Coal Mining Area - Complete???

Well, it's complete enough for now - I'm going to move on to the next area (viaduct, river).  Lots of details added, as you can see below.  Still a bit to add and do, which I'll pick at while building the next area:
- complete the control panel wiring for this area
- weather the locomotives & rolling stock
- add more layers of detail, such as grade crossing signs, switch stands
- wire the track signal controllers

Some current counts:
- trees- 248
- people- 35
- animals- 8
- cars and trucks- 4

I'm able to catch some things in pictures, that I didn't notice before - such as:
- photo 2 - the person with the broom appears to be a woman!  Didn't notice this before...
- photo 9 - bent wood stove stack on the darker grey building
- photo 11 - my Jeffreys mine motor is off the track!
- photo 12 - let's assume the boy in the foreground is imitating the girl in from of him - but
                that doesn't explain her odd stance with her arms out!

I've tried to get some good "in the scene" shots - hope you enjoy them - click each for larger.

 

Company Town

I've installed the grouping of buildings that make up the "Company Town", just adjacent to the still unfinished coal tipple.

I'll let the photos show some of the steps in building these wood models:

Trees

Trees and vegetation really begin to bring things to life!

Tree making 101: I start with Super Trees from Scenery Express.  What you get in the "Value Cases" is a big "bush" of natural plant material that, when separated out, looks amazingly like scale trees.  They claim it's from Denmark - what do I know about plants?  I've read some people say it's a plant called Sedum, and you can grow your own in the back yard.  Well, that's not happening.  Anyway, they look good, except they tend to have a natural curve I need to get rid of.

I work in the kitchen for the first steps - another advantage of being single... here's a batch separated from the bush into individual trees - all shapes and sizes.

Then they go into a huge pot of water to boil for a minimum of 20 minutes.  It smells kind of like kale when it's cooking...

Then outside, I've rigged up a clothesline under the deck to hang them upside down, with extra clothespins for weight.  The boiling and hanging straightens the trees out.

When dry, I spray paint the lower stems with cheap light grey primer.

When the paint is dry, I dip the lower painted part into a mixture of alcohol and black India ink.  I think the combination of the grey primer and the ink dip gives the "trunks" the right grey color, highlighted in a darker tone.

Here they're laid out for the ink to dry.

Next, holding the trunk in a gloved hand to mask it, I spray on 3M Super 77 hi-tack adhesive.  It is ready to work with in seconds.

Now it gets fun.  I use Noch Professional Leaf Flake in a variety of shades for the foliage.  Some flake is poured into the Turbo Tree canister.  Actually, I modified mine by transferring all the guts into a little larger container of Utz Pretzels.  The Tubo Tree is a little pricey, and it looked like something I could probably make myself - but as someone in the manufacturing field, I appreciate the cost of innovation and engineering, so I bought one.  It worked great, except I found a little larger container worked better, so now I have about a 2-year supply of pretzels.

I tried to get a video of this thing in action, but failed miserably... but it works really well, distributing the leaf flake evenly onto the tree sprayed with hi-tack.  The trees are then placed upright into a scrap of foamboard with holes poked in it to allow the glue to dry.

Finally, I sprinkle on a random dusting of a fine highlight color - browns, yellows, reds - and give the trees a spray of cheap, unscented, super-duper hold hair spray to keep everything together.

Planting is easy into the foam scenery base - poke a hole with an awl, add a dab of hot glue, and plant.  Smaller pieces of Super Tree material, with leaf flake added, are used as underbrush to fill in the gaps.

I keep count of the trees as I plant them - the current count is 132 trees!

Sneak Peek

A quick update - been working on the ground vegetation - grasses, shrubs - and thought I'd throw up a little peek.  Very much not finished at this stage.  The hill in the second shot will be covered in trees - the gold color is the undergrowth of leaves and clutter.  The building is a switch control tower, located in the triangle of track seen in the second shot in the previous post, "Dirt".

Dirt

 

Dirt.  It's the base of the earth, at least the part we see everyday, right?  Dirt has finally arrived in the coal mining area. I've got approximately 20% of the railroad now covered with dirt, along with rock detail, and some of the track ballast. 

In the photos above, the area is still wet from the glue, and will take a few days to completely dry.


Some detail on how I do it - there are as many ways to create model scenery as there are models and modelers.  I chose to try, for the first time, a rigid foamboard base.  The material is expanded polystyrene (EPS) sheet - it's the stuff you see at HD or Lowes known as rigid insulation foam.  More often than not, you see it in a pink color from Owens Corning;  most of mine happens to be from Dow, and is light blue.  Same stuff.

What is not the same, but similar, is white beaded styrofoam, commonly used as packaging material for TVs and such.  This would work, but because it is made by compressing beads of expanded polystyrene together to create a form, is can be a real mess when you cut and shape it.  Plus, the flat sheets of EPS, which come in a variety of thicknesses, are better suited to cover large areas.

That's not to say, working with EPS is not messy!  It does cut, sand and shape very nicely, with a variety of tools, but the material cut away can hold a lot of static - it actually jumps up onto my arms and clothes as I sand it!  So, I try to do cuts with knives and hot wire tools in the basement (less mess), and most sanding in the garage.  A shop vac and compressed air are very necessary!  The foam sections are glued in place to the benchwork structure.





Some photos to show the foam being fitted into place:
Left, structures in the "company town" - some are just the floors at this point - are fitted where they will go, and a roadway is sanded in.
Below, the narrow gauge mine track is being laid out to go from mine to headhouse.
Bottom, the coal tipple foundation piers are located and glued in place.

 

Rock detail is cast in rubber molds from Hydrocal plaster.  See the new page on the sidebar to the right on rock finishing.

 With the foam in place, it (and any exposed plywood) is then covered with the "crust" - this is a cellulose and plaster-base material called Sculptamold.  Very nice stuff to work with, blends everything together.  Some small details and plaster rock castings are "glued" in with the Sculptamold at this time.  Above, you can also see some background hills on the wall.  The hills I'm building here will also be covered in trees.

The crust is then painted, and with the paint still wet, covered with a sprinkling of real, sifted dirt.  I actually took a sample of my main dirt color to Lowes, and matched the paint with that.  After the paint is dry, the dirt is further held down with first a spray with 70% isopropyl alcohol (as a wetting agent), then a dribbling of a 50-50 mix of white glue and water.  The white glue dries totally transparent, and rock hard. 

The final step for the scenery base, before moving on, is to ballast the track - you can see that best in the 2nd photo at the top of the page.  Very time consuming, but necessary.  I use Highball brand real crushed limestone (made for model railroading).  It is poured on, spread between the crossties, and shaped to a nice slope down the sides while dry , then is held down with a 50-50 mix of matte medium (an artist's material from Michael's) and water.  The matte medium also dries totally transparent, and holds the stone in place very well, but dries a bit softer than the white glue mix - this deadens the sound a bit better when running trains.

I need to finish building the structures in this area - the coal tipple and headhouse, some company housing for the mine workers, a company store, and a few railroad buildings - and blend them in with the dirt, before adding more layers of scenery - grasses, weeds, bushes, rocks, trees and undergrowth - as well as people, vehicles and man-made clutter.  So I'll be working on completing those buildings.

This is a good stopping point before completely finishing the scenery, to move on to covering the next area with foam and dirt, which will continue around the corner, under the TV, and include the river and viaduct scene.

Coal mining area and lift gate

Yeah, it's been slow going.  I have been working on a few projects, one being the coal mining / sorting / loading area.  The photo below shows the trackwork being "dry fit" before final mounting, and the partially completed coal tipple straddling the tracks to check the spacing.

Coal trains arriving here need the ability to either pull in locomotive first, or back in caboose first.  Either way, the loco or the caboose (with help from a switching engine) need to uncouple from the train, and then do a "run-around" maneuver to get back out while the coal hoppers are being loaded.

A little further up the line, the other project I've been working on has been a royal pain.  If you remember my previous railroad, you may recall the lift gate running past the sliding door in the basement, and that I had to rebuild that gate to get it right.  Well, what was once a swing gate on this railroad, at the room entry, has been rebuilt to be a lift-out section.  The swinging gate didn't provide a wide enough access to the room - just poor planning on my part.

Above, looking across the upper level of the lift-out toward the coal mining area;  below, looking across from the opposite direction.  Track and roadbed are yet to be replaced.

Computers and the model railroad

There's a computer on my railroad!  Not what you may think of, but a computer none the less.  It's like one of the computers in your car, an electronic "magic box" that contains a processor, memory and some sort of operating software or firmware, so it meets the criteria to be a computer.

There it is, lurking under the locomotive above like a troll under a bridge.  It's a Digitrax DCS-100 DCC controller, the brain behind how my trains are operated.  I mention DCC control in the "About" page on this blog.  Now that I have the ability to run trains, it's time I do some basic programming of the individual decoders in each locomotive, such as assigning them an address other than the default number they all come with (3).  Once this is done, I can dial up that address - the one-to-four digit number on the side of each locomotive - on a handheld throttle, and I'm then controlling that loco.

That's pretty easily done, but decoders have a host of features involving both how each loco performs and sounds, that usually need to be adjusted, so that each one behaves pretty much like the others.  Different model and decoder manufacturers have their own way of doing things, and it's nice to establish some in-house standards.  (Standards do exist for DCC decoders and systems, these having been established by the National Model Railroad Association (NMRA), but they don't cover everything).  This can get pretty complex and tedious, when trying to program using only the handheld throttle - the only equivalent to a keyboard, mouse and monitor that the Digitrax computer has.

Fortunately, there is another organization that has developed a freeware program and interface to simplify this task - Decoder Pro by JMRI.  This software is run on a conventional PC (or Mac), and gives the user a nice graphical programming interface, with the loco usually resting on a specially wired programming track.  The loco in the first photo is on my temporary programming track;  I will eventually have one built into the layout, disguised as an abandoned siding.  It has to be insulated from the rest of the track.

A couple of Decoder Pro screenshots:

Computers, of course, can have other uses when actually attached to a model railroad.  The technology exists to completely or partially automate many functions, such as turnout routing (switching), signaling, and even full train control.  If I get into automated signalling before this thing is complete, I think that would be as far as I'd personally want to go.

When unattached, the internet, of course, has changed a lot about the hobby, as it has many aspects of our lives.  I can research most anything about the time period I'm modeling, and the now defunct railroads. I can shop for just about anything I need, new or used.  I can watch demos of how to do things on YouTube.  I enjoy reading a few model railroading forums on the web, and sometimes I'm able to contribute there, and help someone out.  That's pretty cool.

Last but not least, computers and the internet enable me to share all this with the world through this blog!

Video part 2

And some faq's and comments on part 1:

Most questions can be answered by saying, "it's not finished".  Really, I'm not blowing you off!  But of course, there is no scenery yet, many solder joints in the wiring are not yet insulated, and the trains are still shiny and new looking - this will all change in time.

Is the locomotive we're following spinning up the grade?  Is this the longest train that particular loco can pull?  Yes, and right now, yes.  The grade in part 1 is the steepest on the layout, though it is not excessive.  I will be applying a traction compound to the drive wheels of all of the locos, and they will both not spin, and be able to pull more cars, up this grade.  The traction compound, by the way, is called Bull Frog Snot.

Yes, all of the sound in the videos, with the exception of my narration, is coming from each locomotive.

No, there is no smoke or steam.  At least one manufacturer, MTH, offers smoke on their locos - but that tends to gum things up eventually - what goes up, must come down.  And if you know me, you know that I smoke - but not in my home.  So if I don't smoke inside, I don't want my trains doing it, either!

Other than all that, I am pleased with this effort for a first video.  I know now that I need to use better lighting, and learned a lot in the process.  Hopefully, future videos will be a bit better, but I'm not trying to be a pro - it is what it is...

Here's part 2 - again, click on the YouTube logo, and watch it full screen there.  This one is 1080p HD - if you can get YouTube on your TV, it will look awwwwe-some!

One year later

OK, 13 months, but who's counting?  To mark the occasion, my first video.

Best to click the YouTube logo, then watch it full screen there.  If your connection is fast enough, it's best resolution is 720p HD.

Continuing fascia work

Continuing work on the fascia board, refining the contours at the top, and adding openings for access doors and control panels.

With DCC control, I have the option to control just about everything on the railroad from a hand-held device (transmitter).  Each device to be controlled this way would have to have a decoder (receiver), and an address.  These are called "stationary decoders".  I'm choosing to control just the locomotives themselves with the hand-held, so I'll call it a throttle.  Each locomotive contains a "mobile decoder" with a unique address - I set this to the one- to- four digit number printed on the loco's cab.  Control of switches for turnouts, lighting and other functions will be done from separate control panels around the fascia.

Below is the panel for lower staging, showing a schematic view of the track in that area, and appropriate controls to route trains in and out.  (I'm not thrilled with the graphics on the panel, and I'll be working on that - but you get the idea.)

Also seen both above and below are the throttle plug-in panels.  You can unplug a throttle from a panel - the loco will continue running on the last commands it had received - and re-plug at another location, to re-aquire control of the loco.  That way, you can walk around and be near the train as it moves around the layout, and also be near to the control panel associated with that area.

Below, the fascia is cut to just above the water level at what will be the fishing harbor scene.  The "water" will be just about 3/16" - 1/4" deep over the plywood base, but will appear much deeper (if I get it right!).  The resin fishing boat hulls are from kits I'll be building - they are called "waterline" hulls, since they are made to sit on the water's surface, as opposed to some other types of boat models that have a complete hull all the way to the bottom - which would look right when displayed on a stand.

Finally, a sneak peek at the (almost) finished fascia, as it will appear in my next posting - which will be a video tour of the layout!  I've completed the filming, and am now in post-production - lots to learn - video editing software is all new to me!  But interesting and fun, all part of the many different things the hobby can involve.