Back To T-TRAK

I've been experimenting with more variations on T-TRAK modules for home use. Not long after I first got started doing this, a fledgling T-TRAK group got organized in the Los Angeles area, but the COVID lockdowns took all its potential venues away for a couple of years, and when meets became possible again, a lot of potential members had lost interest, and then some of the best venues began requiring insurance from meet participants.

Thus I've had less motivation to build modules that follow T-TRAK interchange standards, like the double main line, since it's less likely I'll ever run modules at a meet. So here's a new module, a double track to single, which is not kosher for standard T-TRAK at all:

Conceptually, this is a CTC control point plus a short spur. It uses Peco code 80 switches with Peco switch machines, which I find more reliable than Kato Unitrack switches. Unitrack end sections are spliced onto the Peco or Atlas switches and flex track to allow the modules to be connected with Kato Unijoiners.

The underside of the module shows the Peco switch machines and the start of the numerous terminal strips and other hardware that go under my modules. The switch machines will be controlled by a Digitrax DS52. My modules have a DCC bus that runs through the rails via the Unijoiner connections between modules, and each module has takeoffs from drops between the track and the terminal strips.

There will also be an NCE Illuminator that will convert the DCC signal in the rails to DC current for signals and lighting. The signals will reflect the switch positions via Atlas Snap Relays running in parallel with the switch machines.

The module itself is from Osborn Model Kits. I've seen that vendors for T-TRAK module kits come and go. One problem seems to be the availability of plywood due to supply chain interruptions, but Osborn is still in business, ships promptly, and has a good product.

More With Photo-Realistic Building Flats

One thing I'm learning about N scale is that it's much easier to fool the eye with small amounts of detail that suggest more is there than actually is. Photo-realistic building flats like those from Trackside Flats definitely do this. The eye wants to find 3-D effects, especially in photos of the photos on the flats, for instance like the one below:

I'm still playing around with the most recent Trackside Flats that I've converted to low-relief buildings to see what T-TRAK modules they'll work best with. In addition, I've found another producer of similar flats, PTF Designs, that sells on eBay. The abandoned factory with graffiti below is from PTF. It's between two Trackside Flats buildings.

I'm aiming for an "urban generic" background reminiscent in part of the Northeast Corridor, but also generic enough so that even European equipment like that in the photo above doesn't look out of place.

Below is another new set of low relief buildings that I'm trying out on another T-TRAK module.

Advantages Of T-Trak For Home Layouts

I'm beginning the process of reconguring my T-Trak modules for the expansion I talked about in my last post. As part of it, a module based on the Springfield. MA Amtrak station is moving from a shelf to active use on the expanded layout:

I began to realize this is a result of the thinking I've done in taking the T-Trak idea to develop a portable and configurable layout. The idea started as a very basic staging module built on white foam using extra pieces of Unitrack:

Then I thought it might be intereting to add features like the Springfield Amtrak station:

I finished one baggage elevator like those in Springrield.

I began thinking about building flats as background and using it on a shelf as a photo background:

But then I decided I miht as wel turn the thing into a full module and ordered a half-depth dobule-side kit:

And began building a full scenic development, eventually with lights.

The point of this is that the basic T-Trak idea encourages things like prototyping on a very manageable scale.

T-Trak Expansion

I've been continuing to experiment with the idea of T-Trak for home layout use. As the mainstream concept has evolved, it still isn't much more than a series of tail-chasing continuous loops with, at best, a set of big "staging track" yard modules that feed the individual loops. As I've worked on T-Trak at fome with DCC, I've found that with crossovers between mains, you can hold trains on sections of the double track and route trains in either direction around them -- sort of a slo-mo CTC. /

My original project expanded onto a 30 x 72 nch folding table. As time went on, I built additonal modules, at first intended to branch off from the original oval on the table and run onto an old desk, as in the photo below.

However, I slowly begsn to realize that if I got rid of the old desk and rearranged a few other things, I could replace it with a second 30 x 72 inch folding table. In fact, I began to realize that I had enough modules that, with the addition of just one more double-wide module kit, I could reconfigure the existing modules into an L-shaped layout.

I drew each module I have to scale using a Kato transparent plastic Unitrack planner, scanned and printed my drawings out, and came up with the drawing below. It's messy due to all the copying, cutting, and pasting, but it gave me an idea:

This will give the newer modules I've built a home, like those below:

The kit I have left to buy will be a double wide recessed deck to hold the Richmond Main Street Station project:

T-Trak Progress

I did some work over the past week on T-Trak modules. Again, I'm finding the T-Trak concept potentially useful as a home-based project, since modules can easily be rearranged, stored, relocated, and so forth. As a result, while I use standard module dimensions, I don't necessarily follow other track or wiring standards, since they're for me, not for some committee of petty tyrants. It's likely I'll never run my modules at a show.

Here's the current state of the corner module based on the Little Hell Gate approach to New York's Hell Gate Bridge:

The prototype passes over a city park. There will be more parklike vegetation added. The building in the background is a Walthers Parkview Towers. It will have Just Plug lighting installed.

Below is a module where I installed a package of JTT autumn trees, on the left.

I'll gradually add other scenic improvements to all the modules.

The Kato N C&NW Bi-Level 400

I was eager to get one of these new sets, because I rode the remnant of the Peninsula 400 in late 1970, just before Amtrak. In fact, it was probably the last pre-Amtrak train I rode. I've been interested in these trains since I saw a blurb in a Trains magazine with mention that the C&NW had had Pullman rebuild a single-level diner with a false roof to conform to the bi-level profile of the Flambeau 400 and Peninsula 400 trains. The bi-level 400s wound up as pretty much the last C&NW intercity service, although I believe that by the end, they ran only as far as Green Bay, WI.

I also had a chance to ride C&NW bi-level suburban trains in the 1960s, and I remember being in a meeting in a Chicago office about 1967 and seeing from the window one of the bi-level 400s departing Northwestern Station complete with re-profiled diner. The 400 bi-levels were in a completely different pool from the suburban bi-levels and had different interiors. Kato has released C&NW E8s in C&NW paint in two numbers as well as cars numbered for the 400 trains in a set. They also appear to be releasing C&NW cars numbered as suburban gallery cars, as well as C&NW style cars repainted in contemporary METRA paint. While the C&NW cab cars have been retired from METRA, ex C&NW coaches remain in service.

I really like the Kato C&NW E8. These are heavy locos and smooth runners. I ordered the set with pre-installed DCC. The E8 is lettered in the late 1950s C&NW scheme without the horizontal black stripe in the middle of the body and with the nose numberboards blanked out and painted yellow.

By the time the bi-level 400s were introduced, the E8s had been rebuilt for head end power with diesel generators mounted in the rear of the body, with a porthole removed and vents added. This isn't reproduced on the Kato model. For N scale at normal distance, this isn't critical. The nose is painted with the older style C&NW silver winged bezel. Later, this was eliminated, and only a simple large C&NW monogram was placed under the headlights. Photos indicate that both styles appeared together during the 1960s. The overall effect is of the C&NW E8s I remember from the 1960s.

The set includes a cab car, but the bi-level 400s did not operate with cab cars. However, the cab car in the set gives a modeler a start on a suburban train of gallery bi-levels. The set that I got with pre-installed DCC includes an FL12 directional decoder for the cab car lights.

I especially like the red tail lights in the prototypical side mounts.

A note of caution: the horn on the cab car fell out in normal handling, an irritating feature of many preassembled models. Given its size, it's effectively gone forever. It would be smart to add a small drop of plastic solvent to hold it in place when you first take it out of the box.

Kato provides a model of car 903, which had 48 coach seats and 32 tavern seats (converted to snack coach in 1970).

The set provides two of the intercity coach cars, 700 and 705. Although there are interiors, there's no difference among the various configurations, and in fact I believe they represent the suburban gallery coach interior. Again, for N, this isn't important.

I had a couple of extra Kato lighting kits and installed them in the intercity coaches. They're easy to do.

The other car is parlor 6400. This is visually the same as the coaches. The prototype parlor was rebuilt to a suburban gallery coach in 1967, so the only unique feature on the model is the number.

The bi-level 400 trains appear on many videos. A full set of one running in reverse from Northwestern Station to the California Avenue coach yard is shown in the Green Frog Emery Gulash Chicago Odyssey Volume 2 Part 1, including both a re-profiled diner and the tavern coach about 1962.

Other videos show single-level RPOs running with bi-level cars on these trains. I found an old Atlas Rivarossi C&NW RPO on eBay that can work as a stand in:

Considering this model is about 45 years old, it's not bad at all. I'l.l probably just swap out a pair of Micro Trains trucks.

The consist and length of these trains varied widely over the years, from season to season, and probably by day of the week. Late videos show just two coaches, which I think was the consist of the train I rode in December 1970. That's what's currently on my layout:

Struggling With NCE

I've said before that outside of the cabs and boosters it makes, I've had a 30-50% defect rate in NCE products across its line. I'm not sure why the boosters and cabs seem to be exempt from this. I've had a Power Cab for seven years that's worked without a problem, and earlier this year I got an SB5 that so far works fine. But their decoders are a completely different story.

The NCE Illuminator is a recent product that can substitute for the Woodland Scenics Light Hub in its Just Plug system. It has some real potential advantages that include the ability to program individual outputs for features like flashing, random on-off, and even flickering fluorescent bulbs. Another one from my point of view is that it can run off the DCC power bus, which can minimize layout wiring. In particular, since T-Trak uses the Kato Unijoiners to carry power between modules, the track can become the DCC bus, and Illuminators can run off the track DCC via a terminal strip on individual T-Trak modules.

The problem is that, as I've been working with Illuminators on T-Trak modules, I've been finding the defect rate is about the highest I've experienced with any NCE decoder. Last month, I packed up four and sent them back to NCE for warranty support. One problem, though, is that NCE's warranty support is slow -- even if they replace a decoder, it takes them weeks and months to ship the replacement, which puts any project on hold or requires you to buy a new one anyhow if you want to finish the project on time -- but there's no guarantee that the new one or the replacement will work, either.

Their warranty support is a guy named Matt, whom I've gotten experience working with over the past year or so. He's a passive-aggressive sort of guy who's slow to get back to you. Rather than use e-mail, he leaves phone messages, and if you try to reply to his phone message with an e-mail (rather than play phone tag), he simply doesn't answer. But if you return his call, he wants to talk to you for half a hour.

Based on my experience this past week, I located the guy who seems to be in charge at NCE (he isn't listed on the web site), who seems to be James Scorse. I sent him a snail-mail letter, since his e-mail isn't public:

Dear Mr Scorse,

Over the past several months, I’ve purchased eight NCE Illuminators. Five of these have had various problems, including not functioning at all when connected to DCC power and output ports set to non-default values. In two cases, I was able to debug the problems myself.

Nevertheless, I think you’ll agree that a new product unpacked from its factory package that does not function according to the documentation shipped with the product is defective. This is a defect rate for recently purchased Illuminators of over 60%.

I was unable to debug three of these and returned them, along with another one that had burned out, to Matt in Warranty Support, on October 26. Matt left me a phone message on November 6, and I had a phone discussion with him on November 7, at about 11:15 AM EST. In that discussion, Matt insisted that there was “nothing wrong with” these Illuminators.

It took about 15 minutes for me to ask enough questions to get Matt to explain to me that what happens is that at the factory, technicians will do things like turn off the Illuminators or change CVs to test them, but they do not return them to factory default values. Matt was, in my opinion, extremely argumentative and sometimes sarcastic and condescending in explaining this, and his view seems to have been that I should have figured this out for myself and not claimed the Illuminators were defective. The entire discussion lasted over 30 minutes, in my view because Matt was unwilling to acknowledge that NCE had shipped defective decoders.

However, the decoders were either non-functional or did not function as documented when shipped from the factory. Matt admitted as much.

I can’t tell you how to run your business, Mr Scorse, but it appears to me that you have a problem in your factory, which is shipping products not set to factory default values, and you have a problem in Matt, who seems extremely defensive and unwilling to resolve a legitimate customer problem promptly or courteously.

My experience with NCE is that its products have unacceptably high defect rates, with support staff unwilling to resolve problems promptly or courteously. My preferred DCC vendor is not NCE.

I applied additional pressure on NCE to retrieve the four decoders I sent in (or get replacements), and I got a shipment notice Friday. We'll have to see how many work when I get them back. I'm hoping to salvage at least a few for use on T-Trak modules, but I've decided it's too much of a crap shoot to continue using them on my HO layout.

I'll update if I get any reply or better treatment from NCE, but I'm not expecting anything.

Working With The Just Plug System

When I started this layout 25-plus years ago, I wanted to incorporate lighting in many of the structures. I did in fact do this, although the available means were basically 12-volt flashlight bulbs in little screw stands from Bachmann and Model Power. Over the years, these have pretty much all burned out, come unsoldered, been damaged, or whatever. Discovering the Woodland Scenics Just Plug system has rekindled my interest in lighting, and I'm beginning to install new lighting in buildings or reinstall Just Plug LEDs to replace old burned-out bulbs.

In addition, last week I picked up some woodland Scenics Light Diffusing Window Film at the hobby shop. This is very useful for letting light shine through windows, while keeping a viewer from looking inside the building and seeing there's no interior. For instance, here's the Light Diffusing Film installed in a Campbell Carstens Flophouse lobby. (On my layout, this is the McKittrick Hotel on 14th St in Bay City.)

Even without the lights, this is very useful stuff. For instance, I found a basic set of walls for the old SS Ltd San Francisco office building at the old Caboose Hobbies in Denver several decades ago. I built them into a nice oblique corner building for Zenith. I even went as far as to add floors and an elevator shaft, but I knew adding a full interior would be something I'd probably never get to, even though the large windows beg for it. Here was the result:

I added the Light Diffusing Film and another type of tinted film that comes in the same box to darken and block out the view inside. I think this is a big improvement even without lights in the building.

There's other capability available with the Just Plug system, which is the ability to set individual strings of LEDs to turn on and off at random. I am doing this with an option in the NCE Illuminator, which runs Just Plug LEDs off the DCC bus, but Woodland Scenics offers a light hub with the same ability. Basically, if you add interior walls to a building, or have LEDs in separate individual buildings, you can have them turn on and off at random. Here's how I've set this up in a pair of storefronts on 14th St next to the McKittrick Hotel:

Here are the lights turning on and off individually. The storefront windows have also had the Light Diffusing Film applied:

I'm doing the same thing with lighted buildings on the N scale T-Trak layout.

However, as I work more with the NCE Illuminators, I'm finding these have a high error rate -- like 30-50%. While NCE has a return policy, their support staff is hard to deal with, makes errors (I had to send back to them a set of decoders they'd fixed for a different guy, and they want to play phone tag instead of use e-mail), and they keep your defective decoder for weeks before sending a replacement, which itself will be iffy. As a result, I'm going to continue to use Illuminators only with the T-Trak modules, where running off the DCC bus will minimize wiring, while I'm going to move to Just Plug light hubs on my HO layout.

Virginia Railway Express Train

I'm feeling my way toward modeling contemporary passenger and commuter operations. Although there are N and HO models out there, the range is a little sketchy, and few commuter modelers post regularly on blogs or YouTube. The fact that couplers, wheels, and car weights aren't very well standardized in N makes operation using models from different manufacturers a problem, too. Her's a Virginia Railway Express train I recently finished and got into preliminary operation.

The lead car is a Kato Nippon Sharyo cab car with an FL12 decoder for head and tail lights and a lighting kit from an 11-212 set:

I also added Kato catenary bridges to the scene. I painted these for the red oxide New Jersey Transit uses on its Morris and Essex ex-Lackawanna routes, but VRE either operates under black ex-PRR bridges that have been de-wired or Amtrak bridges that are gray.

Here's a straight Kato Nippon Sharyo coach with an 11-212 lighting kit:

Wheels of Time brought out C&NW bi level cars in several schemes, including one Virginia Railway Express scheme. These cars were leased from Chicago METRA. The six-window style I believe was built for C&NW by St Louis Car Company, and these were completely withdrawn from METRA, while METRA kept running some of the ex C&NW Pullman 4-window style cars. However, the VRE 6-window cars were recently returned to METRA, which has put some back into service still lettered for VRE.

The Wheels of Time cars would not go around curves coupled to Kato Nippon Sharyo cars. I fiddled with some options to fix this until I found the Wheels of Time diaphragms would simply snap off the car ends, which eliminated the conflict, and both cars will now operate in a train around the T-Trak module curves. Even so, I think I need to tweak the way the Micro Trains trucks are mounted on the Wheels of Time cars to get more reliable operation.

Another Kato Nippon Sharyo coach. One thing I like about the newest locos and passenger cars is the ability -- at least with Kato -- to add lighting kits that give an extra prototype dimension to the models. It's a shame the Wheels of Time cars don't have this ability. However, Kato will be bringing out the C&NW Pullman style 4-window bi-levels in METRA in another month or two, and I'm assuming these can be lit like the Nippon Sharyo cars.

The way N scale works, I'll be looking forward to running METRA trains with both Nippon Sharyo and Pullman cars that are fully compatible via Kato. Here's a Pullman I shot in Elmhurst, IL in train with later stainless cars:

I'll need to check to see if VRE had any of the Pullman 4-window style cars. If so, it would be great if Kato would bring them out for VRE.

And here's a Kato MP36 shoving the train.

How To Assemble Kato N Catenary Masts

My focus in N scale has mainly been contemporary passenger operations, and this includes things like the Northeast Corridor, New Jersey Transit, SEPTA, and other prototypes with electric operations. I've been intrigued with adding Kato catenary components to parts of the layout as scenic detail features, although actually powering N catenary is more than I want to take on. So the Kato components are an interesting idea, snce they're meant to be scenic features only. But they aren't much used in the US, and attempts to get info by posting queries on Facebook groups have been unproductive.

So after some searching, I've come up with an explanation of what the various components are about and how to use them. I found this English-language web page on the Japanese prototype for Kato catenary is very useful. This discussion will cover the catenary components that are used for standard Unitrack, not the wider plate track.

We'll start with the 23-056 catenary pole base set. This provides bases for either style of standard double track catenary bridges, as well as the single track gantries. The set contains two styles of base. Both come in the same package:

If you separate the bases into two types, the style on the left is for use with standard Unitrack, both wooden and concrete tie. The style on the right is for use with viaduct sections. I'll concentrate on the standard Unitrack in this post, although I've also added the viaduct style to viaduct sections on one T-Trak module.

The standard Unitrack bases have moldings that will either let them fit onto the bezels under the track centers or the gussets under the ballast slopes:

The bases extend from beneath the track on two sides. One side goes to a socket for the catenary bridge base. The other side goes to an interface that will allow two bases to keep two parallel tracks at the correct distance for double track catenary bridges:

For single track, you just use the one base with a Kato single track catenary gantry, 23-059. For double track, two bridge styles are available. The one below is 23-057, a curved arch.

This, according to the Sumida Crossing site linked above, is a modern Japanese style used on both the Shinkansen and narrow gauge lines. You can occasionally see arches like this in the US, but they aren't common. Here's one that's been cut out and installed on the bases with double track:

The good thing about this system is that the bases can be permanently attached beneath the Unitrack, but the bridges can easily be removed, replaced, or swapped out with a different style. Especially for T-Trak, this is very desirable to prevent damage in handling the module. Here's a first crack at installing a Kato bridge in scenery:

However, the Kato 23-060 style of Warren truss catenary bridge is much more like what you see in the US, in some parts of the Northeast Corridor, METRA electric, and New Jersey Transit. I have a set of these on order. I find that unless the bases are glued down and permanently attached to the Unitrack, the whole assembly is pretty flimsy. But the components make good scenic details for passenger operations in urban areas. In addition, on former Conrail electrified freight lines where the wires have been removed, the catenary bridges are still in place, so they're also prototypical in modern freight only areas.