More Roundhouse Drafting

As I was finishing up yesterday, I realized that the roundhouse needed to come closer to the turntable a little bit so as to avoid sharp points at the pit edge. A quick review of Engine Houses & Turntables on Canadian Railways, 1850-1950 by Edward Forbes Bush (thanks for the loan, Scott), shows that a […]

Concepts for Pembroke Roundhouse

It’s really inconvenient to run all the way down to Golden Lake, the other end of staging (12 feet away) to turn the engine, and so, I’m starting to turn my attention to the Pembroke turntable. One of the first things I need to figure out is the spacing of tracks for the roundhouse, and that […]

Canada Atlantic Way-Bills

Actual paper from the Canada Atlantic is about as rare as hen’s teeth. I don’t collect it, but I do keep an eye on eBay lest some show up, and if nobody else looks like they are buying it, I’ll bid on it to ensure it doesn’t get thrown out. However, I don’t have a […]

More Lessons from Brio

The kids were restless this morning after painting our faces, and so we decided to build a Brio layout and play trains some more. This gave me a chance to try out some of the ideas I’ve been working through since the last session. In particular, I tried out some ideas with different states for […]

Staging Yard Operational

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 […]

More Playing with Brio

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 […]

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 […]