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.

A Little More Work On The T-TRAK Module

I did some scenery work on the T-TRAK module I posted about last week, adding some vegetationm to the berm:

The ground cover is just a sheet from JTT that includes all the dirt, grass, and shrubbery. I cut it up to fit the space. The great thing about these sheets is that they aren't paper, they're a somewhat more flexible material, and if you cover the area you're going to put it on with a coat of Elmer's Glue, even if it isn't flat, as shown above, it will shrink to fit the irregular surface as the glue dries.

The trees are from Bachmann. I'll be adding more to the area as work continues.

Most of the work I did over the past week was under the module deck. I've pretty much given up on the idea of ever bringing my modules to a T-TRAK meet -- a Southern California group was starting before COVID, but it quit for the duration, and then the venues raised their insurance requirements, so I doubt if this will ever really restart. In any case, I'd already been building modules that weren't electrically compatible with the T-TRAK standards, so I'm basically satisfying myself building small layouts in a home environment.

But under the decks, I'm installing things like DCC switch machine decoders and NCE Illuminators that let me run Woodland Scenics Just Plug devices off the DCC bus. This is what the underside of one of my typical modules looks like:

This will allow me to add featues like signals in the future, without the need to go under a conventional layout to make changes -- all I do is flip the module over to work on it. There's a lot of potential in T-TRAK besides just running big layouts in gyms and convention centers.

Restarting Work On My Newest T-TRAK Module

Looking at the data on this photo, I took it in June 2023, more than 18 months ago.

For whatever reason, I got stumped and lost interest in the project -- it may have been because I couldn't see a robust way to fasten the Kato crossover to the surface, as it doesn't have the usual mounting sockets for screws coming up under the deck, and any sort of adhesive could be either dangerous getting into the switch mechanism or too uncertain given the wear and tear of constantly disconnecting and reconnecting the track on this module to other modules via the Unijoiners. Not long ago, I rethought things:

At the right end of the track, about an inch in from the edge of the module, I bracketed the ballast shoulders on each side of the crossover with 2-56 wood screws inserted in #50 holes. They don't penetrate the ballast shoulders at all, they just hold the track tightly in place on the sides. At the other end of the module, I simoply drilled a hole in the middle of the Kato 20-042 double track 2-7/16" straight section and held it in place with a larger sreew drilled in from the top. This holds the track firmly in place without the need for any sort of adhesive.

The screws will be either painted or covered with bits of ground foam to make them less conspicuous. I also started to rethink the scenery, beginning with a new color of Rustoleum Nutmeg to replace the yellow-brown I started with. I also began to notice from wstching train videos that even in fairly flat country, there's often a low berm on one side of the tracks or the other, so I made this up with some Sculptamold. This willl be covered with trees and brush.

I'll put farm buildings and more trees on the other side of the berm.

Klawndyke's T-TRAK Lackawanna Concrete Arch Bridge

Klawndyde's offers a Lackawanna-style concrete arch bridge kit that's dimensioned to T-TRAK standards. The Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad undertook an extensive relocation and straightening of its main line in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the early 1900s. A major feaure of the project was four reinforced concrete arch viaducts. These are all still in existence, but the Delaware River and Paulinskill viaducts have been out of use since the early 1980s. These may return to service if Amtrak adds a New York-Scranton route.

These were generally similar, but they differed in length, height, and detail. The Klawndyke's model appears to be loosely based on the lowest of these, the Delaware River crossing.

The Klawndyke's model comes in two-arch and four-arch versions that are dimensionally compatible with T-TRAK modules. The two-arch is dimensionally the same as a single-wide module, while the four-arch is a double-wide module. The kit pieces are laser cut from 1/8" MDF. The bridge is easy to assemble with tab-and-slot construction using Elmer's glue.

For paint, I had a puzzle. The model paint manufacturers once offered concrete-colored paint, and Scalecoat even had a spray can of it available. No more. I went on Amazon and found Rust-Oleum 223524 Desert Bisque in a spray can. As a bonus, it's textured to look like concrete. Here is the painted kit posed on concrete steps in our back yard.

I think it's a good match for a concrete color. I assembled two lengths of Kato double-track concrete tie Unitrack that matched the 12-1/8" length of the bridge. I spread silicone caulk on the bottom of the track, centered it on the deck, and held it down with two heavy machinists' vises to dry overnight.

Here's the final result:

Homemade Contemporary-era Building Flats

I enjoy armchair-traveling on Amtrak via YouTube. One thing I've noticed, though, is that the trackside environment no longer looks like the urban backgrounds the commercial hobby suppliers think it does -- there are no longer all that many brick factory or mill buildings next to railroad lines, for instance. Downtown hotels look nothing like they used to, and there are new kinds of structures like concrere parking garages. The suppliers of building flats and urban backgrounds have really been behind the curve, and you really can't order buildings that fit the era of current Amtrak, NJ Transit, or Chicago METRA off the web.

Now and then I've been playing around with saving screen shots off YouTube or other photo sources on the web and seeing if I can make my own building flats that fit the modern era, at least as a stopgap. My first experiment was an N scale compatible flat based on a YouTube screen shot of the Morrow Hotel, which overlooks the Amtrak Northeast Corridor just north of Union Station in Washington. It's posed on a single-wide T-TRAK module in the photo below.

I made it using the cardboard from a Triscuit carton. I printed the screen shot out on ordinary printing paper, glued it to the cardboard using Elmer's glue, pressed the cardboard on a sheet of glass under weights overnight, and assembled the box with more of the carton braced with used fireplace matches.

More recently, I decided to see if I could extend this into a full backdrop that would fit the whole width of a single-wide T-TRAK module, which is 12-1/8". I found a photo of a concrete parking garage that printed out very close to N scale and built a second building flat using a second Triscuit carton the same way:

Right now, this is just a proof-of-concept, but I feel encouraged. Commercial building flats actually need quite a bit of work with Photoshop to edit out perspectve effects and random unwanted details, but the result here is at least a lot closer to what I see riding Amtrak on YouTube, and as I see more opportunities on the web, I'll do other experiments.

Track Relaying On Inglenook Complete

I finally was able to complete replacing the track on my N scale Inglenook. I had a brightt idea at first of re-using Peco switches and whatever-brand flex track salvaged from a long-ago N layout, but it had simpoy gotten too wobbly in the salvage process, and once I decided to make the layout compatible with other N modules using Kato Unijoiner architecture, my option was clear. Only a little of the salvaged track remains on the diagonal track and crossing that serves as the programming track.

I've begun to extend scenery in the upper left corner. I still have to figure out what to do with the DS52 switch machine decoder. I've put a Bar Mills Jeffries Point kit that's not quite finished on the layout temporarily to see if it will fit. This is one of their N kits that are based on HO structures on George Sellios's layout. I also need to start dirting things in.

Programming A Walthers Proto SW900 With ESU LokSound

I found a Walthers Proto Lehigh Valley SW900 with ESU LokSound at a good price, which I like a lot.

A number of manufacturers seem to be settling on LokSound. There are two areas of incompatibility between LokSound and other makers. Up to now, most had focused on F9 as engine start/mute. LokSound uses F8, which wouldn't be too much of a problem, except LokSound then adds a feature called "drive hold" for F9, which locks the loco into its current speed step setting but allows the user to change the apparent speed of the motor via the controller knob. But if you forget ESU engine start is F8 and press F9 when the loco is at speed step 0, this will keep the loco from moving until you remember that you goofed and press F9 again to release it.

The other feature I'm less enthusiastic about is the "prime mover delay" available on full-featured LokSound decoders (but not the economy LokSound decoders on Walthers Mainline locos). In additioon to normal momentum from CVs 3 and 4, this adds an additional acceleration delay while the sound of the prime mover spools up in the decoder.

Since I've never driven a prototype diesel, I don't know how much this additional throttle delay actually reflects the prototype. The main problem I see from a model perspective is that this makes a loco equipped with an ESU LokSound decoder incompatible for consisting with locos that have decoders from other manufacturers, since the ESU equipped loco won't accelerate as quickly as the others -- and that would even include Walthers Mainline locos with the economy LokSound decoder.

The way to fix this is simply to change CV 124 to 16 to eliminate the prime mover delay. Then the model will accelerate compatibly with other locos.