First Ground Cover Goes In!

It's a day to remember -- the day the weeds finally came to the layout. I've added basic ground cover to the area around West San Jose.

Here's a couple photos showing the work. First, here's a photo of the West San Jose passenger platform. The passenger car was used as a temporary station in the early 1930's after the track was raised on an embankment and before the new San Jose (aka Diradon) station was built.

Looking the other way from the San Carlos St. overpass, you can see how the tracks near the station are raised above the level of the Del Monte Plant 51 spurs.

Here's also a photo of a train going over the Alameda overpass.

It's Almost Too Quiet...

It's been a quiet few months; after the burst of effort needed for the LDSIG meet, I spent the winter and spring building freight cars. I needed a bunch more reefers, but I've wanted more detail than the typical Athearn / Accurail car. I really love the Red Caboose Pacific Fruit Express R-30-12 refrigerator cars, but the plastic grab irons and steps quickly get broken in operation.

The solution? Buy a half-dozen Red Caboose cars, and bend wire grab irons to take the place of the plastic ones. Red Caboose still sells these reefers, but they're undecorated and need painting. I also used the opportunity to paint the roofs black as they would have appeared in the 1930's.

The other fun project was an automobile car. Most of the freight cars in the 1930's were small, but the boxcars used for shipping the (relatively light) automobiles and buggies could be huge -- 50 feet long and 2 feet higher than surrounding cars. Tony Thompson's SP Freight Cars volume 3 has photos of a bunch of these, and the A-50-2 -- a 40 foot automobile box -- caught my attention. (One of the neat photos of this car shows it after the ends were repaired; the SP didn't bother to repaint the cars, but just the modified ends, leaving strong boxcar-red ends surrounding weathered wood sides.) This seemed like a fun car to scratchbuild; it used the Bettendorf underframe fabricated from I-beams and used also on the PFE reefers, and the smooth-sheathed walls simplified construction.


I drew up some plans of the car, but decided to test my accuracy by building an O scale version of the car. It was a fun jaunt into another scale, and the completed car now sits on my windowsill at work.

Here's the completed 40 foot O scale car next to a Westerfield 50 foot Union Pacific boxcar.

There's been some other work on the layout (such as building some fast clock kits), but nothing serious. I need to put some effort into the layout again...

LDSIG 2006 Santa Clara Meet: First Open House

This weekend was the annual Santa Clara mini-convention on layout design and operation -- a weekend of presentations on layout design, operating sessions at nearby layouts, design critiques, and layout tours. I opened my layout for viewing on Saturday night, and probably got a good thirty or so people visiting during the evening. This was the first time I'd ever showed my layout to more than just friends, and the comments and suggestions made it all worthwhile.

It's also been a great kick-in-the-pants for the last few weeks as I put in minimal scenery, got the layout operating much better, and in general dealt with all the little niggling details that made the layout that much more viewable.

Some of the particularly helpful projects:

* A couple of stretches of empty space were replaced with flat fields of plaster. Though the area wasn't scenicked, some hastily planted buildings and fences hinted at where a farm would soon be placed.

* My lovely wife spent a good part of a weekend sewing minimal drapes to hide the underside of the layout; while the 15 yards of good fabric was a bit pricey (even on sale), the cost of the velcro to attach it to the layout was equally bad. Luckily, I now have some nice heavy denim drapes in pullman green -- a good color for the SP, and a great color to complement the scenery.

* I spent several days just cleaning track. A battery-powered Dremel tool with a wire brush did fast work of lingering dirt on wheels and track. I also found the foolproof way to test the track was set a balky 0-6-0 switcher at one end of the layout and see how far I could get before it stalled.

* A non-railroad friend kindly kept the trains running all evening as I talked with visitors. With a single-tracked mainline terminated with a pair of reverse loops, operation really requires someone observing what's going on.

Third Operating Session!

Another friends-from-work operating session. Scott and Dave came back for another try, while Tim (another newbie) helped Scott with the San Jose cannery run. Tim learned the advantage of never asking questions you don't want answered:

Tim: "Hey, where do I put this boxcar at Plant 51? There's no door listed on the switch list!"

Robert: "Um... door 1."

Tim: "Door one? That means I need to undo all the work I just did!"

Second operating session!

Dave and Scott, two friends from work came by for operations. Dave's operated on the layout when it's been more unfinished, but Scott's never operated a model railroad before. Both did fine. Scott reminded me that my switches for controlling turnouts are way too hard to find without staring at the track diagrams.

(Update: Scott's comments matched a lot of other comments. I ended up taking out the schematic maps for the switches. Instead, I inset the switches in the fascia immediately below the track each controlled. See the before and after photos to see the difference.)

First Operating Session!

This month, I ran my first serious operating session, with local (and very-well-known) operations gurus Byron and Seth present for the first run. Apart from a couple stalls and shorting switches, they had a great time. Woohoo! Much thanks to Apple's debugger summer intern who helped me prepare the layout the week before, and ran a couple trains during the operating session.

As of July, 2005: The layout's to the point where you can operate it without having to push locomotives every few minutes. In the last few weeks, I've been switching from manual Caboose ground throws to Tortoise switch machines to make it easier for others to operate the layout, and to avoid power problems at switches. I've also been doing a lot of cleanup work. The fascia's been painted and labelled, and a bit more scenery (such as the orchard between Campbell and Los Gatos) has been (temporarily) added.

Here's some photos of the layout, along with a close-up of one of the schematic track diagrams on the fascia.