We got home from our impromptu trip last night, and tonight I finally hooked up the staging yard bus wires. I also installed the hex frog juicer, which is pure magic. The daily mixed was sitting on one of the tracks waiting to come in and turn around. So, I uncoupled the engine and ran it onto the turntable. It worked flawlessly on the first … Continue reading Staging Yard Operational
As I mentioned, I am using an enforced break from construction to think about car forwarding. My leaning has been toward something similar to what Tony Thompson has described with car pockets and realistic-looking waybills, and I have Mike White’s collection of Tony’s blog postings on my must-read pile. Probably, Tony is way ahead of me, and I am reinventing a wheel, only mine will … Continue reading More Playing with Brio
I have a surprise trip this week, and so, there will be no physical work on the layout. To get my mind off the reason for the trip, I’ve been thinking about operations. Specifically, what mechanisms am I going to use to generate freight traffic on the layout? As mentioned before, on a small layout, I think it is important that the traffic reflect the … Continue reading Car Forwarding Design – Givens and Druthers
A recent comment on the Model Railroad Hobbyist forum has got me thinking about operations. I think that operating a small layout is actually different than just a piece of a larger layout, as asserted in one of the responses. Now, first, I must confess that I’ve very little experience with operating small layouts. There was the one time that I operated John H Wright’s … Continue reading Operating a Small Layout
While my wife was at the gym and the kids were playing nicely together (nobody visibly hurt or missing as far as I could tell) today, I pushed ahead with the other set of connections for the turntable. This was a cinch because of the existing indexing connection for one set of rails. I simply indexed to the one set, and soldered on the other … Continue reading Staging Turntable Functionally Complete
Thinking more about how we get past the “I can’t do it” stage of skills development (See a great conversation from last weekend by Simon Dunkley, Trevor Marshall and Mike Cougill ), I realized today that one of the things I do is I try things out before I proceed. This evening, for example, I wasn’t sure if I could solder a piece of 3/32 … Continue reading Practice Makes Perfect
Andrew came over on Wednesday and we made a start on indexing and feeding the staging yard turntable. This more or less followed the original plan from October. I varied the plan by using square brass rod and tube because it’s easier to solder things that don’t want to roll away from you. I also decided not to mount each pair of shore-side connections on … Continue reading Turntable Indexing Started
