Bachmann Silver Series 4-Wheel Caboose

I really like the Bachmann Silver Series 4-wheel caboose, which is a somewhat retooled version of a model that's probably been in their line from the start. I have more of them than I should:

Not long ago, I found another one on eBay. It was bright red with an incongruous New Haven McGinnis "NH", but it was cheap. I discovered that if I just brushed the lettering with some Walthers Solvaset, the letters simply floated off. With that problem solved, I masked off the black of the roof and cupola and sprayed the car boxcar red. Then I applied decals from the K4 NYO&W loco and caboose decal set.

Here's a prototype photo off the web:

Close enough.

Vintage eBay Find

A fun sub-hobby I enjoy is occasionally finding vintage items that can be restored to operate compatibly with contemporary equipment. This usually involves replacing trucks and couplers, but it may also involve adding weight and sometimes cosmetic improvements. Not long ago I found a Chateau Martin wine car on eBay that I'm pretty sure is a Laconia kit from the 1950s.

This is exactly how I got it from the seller (it was pretty cheap). A prior owner had converted it to Kadees mounted with wood screws, so that's one thing I don't need to worry about, but the trucks will have to go, and the roof probably needs sanding sealer and new paint.

The prototype is a General American Pfaudler milk tank car (the tanks are internal within the wood carbody), the same thing as the much more recent Athearn car. Chateau Martin used it for wine. For some reason, as far as I can tell, Athearn never brought its model out in the Chateau Martin scheme. A web search shows Lionel brought one out in 3-rail O, AHM did an HO freight reefer in this scheme in the 1950s, and Roundhouse did a 50-foot HO express reefer in this scheme, but neither is as close to the prototype as this 60-year-old Laconia car.

Tony Thompson's blog has a post on this same Laconia car. He pretty much agrees it's an OK model as is, and nothing better has come along.

There's also a history of Chateau Martin and the wine cars at this site. They ran from 1940 to about 1974 in the basic magenta paint wirh several different lettering schemes. The traffic was between Waterford, CA and Bronx, NY, where they were unloaded at a Chateau Martin bottling plant, but they somehow seem to have appeared in freights all over the country.

Progress On Fat Lou's

I've finished the detail painting and weathering on the Downtown Deco Fat Lou's Liquor and have also added the wall signs.

I decided to position it with the front facing the front edge of the shelf. But as you can see, while I've figured out exactly where it should go, I still have to level things out and clear the surrounding area up.

The detail painting and signage went much easier than I expected. The basic model should be complete within the next few days. The signs in the kit are Downtown Deco's older style, not actual decals, but printed on thin glossy paper. I cut them out and mounted them on blobs of full-strength Elmer's glue the general size of the sign itself. I squished the signs into the glue and straightened them out, then left things to dry. The glue shrank and pulled the paper signs into the brickwork pretty well. If glue seeped out from the edges of the signs, that was OK, it was invisible when it dried.

Opening Up A New Photo Angle

I decided to begin opening up a new photo angle to a corner of the Manhattan Transfer section of my layout, which I've bern neglecting from the start. I want to add several Downtown Deco kits, starting with the Fat Lou's Liquor, kit DD165. Below is a photo from their web site:

I've gotten as far as assembly of the plaster sides and basic painting:

Most of the work that remains will be in the detail painting and weathering on the walls and adding the signs and roof details. Then several more structures in the bare area to the right, and then other street details and vehicles.

Walthers Mainline Central Vermont GP9

The Central Vermont is oone of the railroads I grew up with, because in my late teens I spent several years near White River Junction, where I saw CV GP9s and Duluth, Winnipeg & Pacfic RS-11s all the time -- even had a chance to ride to St Albans on the Ambassador the year before it was discontinued. Central Vermont models, especially for the later years, have been fairly hard to find. Walthers released a Mainline GP9 in the post-1977 green and yellow not long ago, and while this is after my time railfanning and riding the CV, I'll take what I can get.

The Walthers Mainline brand are bare-bones models and lack many of the details on CV units, includiing sunshades, winterization hatches, rerail frogs, correct horns, bell mounted on the long hood, and spark arresters. Oddly, there is a plow mounted on one pilot, but this is the rear pilot, when the CV units in the late scheme have plows on the front pilot, the long hood end. I'm not sure how easy this will be to change. The shade of green strikes me as just a bit dark, but this is a subjective judgment.

I've added some of these details to GT 4448 above. I covered GT 4448 in a post here four years ago. As I said in that post, the Grand Trunk Railway, which was the US portion of the CN line from Montreal to Portland, ME, was a mountain railroad that did have dynamics on its GP9s.

In addition, CN subsidiary Central Vermont, which was the US portion of a CN line from Montreal to New London, CT, was also a mountain railroad that had dynamics on its freight GP9s. Grand Trunk Railway GP9s 4442-4450 were built for the line to Portland, ME and originally lettered with just the name Grand Trunk, not Grand Trunk Western, on the long hood in the CN green and yellow scheme.

The GT and CV units originally ran interchangeably on both the lines to New London and Portland. However, the GT units, or at least most of them, were eventually sent to the Grand Trunk Western, although parent Canadian National transferred GTW units back to the CV as needed. By the 1970s and 1980s, GTW blue units could be found on the Central Vermont along with their own green and yellow units.

Baseds on the original roster info, CV 4450 would have originally been lettered for the Grand Trunk, but for whatever reason seems to have been transferred to the CV before the other GT units went to the GTW.

As a result, GT 4448 will opeate as a mate with CV 4450 on my layout, something I had planned all along. I'm also hoping to track down the other Walthers CV number in this run, 4447, although these locos seem to have sold out very quickly.

Both these locos are the DCC sound versions. The only change I make to the ESU OEM CVs is to set CVs 3 and 4, acceleration and deceleration, to 0 -- I'm still used to DC control, and I like to see a loco start right away. This is a pure personal preference.

Accurail Lehigh Valley RBL Car

I saw this Accurail white Lehigh Valley bunkerless refrigerator RBL car kit in a train store many years ago and picked it up by reflex, even though I wasn't sure if it had a prototype -- Accurail can get pretty creative. But Lehigh Valley is one of the roads I grew up around in New Jersey, and I'll pretty much go for anything LV. But I looked in equipment registers when I got it home, and I've been a member of the Anthracite Railroads Historical Society from the early days and never found any info.

So it sat in a box for a long time unfinished. As a teenager, I'd seen the LV white outside-ribbed X58 style cars that were made by Athearn and others, but this wasn't those.

Finally I ran into a Facebook post with a prototype photo and some info.

It said the flag in the photo wan't completely painted. The car was one of five numbered 7050-7054 and leased from North American Car. For whatever reason, leased cars didn't always show up in the equipment register. Around the same time, I found the photo below with the ladders shortened as in the kit. The cars were apparently built by Pullman-Standard and had P-S features, but for Accurail, this is close enough.

I don't know the photographer of either photo. I don't know what service they were in. If I were to venture a guess, it might be beer. But I finished the car, and I'm delighted finally to know it has a prototype.

Confirmation!

A mostly unacknowledged problem with DCC, as well as earlier carrier control systems, is that the circuit breakers that come with many standard products, like in my case the NCE Power Cab or SB5 booster, aren't always sensitive enough to catch certain short circuits. This is especially true if a loco comes up to a switch that's set against its direction of travel, meaning that if its pickup wheels cross onto a powered frog with the polarity set opposite the track the loco is on, a short will result -- but the NCE (and possibly other manufacturer) circuit breaker won't activate.

This will heat up the metal pickup wheel involved very quickly and melt any plastic next to it, like an axle sleeve and gear, almost instantly turning the power truck interior into a blob of goo. The only cure is to see if you can get a replacement power truck from the manufacturer, and given the greater complexity of newer models, replacing a power truck with associated wiring isn't a trivial task. I've had to do this with three expensive locos, and finding a solution to the problem has always been at the back of my mind.

Last year I saw a comment on a thread somewhere that said if you connect a Tam Valley DBA002 booster between your DCC system and your layout bus (or multiple DBA002 boosters between the DCC and your power districts), this has a circuit breaker that's fast and sensitive enough to catch this kind of a short. At $59.95, this was inepensive enough, especially considered against the likelihood of more melted power trucks, that I decided to give it a try. I've used a lot of Tam Valley's Frog Juicers, which also operate with fast circuit breakers, so I thought this might actually work.

\ I set it up, and my big question was when I might run into the problem again and see if the DBA002 tripped. A big cause of the problem in my experience is if, via some glitch, a loco starts crawling very slowly toward a switch that's set against it, and I don't see it until it's too late. I would have to wait until this happened again and see if the DBA002 caught it. The question would also be whether the NCE system would ever see it and, if not, how I could troubleshoot the short, if a short it turned out to be.

Finally, the other day, my DCC bus lost power, I couldn't run a loco, even though my control station said power was on, and it had the loco addressed. So I had to go over all my wiring connections and see that they were OK. Then I noticed that the red LED next to the DCC OUT terminals on the DBA002 was blinking. So this was an indication that I had a short, even though my NCE system hadn't picked it up. This was my sign that maybe I needed to check and see if any locos had crept onto a switch that was set against it.

Yes, that had happened. I moved the loco involved back from the frog, and the system reset. The NCE circuit breaker had never noticed. The DBA002 had saved the day!

Model Manufacturers' Tariff Announcements

I've been in the hobby long enough to know what things were like before the 1990s, when almost all the rail hobby manufacturers moved production to China. I never thought this was a wise decision, and the manufacturers were effectively put on notice that they were giving a hostage to fortune in 2018, when a major factory producing model railroad items closed:

InterMountain Railway Co., Atlas Model Railroad Co., Bowser and Fox Valley Models announced this week that some new locomotives and rolling stock will be delayed or canceled because of the unexpected closing of one of the industry’s top manufacturers. Creating their own manufacturing factory with the implementation of plant networks they could have possibly avoided this situation.

None of the companies said what products will be delayed.

Other manufacturers, including Trainworx and ExactRail, also are affected.

At least one manufacturer confirmed that Hong Kong-based Affa Technologies, Ltd. closed. The company, founded in 1996, specializes in metal parts for toys, scale trains, scale cars and metal electronic products, according to the company’s website. The website made no mention of the closing.

The report here suggested that the companies hadn't planned adequately for this sort of contingency in 2018, and the situation this year with the tariff war simply confirms that nothing has changed. The bottom line is that all but a handful of hobby producers had surrendered control of their supply chain and production to factories in a country that wasn't aligned with US interests, and this led to a range of risks that none of these companies adequately addressed.

The companies have been slow to recognize their problem publicly. The first seems to have been Walthers. Stacey Walthers Naffah, CEO, gave an interview to David Popp of Model Railroader on April 21. I want to stress that her public bio indicates that she is a graduate of Boston College as well as Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management, which means that she should have been far more aware of the risks to her business's continuity than she appears to have been. And for now, she still doesn't have much of a plan:

Stacey: . . . Many product categories are heavily reliant on China and Southeast Asia. They have the skill set, they have the supply chain, and they have the team members that they’ve developed in some cases over 30 years or more.

David: I think a lot of people fail to pick up on the fact that the system that’s in place; these factories that make all of the specialized parts for locomotives and put all the little grab irons and everything else on we modelers love, they didn’t happen overnight. It’s taken that industry [model trains] a long time to spool up to make those products and get them to the level we see and enjoy them today.

Yes, it did take 25 or 30 years, and people like Ms Walthers Naffah with MBAs let it happen, even with the 2018 wake-up call. Ms Walthers Naffah is lucky she can't fire herself from the family business, because she'd be fired by the board of any other. But what's the plan now?

Stacey: This has been a really interesting leadership and management challenge for me and for my team and for a lot of the businesses in the industry. We’ve been talking to each other to help advocate for our position and explain it. But, yes, everybody’s really trying to figure out what to do.

. . . So yes, there’s a lot of pausing, regrouping, figuring out what’s the right thing. Our suppliers have made this product. We need to pay them. We’re always going to be a good partner to them. They’ve been a good partner to us. And so, there’s a lot of decision making that has to happen to figure out how to get us from where we were three weeks ago to where we’re going to be.

So basically tbere's no plan. They're just going to have to figure it out. Manufacturers are slowly announcing that they can't guarantee prices on pre-orders, but that's not any sort of solution to the basic problem. Athearn announced this past week on Facebook:

Due to the China import tariff increasing to 145% and ongoing uncertainty about future rates, the Athearn team is currently unable to confirm pre-order pricing with confidence. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to postpone all new product announcements, including the May release originally scheduled for Friday, April 25th.

We understand this may be disappointing, but believe this pause is the most prudent course of action under the circumstances.

Atlas basically announced rhe same thing in different words:

Atlas Model Railroad Co. has announced the roll out of a new Price Lock program, effective through May 31, 2025, as a response to market uncertainty brought on by the rollout of U.S. tariffs.

“We know our partners are navigating a rapidly changing market. This decision is about providing them time, clarity, and trust,” said Jarrett Haedrich, Executive Chairman of Atlas, in a press release shared with Model Railroader. “All of our in-stock inventory — plus our most recent container arrivals subject to the new 20% tariff — will remain at current pricing through the end of May.”

. . . This program applies to in-stock N, HO, O, and Z scale products. After May 31, 2025, Atlas plans to reassess market conditions and adjust their catalog accordingly.

At this point, they're hoping the problem will go away in a matter of weeks, there'll be a tariff level they can live with for now, and life will go on. But this doesn't change the basic problem, that 25 years ago, the industry surrendered control of production to a few factories in China that are still subject to natural disaster, epidemic, economic collapse, regime change, or even war with the US, all of which could have a greater and longer-lasting impacrt than a tariff conflict.

From a consumer point of view, at my age, I've bought 99% of what I'm ever going to get, and my future plans have more to do with disposing of it all. But also, there's a huge supply of "new old stock" train equipment avaiIable on eBay, so hobbyists have that option. I think more of the small-business train stores that are threatened if they don't have products to sell. Somebody with more imagination and initiative than David Popp and Ms Walthers Naffah is going to have to step in.

The Bachmann N Amtrak ALC-42

I was interested in getting the Bachmann N ALC-42 and bypassed the Kato model, which has been out for quite a while, even though even at discount, the Bachmann is three times the price of the Kato model. But in comparison to either the Kato P42 or SC-44, which I do have and which are mechanically and electricslly similar to their ALC-42, I think the Bachmann is worth the money.

For one thing, it's possible to get Kato ALC-42s with DCC and sound installed from a few vendors, but the price is comparable to the Bachmann, but the Katos don't have the Bachmann level of detail, nor the added lighting features of the Bachmanns. (I don't know if the Katos, even with DCC and sound, have the corridor lighting installed, which is standard with the Bachmanns.) There are also numerous detail features like free-standing grab irons that are visible in the photos.

Below are two shots of the Bachmann up and running on my small layout:

The ditch li9ghts are always on with the loco in forward. You can turn the main headlight off and on with F0. The ditch lights will alternately flash when you press F1, the bell, or F2-F3, the long and short horn. In reverse with F0 on, a rear headlight will go on:

In forward, two red rear marker lights illuminate.

In reverse, two red marker lights illuminate at the front of the locomotive.

The loco has a capacitor that lets the sound and motor run for a few seconds after power to the track is switched off.

The ALC-42 has illuminated numberboards on the front that, like the ditch lights and corridor lights, illuminate whenever power is in the track. However, the ditch lights turn off automatically with the headlight in reverse. The DCC and sound decoder is TCS version 5. The loco prime mover sound starts whenever power is applied without the need to address the loco or press a startup key. However, you can mute the prime mover sound with F8. You can also run a prime mover start sequence with F6. F7 dims the headlight.

There are more advanced TCS features that allow you to control the numberboard and ditch lights, along with many other options, in the loco documentation.

So far, I like the sounds that come with the loco a lot, but questions like the volume or the precise horn sound are individual preferences.

More Scenery Work Around The Power Substation

I mentioned in my last post that I wanted to add more small details around the substation a la George Sellios. I had some items on hand. The photo is mainly to check my work and see what else might be done:

I added ductwork to the roof of the building and barrels to the ground surface nearby, both from Model Tech Studios. I also added a Kato catenary bridge, inserted in preinstalled bases.

The roof needs more details like maybe a rooftop water tank and stairway entry. The plywood base holding the background buildings needs to be disguised with either vegetation or a retaining wall.

Woodland Scenics N Power Substation

I installed a Woodland Scenics N power substation, with their N chain link fence kit, on my triple-wide urban-industrial T-TRAK module.

As I get older and my fingers don't work as well, I'm finding Woodland Scenics built-up models an acceptable substitute for kits and scratchbuilding. The other structures in the scene are N scale building flats, some of which have been made more 3-dimensional with foamcore additions.

The building to the left is an abandoned factory from PTF Designs, a low-relief model installed as is. The one to the right is from Trackside Flats with a foamcore additon to make it 3-dimensional. I added fine ground foam "ivy" to the sidewalls to make up for the fact that they don't have detail. The buildings to the rear are plain flats from Trackside Flats.

The photo details on Trackside Flats N scale flats come out with a really good 3D effect for fire escapes, drain pipes, and so forth in photos. I have more N roof details like ducts to add to the 3D building roofs, and it looks like the ground areas can use more barrels, pallets, vehcles, and so forth a la George Sellios.

Start Of Scenery On Module 15

A little over a mopnth ago, I posted on a new half-depth, single-wide T-TRAK module that would mainly feature contemporary-era low relief photo backdrop buildings. I didn't have anything quite finished for that post, but in January, I posted on one experiment. I finally got the first experimental building mated with another that would fill out the width of the module and got them squared up and attached to the base.

As I described in the January post, the building on the right is from a screen shot off a YouTube video showing the Morrow Hotal just north of Union Station in Washington, DC. The building on the left is a texture I found on the web representing a multilevel parking garage. Both turned out to be close enough to N scale off my printer without the need for any other tweaking.

I follow George Sellios's work on the Franklin & South Manchester Facebook group, and I've been surprised at how often he includes printed buildings and components, some probably off his computer and others commercial products, on his layout. For instance, I think most of the buildings except the water tank in this photo are printed out and braced on cardboard or foamcore, with just a few of his characteristic details added:

The cost of my buildings was negligible, the backing was made from cereal box cardboard stiffened with used fireplace matches, plus the cost of a couple sheets of printer paper and ink.

I'll add ballast and other trackside details to the baseboard.

Surfliner Variations And California-Style Scenery

The Kato Surfliner sets provide only a couple of variations on Surfliner trains. Among other things, there's currently at least one Capitol-San Joaquin Califormia car running in consists down south in the northern California paint. I hope Kato makes this -- or in fact, other cars in that scheme -- available. Also, while Kato provides both a Superliner coach in Amtrak Phase Vi paint and one in Surfliner paint in its complete 8-item set, which are both prototypical, in recent years there have also been two Superliner Sightseer Lounges in Phase VI paint running as substitute cafe cars in Surfliner consists. Generally, the prototype Surfliner sets do not have both a Phase VI Superliner coach and a Superliner coach in Surfliner paint in the same set.

So far, I have just the Kato 4-item set, and while I've installed corridor lights in the SC-44, I have yet to install the 11-211 lighting kits in the coach, cab car, and business class car in that set. However, I have put together a Surfliner consist with both a Superliner Sightseer Lounge and Superliner coach in Phase VI. This gives 5 cars total, which is just 1 car short of the 6-car consist that sometimes runs on the prototype. This is probably perfectly adequate for a small layout like mine.

The Surfliner SC-44s that replaced the F59PHIs that went to Chicago Metra have been less than reliable, and Amtrak P42s and 8-32BWHs often substitute, sometimes with a loco on each end to replace the cab car.

You can also see that I'm starting to play around with more California style scenery on the inside corner Module 10. The new ground cover so far is JTT 0595603 Golden Grassland sheets, which I find at least acceptable for semi-arid California areas. I'm also starting to play around with some oil field details. I got these as 3D prints from eBay, but I also have an N Walthers pumpjack. Here is an example of California oil field scenery:

Installing The Corridor Light In A Kato SC-44

One real deficiency in N scale is how-to documentation for important add-ons. An example is how to add the side corridor lights in the Kato Siemens SC-44s and ALC-44s. As I understand this, these lights, which are visible in the radiator vent cutouts on the sides, are always lit on the prototype, with very few exceptions, whether these locos are pulling or pushing, day or night, trailing in consist or leading. One question I have is if Kato provides factory-installed headlights in all its units, why should it be necessary for the user to install theae separately at all?

This video from Kato USA gives basic info on removing the shell and the basic innards of both the ALC-42 and SC-44:

However, it leaves out specific info on how to install the corridor lights. It specifies that yoiu use the 11-211 lighting kit that's meant mainly for passenger cars. It implies that you leave off the long light bar for use in passenger cars, but it doesn't make plain that you also have to remove the piece of white plastic that surrounds the PC board and the two contact wires that extend below the board.

You can see the basic PC board from the 11-211 inserted into the chassis at left in the photo above. If you remove the white plastic piece that surrounds it in the 11-211, it will go in easily and work fine.

The installed corridor light with the body reattached is above.

Back To Richmond Main Street

I last posted on my project to build some sort of representwtion of the Main Street Station in Richmond, VA on a double-wide, lowered-deck T-TRAK module a little over three years ago. Looking at the dates on my photos, I began the project in 2019, three years before that. The idea has been to build a basic shape of the station from foamcore in N scale -- it's possible to find various dimensioned drawings on the web -- and gradually to add a "skin" of photos printed off the web reduced to N scale. Here is how it started:

It appears that not long after my last post in 2022, I burned out and set the project aside. Here, by the way, is a recent overall photo of the prototype

The station originally served the Chesapeake & Ohio and Seaboard Air Line, buit it sat vacant after Amtrak in 1971. In the 1990s, the city restored it as a wedding and event venue, and it eventually resumed use as an Amtrak station on the line to Newport News, VA. The train shed is now used as a convention hall.

I posted last week that I'm feeling encouraged by recent T-TRAK projects, and I decided to return to the Richmond Main Street module. It turns out that I never laid permanent track on it, so I added permanent double-track Unitrack and wired it to a terminal strip under the deck. The prototype is now single track, but the C&O side was double track in earlier years. Here's the current status with track laid and power hooked up:

The next stage will be to finish the large dormers and chimney, which for now are just cardboard facades. They will need backup pieces and roofs to bulk them up and straighten them out. I'm also scaling and printing more "skin" to add around the side and rear, and I need to add the roof between the headhouse and the train shed.

Some time ago, I heard from a guy who was thinking about doing this in 3D print, but I never heard more. I think doing this in any sort of detailed depth would be close to a lifetime project, and you'd either need to locate the original architectural drawings, digitize them, and translate them to Sketchup, or do some sort of mega scan of the actual building.

What I'm doing is purely to satisfy myself, and it probably won't impress too many other folks, but it will at least turn out to be doable.

Module 10

I number my T-TRAK modules, because it makes it easy for me to assign DCC addresses to switch decoders and NCE Illuminators installed in them. Module 10 is an inside corner module intended to fit inside an L-shaped configuration or an L-shaped around-the-wall arrangement. I took this photo in 2022 not long after I assembled it, without much scenery.

In fact, I wavered over what kind of scenery to give it. Finally I started to add a California-style palm grove using cheapo plastic Chinese palms from eBay, but then I set it aside. Here's the prototype I followed:

When I got a Kato Surfliner set this past weeK, I pulled the module out of storage and hooked it up again:

I decided to try using the palms as a backdrop for closaeup shots testing the Kato Surfliner lighting features:

I'm pretty happy with how these turned out with just the suggestion of scenery. It sort of encourages me in the general approach I've been developing toward T-TRAK.

New T-TRAK Module

I've finished basic assembly, track, and electrical work on a new T-TRAK module. This is a half-depth, single-wide module that I intend to be compatible with an earlier half-depth, double wide module that I based loosely on Amtrak's Springfield, MA station, shown below:

Although there's no scenery work yet, I want to base it loosely on the city scene just north of Washington, DC Union Station using the building flats I discussed in this post. Below is a top view of the track:

The upper track in the photo is a dummy track intended to add depth to the scene, but wired to the DCC bus to allow lighted rolling stock to pose on it for photos. The lower two tracks are according to T-TRAK mechanical standards and will interface with any other standard T-TRAK module. The departure, for those familiar with T-TRAK, is the Kato crossover. T-TRAK generally can't handle crossovers between tracks, because the wiring according to standards is opposite: the bottom track connects with the Kato terminal wires as blue-white; the upper track connects with the wires white-blue. Sending a train over the crossover between the tracks will cause a short.

From the time I started with T-TRAK, I intended to use DCC, and I intended to build modules mainly just for personal use, not T-TRAK meets. I built several early modules with DPDT toggles that would allow the wiring to switch from BWBW to BWWB in case I ever wanted to run them at a T-TRAK meet, but it seems less and less likely I will ever do this, so I've stopped including the DPDT feature on recent projects.

The photo below shows my idea about taking advantage of the space under the module deck. I haven't heard of anyone else doing anything like this. Normally the space under a standard T-TRAK module is empty. But doing things this way makes wiring much more accessible than under normal benchwork, among other things. The bottom line is that I can include crossovers on my personal modules and not have a short, but I couldn't use them at a T-TRAK meet. Not likely I will ever take a module to a meet as I get older anyhow.

The 6-position barrier strip at left connects all three tracks above the deck to the DCC bus. They are all wired BWBWBW. Every standard module I've built has a barrier strip like this that takes power off the two main tracks. Thus a bad connection via a dirty or damaged Unijoiner between modules can be bypassed via the Unijoiners connecting the other track to other modules. This also provides a DCC interface with other DCC devices on the individual module, like a switch machine decoder or an NCE Illuminator that powers Woodland Scenics Just Plug LEDs off the DCC bus. Normally there is no other connection to the DCC bus between modules than the Unijoiners that connect the tracks between modules.

The 5-position barrier strip on the right connects a Digitrax DS51K1 switch machine decoder, farthest to trhe right, to the DCC bus, as well as the red and black wires to the Kato crossover. This allows me to throw the crossover from my DCC command station.

The photo below is an initial test to be sure power is reaching all three tracks on the module and gives a basic idea of photo possibilities:

Surfliners As Modelable Prototype

I've noticed that the Kato N Surfliners have started to reach stores. It'll be a couple weeks until my budget will let me order a set. Meanwhile, here are some photos I've taken while railfanning them over the past quarter century.

A little-noticed scenic feature is the jumpover the passenger route takes over the Alameda Corridor freight line to Los Angeles Harbor and the LA River just past the Redondo Jct engine facility.

Here is 2112, one of the newer SC-44s, in Glendale.

Here is 2109 pushing a northbound past the BNSF diesel facility in Commerce.

Train 769 coming and going in Oxnard in May 2013.

Cab car 6953 next to a Metrolink train in Glendale.