#unitrack

[trainsinanime]

This is the newest section for my model railroad. Yes, it seems chaotic, but that's the point.

My model railroad consists of small sections that I build whenever I feel like it, and arrange on a suitable table. Since my apartment isn't that large, I have exactly one model railroad table, which also serves as a general hobby and random stuff table. That makes it difficult to actually run trains - there's always random stuff in the places where I want to put model railroad sections. This here is the solution. Hopefully.

It's a model railroad module that also serves as a holder and organiser for random stuff. The idea is that it remains in place at all times, and I can connect other modules to it as I want and need. And I get to have model trains running through my pencils, cutters, dead battery boxes and so on.

Just to be clear, by definition, anything that is in the fields of that module is stored away properly and organised. This means I will not take any criticism about the way things are arranged there (and it's bound to change anyway).

Some technical details:

This module (mostly) follows the T-Trak standard for small table-top modules in N scale. As part of that, the tracks at the ends are Unitrack. The main semicircle is Tomix track, which offers a few more options, in particular these nice curved turnouts that mean the module works as a crossover as well. As of right now the turnouts are hand-controlled, I plan to add a DCC decoder at a later date (potentially much later).

The basic construction is probably mostly what you expect: A plywood box with strips as dividers.

Main box, floor and track section are 7 mm pine, the inserts are 4mm poplar. Some inserts end up mostly or fully covered, those have access from the bottom to put cables in. The whole thing has power connections, which is not required by T-Trak standards, but I put it in every module anyway.

The edges of the road bed are covered with a 1mm thick strip of wood from an architecture supply shop, which makes the edge look smooth (it's not, I cut it out with a jigsaw) and holds back the ballast.

Because this wouldn't hold any pens or similar, I designed some special inserts with higher interlocking parts.

Those were a bit annoying to build. Finally the whole thing was painted in varnish, giving the look you see now. I'm really happy with how things turned out there, and I think this'll be a useful addition to my model railroad table for the years to come.

Now I just need to find a different space for my 3D printer, and build some curves to run the trains around the WiFi router and…

[wncrails]

A shot of the layout from above. Pretty simple. It's all Kato Unitrack. Those are no.4 switches, and one rerailer. It measures 6" wide by 51.375", which will perfectly fit inside the display box.

[trainsinanime]

Over the past few weeks, I built a new model railroad module.

It's a tiny trestle bridge, based on plans from the Great Northern Railway. I'm calling it the Nicholson Creek Bridge, because I had hours and hours of old Jenny Nicholson videos on in the background while I was working on this.

(Actually, now that I think about this, I hope this doesn't get read as an insult, because the river here is literally not that deep.)

Anyway, some tech specs: N scale, follows the T-Trak module standard but slightly modified (58 mm distance front to edge of track bed, instead of 38 mm normally), and this time single-track. There are power connections hidden underneath.

The main point is the bridge, of course, a classic american staple. We don't have these kind of wooden bridges in Europe. Although, maybe we should?

The bridge is the main thing here. The main sections ("bents") are constructed out of 2x2 mm balsa wood. The long line on top is 3x3 mm pine, and the reinforcements between the bents are 1x1 mm linden. The track is flex-track from Fleischmann (former Roco) mostly because I could remember their order number the most easily when I went to my local model railroad store (it's 22200). The wood is mostly Amazon, except for the small 1x1 mm profiles, which I got from a local architecture supply store. Next time I'm doing that for all the wood pieces, though I still have plenty of supply left.

I'm really happy with the result, so trust me when I say that I see lots of things I could have done better, I mean this not in a self-deprecating way, but in a "I should build another one of these!" ways.

The most obvious changes would probably be that the 2.0 version of the bridge would be longer, go either through desert or over an actual river (I haven't decided yet, either sounds good), have different track with much wider ties, more reinforcements between the pilers for a more regular look, and I'd color it. But those are all just theoretical concerns at the moment.

(By the way, carrying strength of the bridge is not an issue at all, it's rock-solid with anything I've put on it. I think the 3x3 mm pine stringers would be sufficient already without any of the structure underneath, partly because of the small size and cube square law concerns, partly because I have one long beam under each rail instead of short sections from bent to bent.)

And to close things out, some construction pictures:

Building the structure:

Building the frames:

Building the frames and placing them to test the landscape:

Let me know if you have any questions!

[trainsinanime]

And here's the other model railroad thing: A german class 426 train, model from Kato. Plus this time some white paper to make the lighting better, not sure how well it worked.

I bought this one as a kit at a model train show in Göppingen in September of last year. "Kit" meant a box containing all the components as spare parts, and a spare part order sheet as the "instructions". But, you know, it's Kato, it's really not that difficult.

What was difficult was getting DCC into the bloody thing. The official Kato way is to buy three different decoders, five if you want internal lighting to be DCC controlled, and shove them at various parts into the machine. Obviously I didn't want to do that, I have a Dremel and a soldering iron, so I did it myself, with one decoder (again the PD10MU that I also put in the FP7s and that was the reason for my rant about Bit.ly. There's nothing special about this decoder, it's just cheap and small and works well.)

The thing is that Kato's models are really intricately designed out of lots of cleverly interlocking plastic parts, and soldering a DCC decoder in requires undoing all of them and drilling holes. Some parts are just plain insane, like the motor contacts - if you solder anything to them directly, they'll come out of the motor. If you solder to the small copper strips that transmit the power directly, you'll have to find some way to isolate them because if you put them upside down, they won't conduct properly.

And then there's the fact that there's two parts of this, and of course I didn't want to use two decoders. Routing the wires through was not trivial.

Finally, at the last moment I decided they needed interior lighting, because I still had some Kato interior lighting kits from the Hiawatha. All Kato trains use the same light kit, which is great, except the light kit and the way it's integrated into the train can be very fiddly. In this train, you need to shorten a plastic light bar, lay it down on the roof, and then insert the chassis straight up so that the lighting part comes to sit right behind it. But you also need to push the chassis in diagonally forward, so the headlights come to rest in their proper holes. You need to push forward and straight up with no forward motion at the same time. The solution for me was to glue the light bar in place using adhesive pads, push the chassis in diagonally, then poke the lighting assembly with a long wooden stick until it lands in the right position, then finish closing. I don't think that's right.

It was worth the effort, though, it looks much better with lit windows, even if that means you can see all the cables. Also, yes, some of the cables are not in their right position (I think I'd need to cut some more plastic) so the front part's shell isn't positioned quite perfectly, but I have no intentions of fixing that. I also lost the plastic part that lights up the top headlight and destination display. Oh well. It's nice that it's done, but definitely no more Kato EMUs for me for the foreseeable future (at least next six months, probably). It's always something like this with them.

[trainsinanime]

Short model railroad update: I got the locomotives for the Olympian Hiawatha! An FP7A, F7B and another FP7A of the Milwaukee railroad

Going ABA instead of just two units does look nicer, doesn't it? I've fitted them all with DCC, using a PD10MU decoder, a basic thing for soldering in.

I've tried the Digitrax plug-and-play decoders before for other F units, and I've always been less than impressed. They're relatively expensive (two Digitrax ones would have cost more than the three I picked), not really that much less work, and I always felt like they're not super great with dirty rails. Of course in an ideal world Kato would just put a standard decoder plug in these things, but I'm not holding my breath. Instead I'm holding my soldering iron.

As for speed matching, that has not been a problem, since all three have the same decoder. And the long passenger train with the long train of locomotives in front looks really nice. The passenger train also has lights in now, but no pictures because, well, I couldn't be bothered. Maybe I'll make another post explaining the reason why I couldn't be bothered. It's to do with yet another train.

[trainsinanime]

Since there do seem to be some people who enjoy me posting pictures of my model railroad modules, have some more. Maybe that'll finally motivate me to finish this thing which has been sitting at 94% completion for months. More information about construction and what is still needed below the cut.

This was supposed to be a quick and simple module, themed around Italy, and based around a model of an Italian railroad post house I bought ages ago (from MBS Model). I think it actually turned out really well. The problem is that I remembered the measurements of the module system wrong. I thought it was supposed to be 32 cm long, but no, it’s just 31 cm, and I forgot to check until I had already built the base structure. So the tracks wouldn’t fit, which means I had to add flex track with manual ballast, and stupidly, I decided to do that after building the rest of the landscape. And I’m still not done, because manual ballasting is horrible and it just won’t go where it needs to be. Mind you, I haven’t actually touched it in months, so it shouldn’t be that hard to fix.

The other thing that still needs fixing is that these telegraph poles (by Auhagen) need to be hot-glued in place again because I jiggled them too much and now they refuse to stand straight. I count that one under minor niggles.

Other relevant parts: The small details, like flower pots, dogs, cats and benches are all from Noch; the cars (Fiat Panda) are from Busch; one of the poplar trees is from MBR Model, the other are from Heki (and have cost as much as a set of four as a single MBR tree). The balcony guard rail is an etched metal fence from N-Train, because the supplied laser cut guard rail looked horrible. Most of the rest is from all over the place.

I am planning to add light to the house, using a home-built DCC decoder, which I actually already built and which seems to work; I just haven’t written the code to actually decode DCC signals yet. But I consider that to be a different issue altogether, because the module is functionally complete even without it.

[trainsinanime]

Since there was more interest than I expected in my latest model railroad pictures, and in order to maximally confuse my followers, have one final model railroad picture for the day. To recap, the context is that I build my model railroad as modules (small sections that I can/have to put together to form a full layout), roughly following the T-Trak standard, and I built this and the desert one for cases where I just need a straight line (e.g. to test a locomotive briefly) and don't want anything rolling off the end.

I'm really incredibly happy with how the rocks turned out on this one; practicing that was really the main point of this. Good rocky surfaces are something that always seemed really daunting to me, and I used all sorts of workarounds (like explicit "rock plaster") that never looked all that good. This is the first time I just built them from scratch, with standard model plaster, tiny carving tools and paint, and it turns out that doing it like that is both really easy and looks really good. I also think the overall winter effect worked really well. This is definitely not the last module I'm going to build like this.

[unitrackoverseas]

Wishing you a Happy Gandhi Jayanti. "The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.