Car Forwarding Design – Givens and Druthers

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, […]

Operating a Small Layout

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 […]

Staging Turntable Functionally Complete

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 […]

Practice Makes Perfect

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 […]

Turntable Indexing Started

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 […]

One Screw = Game Changer!

Last night I found a few minutes to tackle the other three tracks that connect with the turntable. When I did the first three tracks, I found that the turntable wanted to spin as I was soldering the track. This was annoying, to say the least! I postulated that perhaps jamming the table with a […]

Three Down, Three to go

Three of the approach tracks to the staging turntable formed tonight’s subject. This proceeded more or less as planned, although the special gauge didn’t prove as useful as I’d hoped. Here I am, using it to solder down the far end of the turntable (e and f in the plan). I needn’t have bothered. It turns […]

Progress on the Staging Turntable

Happy New Year! It’s been a busy holiday season for us, and so, nothing has happened on the layout in weeks. However, now I’m back in the swing again, and making progress. I soldered the “rails” half-way on the turntable tonight. As I mentioned previously, I am only fixing one end to start, and will […]

More Turntable Planning

Honest, I’m not procrastinating, really! Sometimes I do that when I’m not sure I can pull something off, but that’s not the case this time. I’m actually travelling, so it’s hard to make progress on the layout. I did spend some time thinking about how to line up the two ends of the turntable precisely. […]

Wiring the Turntable

Being made out of copper clad, wiring the turntable wasn’t so much a matter of wires as it was of gaps in the copper. I made the gaps with a scriber, rather than bothering with etching. It took more time to figure out where the lines should go than to make the lines themselves. Here […]