Nearly two years ago, I made a video of the Z scale railroad I built for Lynn, and posted it to YouTube. It has just over 20,000 hits on it now—by far, my most popular video. I strongly suspect that the popular appeal of this video stems not from the railroad, or its electronics, or even the notorious “disco light.”
It’s gotta be the soundtrack, I swear.
I’ve been wanting a Baldwin Centipede in N scale for 30 years, and finally, there’s one coming out soon. I had the money in my hands, but let the opportunity slip past. I bought an oscilloscope instead.
The trouble began a few years ago, at the Syracuse show. I had just dropped a sizeable chunk of pocket change on a new NCE PowerCab, thus hurtling myself headlong into the world of Digital Command Control. With only two decoder-equipped locomotives in my entire fleet at that point, I had some tough choices to make. In order to get more decoders, I had to swear off buying any more locomotives for a while. It was easy at first, but then the GG-1 on the table winked at me. (more…)
Did you know that you don’t actually need a Digital Command Control station to run your decoder-equipped locomotives? Use the power pack you already have. Just turn the speed knob up all the way, and encode the commands manually by flipping the direction switch back and forth, at about 8,000 times per second. If you do the timings precisely enough, your decoder-equipped locomotives will respond appropriately. What could be simpler?
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My Radio Shack Free Battery Club card, circa 1982.
Electronics retailer Radio Shack, which has been circling the drain for quite a while now, finally did what everyone expected it to do, and declared bankruptcy this week. If you’ve been in the hobby of model railroading for a while, you’ve almost certainly purchased something there that you needed for your railroad—some solder, a spool of wire, Cinch-Jones connectors. How will we survive in a post-Radio Shack retail landscape?
For me, it’s back to electronics this week. If you’ve seen my past layout projects, you’ll know that I like built-in throttles. I did it with the GVC ten years ago, and again with Lynn’s railroad. That’s simple enough to do with a homebuilt DC circuit, but will the rise of Digital Command Control change all that?
The Bickles Foods factory exemplifies the fits-n-starts pace of progress on my projects. This particular structure is based upon an Art Curren article in the October 1985 Model Railroader, an HO scale kitbash of two Con-Cor (now Heljan) Superior Bakery kits, but I’m doing some things differently. I didn’t want to lower the main walls the way Curren did, and I wanted the rooflines a little less chaotic. These decisions, and some differences between the HO and N scale versions of the kit, left me with two short walls that couldn’t be fashioned from the kit parts. (more…)
George’s railroad wasn’t quite finished when I delivered it to him, back in the fall. I made a few trips to his place to tune the track a little, and apply ballast, but it still lacked the trees I had promised him. Making trees is a messy job, especially when my dollar-store can of Aqua-Net blows hairspray in unintended directions. Can you blame me for procrastinating just a wee little bit on this task?
Furniture Railroads 