Modelling what might have been in southeast BC and northwest Wasington
More work on the 23rd. See photo captions for details. Progress is great.
The gang continued on on a number of fronts, refer to the captions for details. Thanks guys!
Now that all of the new track at Carson and Curlew had been tested by VanRail and other operating sessions, it was time to paint it before we start on the scenery.
I have been using a spray paint made by Rust-Oleum called Specialty Camouflage – Earth Brown. It is very flat and covers well, and seems to stick to the plastic ties.
I clean the tops of the rails after it dries with a special tool I made from a simple piece of aluminum with one end sharpened with a file. The aluminum is softer than the rail, so it does not scratch it, but the paint peels right off with very little effort. The tool needs to be sharpened a few times, as the rail wears a groove in it. I found that if I tried to wipe the paint off while it was still wet, I would manage to hit the ties as well, messing up the nice finish. Also, by carefully using the tool, the tops of non-running rails such as guard rails can be left brown.
I have not bothered to try to paint the rails a different colour, as I just don’t have the patience for that. I find that the dark brown colour of the paint seems to make the track just recede from view, and once it is ballasted, it looks fine to me.
The only problem with this painting method is the fumes. You can’t really take the layout outside to paint it, so the room quickly fills with noxious fumes. I close the door to my workbench area which closes off both it and the layout room from the rest of the house, and I use a respirator when spraying. Afterwards, I run my paint booth exhaust in my workbench area for about 24 hours to clear the air. One window elsewhere in the house is left open a bit to let in fresh air, and it seems to travel through the heating ducts to the train room to replace the air that is being exhausted. This works well and we don’t smell the paint elsewhere in the house.
While the spray paint works well, I really need to find a suitable acrylic alternative and learn to spray it before I need to paint future track additions.
The biennial model railway operations event known as VanRail was held here from September 6 to 8th. I hosted sessions on all three days, and we operated using the new train scheme developed over the summer following that “Fateful Friday” and the lessons learned. More information about the event itself can be found on the VanRail web site.
All in all, the three sessions went well from my perspective, and there were no complaints voiced. The amount of work seemed about right, with the one exception of the Morning Star mine turn, which had been a last minute addition.
Of course, on the last day, Paul suggested a great way to enhance the challenge of the mine turn, and he then proceeded to successfully prove how it would work. The idea was to send the train up with more cars than could easily be run around, but that would still fit on the mine spur, necessitating more switching moves. In the end it all worked out as he expected it to, so now we can operate that train with two levels of difficulty, depending on the experience level of the operator.
Some photos from Friday with Dave, Rick, and Cal…
Some from Saturday with Andrew, Glen, and Jim…
And some from Sunday with Don, Norm, and Paul…
I am looking forward to having more layout built before the next VanRail in 2021. There is lots of work to do, but I have a great crew helping me!
Fascia on the layout. It is a very important aspect that helps make a layout look finished, and it has to be good otherwise everyone notices. As one of the last construction steps before VanRail in September, the fascia around the corner with the Morning Star Mine was installed on Saturday with the help of my trusty Saturday gang. Everything was installed just fine, and it was left for me to drill out the three large holes for the switch control pushrods and guide cups. Due to the very tight space along that section of the layout with the track near the edge, there is no room for normal length pushrods. They are so short that there is no room for error and things have to line up well or it won’t work. So, I did a lot of careful measuring up, down, left, right, etc., etc., and made copious notes so that I could position the holes very accurately on the fascia, which is what I did. Or so I thought… I forgot to include the amount that the fascia sticks up above the plywood roadbed, so when I positioned the holes down from the top edge, they were in fact too high.
Then, after remounting the fascia, and noticing my mistake and immediately knowing why, Suzy came along to inspect and tried to push the plastic control cups in and found that they hit the plywood. No problem, as the holes are too high, so that is to be expected, right? Well, it turns out that even if I had positioned them where I had so very carefully measured, it still would not have been right, as I had neglected to allow room between the cups and the switch mechanism attached to the bottom of the plywood. The track is so close to the fascia at that point that the cups have to be even lower than normal to clear the mechanisms.
The solution was to install offset push rods that lower the rod so that the white cup can be below the switch mechanism and all will be well.
So, even if I had “measured twice” and “cut once”, it still would have been wrong. I needed to measure “three times” and “cut once”. This is exactly what I did on the newly purchased second piece of fascia hardboard the next day. Tom was a huge help in coming over mid-week to help get it installed, and this time everything lined up correctly. We also decided that since we had a new piece of hardboard to play with that we would cut some significant undulations in the edge to add more scenic interest. So, in the end, it all worked out even better than had I done it “right” in the first place. Thanks Tom!
More work on the mountain beside the Morning Star Mine. The track was first enclosed inside a cardboard tunnel, with side access, to keep dust and scenery materials off of the track. Then a web is made of cardboard strips, followed by a layer of brown paper to even out the “ribbed” effect from the strips.
I control my track switches with a simple homemade toggle switch mechanism plus micro switches for the frog power. These are operated as simple push-pull using wooden dowels. The front end of the dowel passes through a plastic PVC pipe end cap, so that they are flush with the fascia. I got the idea from Jim Petro in Reno Nevada a number of years back when I operated on his layout during a PCR convention.
The end caps need a bit of work to prepare them for mounting. They have raised lettering on the face that I like to smooth off, and they need a hole drilled in the middle. Plus, I like to roughen up the outer surface using sandpaper so that the glue will stick better. All three operations are easily done on the lathe.
As we extended the fascia arouund through to Carson, I needed a bunch more of these prepared for installation. So, over to my trusty lathe. I used it to clean up about four or five of the caps without a problem, but half-way through the next one, it just stopped suddenly with the belt slipping. Huh, what happened? A quick check with the power off showed the the spindle had frozen solid and simply would not turn. Oh, oh.
Many years ago I was very fortunate to buy the 10″ metal lathe from a friend’s father who had worked for Boeing as a machinist. His hobby had been home-built aircraft of his own design, and he had designed his house with enough room in the basement to assemble them, but I digress….
Just after I purchased the lathe, I disassembled, cleaned, lubricated, and reassembled everything on it except the headstock, as I could see no easy way to do so and everything seemed to be running fine. Some years later, I was able to buy a copy of the user manual for the lathe and it included instructions on how to remove the spindle, only “if it was absolutely necessary”. Well, it now was and I really had nothing to lose, so I gave it a shot. It came out very easily, once you know what to do, which way to unscrew things, and where to apply pressure. The problem was immediately obvious in that the very old grease had simply solidified and jammed the ball bearings. The manual said the the spindle bearings were factory lubed with grease that was supposed to last the life of the machine, but I doubt they were thinking 73 years back then! (It was made in 1946.)
Hoping that the new operating scheme’s success last week was not a fluke, we decided to do it all over again on August 3rd, just to be sure, with VanRail only one month away.
If I may say so, I think it was one of the best operating sessions we have ever had on the layout. Lots of cars were in motion, even with 10 extra cars on the layout than before, but with no real tie-ups or confusion. The Grand Forks yard did what it was supposed to do, namely be a place to organize cars when a train is in town, and not be a big storage bucket all of the time. There was even space for two trains to meet and pass, because the siding was not clogged with cars.
The original design of my CFS program used the notion of a Shipment, which implemented the basic idea of a shipper sending a load of something to a receiver, much as one would expect. The starting and ending tracks could be either in the modelled network (on the layout) or at virtual tracks in the unmodelled space (behind staging). With this approach, only the loaded segment of a car’s journey is defined, regardless of if it is heading in to or out from the modelled layout. Every car’s assignment will always include at least one segment that is done empty, either to supply a car to a shipper to be loaded, or to return an unloaded empty car back home, or both. With a Shipment having only information for the loaded segment, the other segment(s) must be generated using some sort of rules. The various rules tried so far have been less than entirely satisfactory, and this has led to some unfortunate side effects in terms of not being able to shape car movements in desirable ways.
A good example of this problem is when a car is supplied to a modelled shipper. The car will usually come from one of the staging tracks, but which one? The shipment is silent about where a car comes from, or where it returns to. When restaging a car, we may not want the selection process to consider all staging tracks equally, as that may have ramifications on car interchanges, flow through yards, etc. It would be better if there was a way to influence this selection process by having relative weights on the different choices, so that some are more likely to be selected than others. This allows for some oddball routing for variety, but the bulk of the selections will be what we expect.
Similarly, the choice of which way to route an empty car towards home suffers from the same problem. While there are lots of prototype rules around this, the reality on a model railroad is that we may have to coerce the routing so that parts of the layout do not get overloaded. Again, having a weighting scheme would help.
A simple solution to both problems is to define a complete life cycle for each shipment, including car supply, freight movement, and empty return. Each role is given a weighting that can be used when selecting from otherwise equal and suitable choices. For example, car routings that do not involve interchange to other railroads may be given a higher weighting and therefore are more likely to be selected than ones that have interchange, thereby minimizing cars having to be switched through a yard.
This new notion is called a “Role” for now, so that it can coexist with the current Shipments, but the name may get changed back to just “Shipment” after the original Shipment concept has been completely removed from the code.
One major benefit of this approach is that car life cycles that are more complicated than just a simple supply, freight, and return sequence become very easy to implement, as the role will simply have more segments to be followed. Think of a reefer needing to be iced before it is loaded. It really needs to make two stops for “loading”, one for ice, and the other for the actual load. This new simpler scheme eliminates the need for convoluted rules to handle the extra car movements. It now becomes very easy to include some unusual shipments that should get selected only very infrequently, simply by giving them low weights.
In order to implement this change in the program, significant code must be changed, which will be a big job as the results must be checked carefully to make sure that it really is working as expected. Results from early testing look very promising.
Stay tuned….
Following the “Fateful Friday” test operating session debacle, I did some deep thinking about how the layout should be operated now that Carson and Curlew had been added. I wrote a number of posts about the problems and what we should try instead:
After all of that, I designed a simplified train operating scheme without a dedicated switcher at Grand Forks. During the week, I ran numerous simulations to fine tune it until it seemed very workable.
The following Saturday, July 27, 2019, and still smarting from the previous session, my brave crew agreed to try out the new operating scheme. This meant that each train was just a way freight that switched its portion of the layout’s industries, with very little interchange of cars between the trains. I tried hard to keep the trains in different areas of the layout so that we would not have too many people in one place at the same time, and that seemed to work out pretty well.
Afterwards, everyone agreed that it was much more relaxed and enjoyable, even though there was still lots of work to be done switching all of the industries. What a difference from one week earlier where we had to abandon the session because it was just impossible to continue. Same guys, same layout, same number of trains, just a different approach to what the trains did. Thank you for not giving up after the previous week!
Thanks once again to John for capturing the day in photos and for his captions.
