like that...

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                  • Gluing Track continued

                    I got the chance to do some more track gluing yesterday and today. It's going okay, but I still keep getting strange fit problems even after thinking that everything was in line. Unfortunately, I used too much Loctite structural adhesive in the first two tracks and ripping it up to change location is all but impossible. The track at the gate was therefore sticking out too far and fouling the track on the swing gate. At first I thought about trimming it back right at the gap, but quickly realized that the position of these switches had a ripple effect that would add that quarter inch back through many other tracks, so I trimmed the excess from the two tracks leading into the switches. This worked! It brought the tracks at the swing gate in perfect end-wise alignment.

                    For other tracks, I've been using less adhesive. The tracks won't be going anywhere. There is still a couple of places where there are some hitches in the track. It's especially challenging to get the alignment on the diagonal tracks between #8 cross-over switches. Here's a picture of the misalignment. I've tried rolling equipment through the switches and everything works fine. I'm pretty confident that engines won't derail here either.

                    The red line shows how it would look if it was straight.



                    The above picture clearly shows the Ross Bed under this switch. I finally figured out a good way to get the switch nestled into the roadbed... I used a large quick clamp with nice rubber jaws. The clamp could reach into the center of the switch thereby exerting equal pressure on both sides. Working from one end to the other, all the switches bedded down nicely. It worked much better than a rubber mallet. After insertion, super-glue in strategic locations keeps everything where it should be...forever.

                    Here are the four tracks that are now fastened down, so I'm about 25% through the gluing process. These are the most difficult to align tracks (except for the crossing), so after these, it will go faster.



                    One of the cars I'm using to test the track is this Lionel Santa-Fe 18" passenger car. These were some of the last train purchases before I was laid off in '09 and they look spectacular behind the A-B-B-A Santa Fe F3s pulling them. This picture shows the superelevation at the swing bridge. It looks so good my grandson and I decided to do it on some of the other outer high-speed mainline curves. The line illustrates the tilt.



                    Lastly, here's a closeup of that cars trucks. I am just blown away at having a fully equalized, sprung passenger truck under these cars. They make all my other passenger equipment look very toy-like. The cars have full, multi-colored interiors, flush windows and great end detail too. Lionel did a great job with these. (I just couldn't help taking this picture.)

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                    • It's got to be Murphy's law that once you get away from the simple oval or circular track, large setups like this never line up like you expect them to. When I was a youngster, I remember setting up my HO trains on a 4x8 board and once I got beyond the oval, alignment problems always cropped up!

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                      • Didn't do any track gluing today... had to work at a real job... but did some design work on RR Track and CorelDraw PhotoPaint to update the landscaping/scenery some more. I realigned the Hilltown so there was bridges connecting it in a four directions. I extended the town's base towards the corner which accomplished two goals: it eliminated a bridge in at least one direction, and it provided more room for buildings. I am purposefully showing the gas and fire stations right up front. Both of them have (or will have) detailed interiors and or other things of interest. I have two other buildings with interiors that also need to be somewhere in town where they can be viewed. There's a lot more buildings in this picture than I currently own so there's room for expansion.

                        Both tunnels clear any switches. I don't want any switches to be out of sight.



                        Pretty cool how I got those cloud backdrops in there, don't you think. Before I pasted and warped the clouds, I masked and copied a portion of the mountain, laid the clouds in, and then pasted the mountain chunk back over the clouds.



                        I'm off tomorrow and will be gluing track again.
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                        • I love the tunnels. That red mountain looks like it has all kinds of possibilities for an interesting buildup of some kind. Perhaps a missile base or command center?
                          sigpic"If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees.
                          If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children."

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                          • Hmmm.... Missile base.... my grandsons would love it, my wife wouldn't like it one bit. I should probably think about it. Besides grades, tunnels are the best. Of course none of these tunnels are very mysterious; trains just go in and out quickly. I will have access to the tunnels from underneath since the landscaping will be hollow.

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                            • I wasn't supposed to, but I did get some track glued today.

                              I glued on a 5 foot section on the elevated section in the half-hour between getting home from work and dinner. There was a small dip in the left-hand upgrade portion of track on the elevated section. I took some of it out by relocating a cleat upward, but didn't eliminate it. Instead of worrying about it, I'm just putting some cardboard shims under the track to smooth it out. The dip worries me since it makes the engine think that it's going up a more severe grade for a short bit, and with a heavy train, can stall the engine. If I go digital and can run pusher engines, this is no problem, but running singly it could be one. The shims eliminate the dip.

                              The roofing company where I'm consulting has some surplus 4 x 8 sheets of 4" Styrofoam that they want to give me for the layout. I have a hot wire Styrofoam cutter, but it isn't up to the task of carving up something that big, so today I bought a heavy-duty, hot knife foam cutter from MicroMark. With this tool I'll be able to cut the stuff down to size. I'd rather use plastic foam instead of the alternative. The alternative is cardboard strips held together with hot glue, then covered with plaster cloth or window screen soaked with polyurethane expanding foam.

                              As you guys know, Styrofoam cutting is very messy if you attack it with saws and normal cutting tools, but it cuts like butter when you use hot tools, and it doesn't generate a gazillion little static-seeking beads. Normally, model railroaders gravitate towards the green or pick foam that not made from beads since it cuts with less mess.

                              My first experience with Styrofoam bead board was carving a crocodile head for a float in Michigan State's float parade that ran through campus on the Red Cedar River. They really were FLOATS. This was in 1966. It made a complete mess of the dorm room! It was a great float depicting Peter Pan, Captain Hook, the Croc with the clock and a pirate ship. I don't know if they still do this every Spring. It was fun. Anyone out there know if it still goes on? Or if not, when did it stop? Unfortunately, this was long before the age of everyone walking around with a digital camera and I have very few pictures from that era considering I almost spent five years there.

                              The foam will make up the bulk of the bases for the mountain and the elevated city. I'll hollow it out wherever I have to gain access to hidden tracks in tunnels. There could still be some plaster work needed to make a realistic surface, but that's going to be a very small part of the total mass.
                              Last edited by Builder 2010; 31 Jan 13,, 01:30.

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                              • Gluing, gluing, gluing...

                                Track gluing continues apace with lots of help from #1 grandson again. I worked a little on my own this week, but we really did some serious work both yesterday afternoon and today. Both kids slept over. His younger brother did a little, acted as a gofer and had some fun running my Veranda Turbine back and forth on the 10 feet of track to which we added some power to charge its battery. It hadn't run in 4 years and just started right up sweet as can be. He was just 4 when the engine last ran and could barely remember it. Because of all the insulated blocks, trains can't run anywhere. #1 grandson wanted to connect a bunch together just to run trains, but that's not as easy as it sounds and I dissuaded him from wasting time doing that.

                                He's also getting very excited about trying out the new resistance soldering unit when we solder some new jumpers to the track.

                                I made an iPhone movie of the the first engine being powered up after a 4 year hiatus. It's my MTH GE Veranda Turbine, and one of my favorites. But I always end up making movies with my iPhone that come out upside down and I don't know how to make them rightiside up. Any ideas of how to turn them around once they're in the camera. It was the "world's most boring movie" being an engine with it's blowers running and an occasional announcement between an imaginary engineer and control tower. But it did run, and ran well.

                                The outer and inner loops are completely done. All that remain is one short leg of the reverse loop re-entry and the yard tracks on the front side of the layout. There'll be easy since they're not as length critical.

                                Here's the "Gravity-assisted, track gluing augmentation system" (GATGAS) aka "bricks", helping the last part of the outer loop track and roadbed get adhered to the OSB. The tracks on both sides of the swing-gate are in place and align perfectly. That whole swing-gate deal exceeded my expectations.



                                I ran out of the Loctite hi-strength adhesive from The Home Depot, so I went to the local ACE Hardware to buy some more. They didn't have any low VOC Loctite products so I got some DAP. It didn't have the tack like the Loctite, and it seems to be less able to bond to the foam roadbed quickly, so today I went back and got some more Loctite. I also bought more lumber for another girder, some more risers and the new control panel housing along with a piece of clear acrylic for the panel face. The old panel just isn't large enough to house the new designs wiring.

                                There were a couple of stubborn spots that kept popping up when the bricks were removed. In one instance, the track ended up with a 3/4" gap at a switch on the back inner loop. Like in other places, now that the track is being final fitted, I've gotten some movement either too close or too far away. I cut another piece of track to properly filled the gap, but I cut it just a tad long so the track is under a little compressive stress. To ensure the glue cures solidly, I fabricated a scehme to hold everything overnight. Once the glue cures, it shouldn't move any longer.



                                I'm not working tomorrow and expect that the yard tracks will be finished by then. I may need more bricks and there are more to use in the garage, If the track has no stresses, the bricks can come off in about 10 minutes. The glue isn't cured, but it holds by then. The speed of the work is essentially limited by the number of bricks. Before running trains, I will vacuum up the brick dust.

                                I realized that with the mountain going in the far right back corner, there is now a great place to continue that new back siding to the base of the mountain where a coal mine can go. I've been itching to build one of BTS' great coal mines, but could never figure out where to put it. Being that the city is on the far other side, it now makes logical sense to have rural and urban environments.

                                Here's the artist impression of putting the BTS Miller Creek Tipple into that location. It fits, but it's pretty expensive. I may consider scratch building something. There's plenty of prototype photos on Google. I really like BTS' Cabin Creek Tipple but it's sold out. Anyone know if anyone has one that's not being built?



                                Next step is wiring followed by ballasting.
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