Manhattan Transfer Updates

Over the years, I've collected and saved hundreds of photos of George Sellios's Franklin & South Manchester layout on the web. His models are always an inspiration, but one thing I've found in reviewing all the photos I've found is that he takes interesting shortcuts that I've been applying to my own building models. One is that many of his buildings are three-sided or sometimes just flats. Another is that he moves them around. In addition, his techniques have changed over the years.

I think I discovered King Mill building flats a little before he did, but a lot of his more recent work uses them. His own ideas are inspiring the ongoing work on my Manhattan Transfer terminal headhouse:

In the photo above, I found a faded Coca-Cola ghost sign, resized it to fit the precise measurement on the building side, and glued it to the basic King Mill building. This is pure Sellios. Another thing he does is use small castings to give texture to building flats. I've added air conditioners, vents, stacks, and fans here, and I'll keep doing it as ideas come to me.

Another thing Sellios does is make concrete foundations and retaining walls. Below I've added a foundation to the bottom of the headhouse building:

You can also see behind the Penn Central geep that I added a lighted news stand.

One thing I notice about Sellios's work is that he'll take interesting signs and construct a building around them, often a three-sided one or a flat. On this site I've found copes of a number of signs that he's used for buildings on his layout. I made a two-sided building corner using some of those signs to fill an empty spot in the Manhattan Transfer yard:

This was a test using foamcore for the basic shape, and I think it turned out very well. The clapboards are part of the sign image, simply printed onto ordinary copy paper and glued to the foamcore. At any distance, it looks like clapboard siding. The faded image is also just part of the print. It took me a couple of hours to do the whole project. I'll add more vent and stack castings to this as time goes on and also blend it into the scene a little more with vegetation.

Finally, a Just Plug LED installed in a Fos building flat:

Progress With NCE Illuminators

Well, after several weeks of struggle with NCE, I'm making progress. I got four Illuminators back from support, though I was still puzzled that only one port, the one defined in the documentation as the W/G port, would light. The others were "off". Now, the NCE Illuminstor is generally thought to be an equivalent to the Woodland Scenics Light Hub that I talked about here, except that it runs off the DCC bus and can be controlled from the DCC command station or cab.

What gets me is that NCE has a real winner of a product in the Illuminator. The Woodland Scenics Light Hub requires a separate AC/DC circuit or even a wall wart. Then it needs special accessories to gang light hubs, control extra functions, turn things on and off, and so forth. These cost money and take space. The illuminator will do the extra functions via DCC commands without extra cost, takes less space, and is still otherwise fully Just Plug compatible. But NCE doesn’t even market it as a Just Plug product, and now I find that you have to reprogram it to make it work with Just Plug. But what other use can the product have?

So I finally heard from higher-ups at NCE, who at least explained what the actual defaults are in an Illuminator and how to turn the other two ports on, which are off by default. Except that fewer than half the Illuminators I bought were shipped with those defaults, which of course was part of the confusion. But at least I now know how to make a product intended to act like a Woodland Scenics Light Hub actually work like one. Here is my Illuminator installation reinstalled. These nine ports control about a 24-inch segment of 14th Street in Bay City.

It simply would not be possible to mount equivalent Just Plug Light Hubs in the same space. The nine ports control nine different lighting features, six buildings, two street lights, and an East Coast Circuits lighted River Point Station mantainer's truck. I tried out two Walthers Cornerstone street lights, which I spliced into the Just Plug-compatible plug pigtails that come with an Illuminator:

These are the concrete column lights, which look a lot like the ones near where we live. These Walthers lights need one Illuminator port per light.

Here are the structure lights. These are done with Just Plug stick-on warm white LEDS, with the plugs fed into Illuminator ports.

And here is the River Point Station maintainer's truck in its final position on the layout. This has the lead wires spliced into the Just Plug-compatible plug and pigtail provided with the Illuminator. These have come in very handy for my lighting projects.

Clearly the Blue Bird Cafe is also due for lights. Once I got the Illuminators figured out, I'm seeing that lighting projects are fairly simple and fairly inexpensive, but they add an enormous amount to a layout. And since I'm pretty much full-up with rolling stock for the rest of a lifetime, lighting is a good way to put effort into a layout that doesn't challenge existing space constraints, since it mostly involves buildings and scenery that are already in place.

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.

The Little Hell Gate Portals Are Almost Finished

For the last few months, I've posted now and then on progress with the strange pylons that make up the portals the Austrian engineer Gustav Lindenthal designed for his Little Hell Gate bridge, which spans a former East River channel in the Bronx. This would have been a major bridge itself, but Lindenthal didn't want them to detract from the Hell Gate Bridge. Even so, I find them fascinating and much better suited to a model railroad! They seem to reflect a tendency in US architecture at the time to stress abstract form, and they remind me a little of the architect Bertram Goodhue's (1869-1924) late work.

To recap, after studying all the photos I could find, including screen shots from videos taken from Amtrak trains, I started the project by building a paper mockup to help me understand how the overall proportions would fit the T-Trak module:

After giving it some thought, comparing how it looked in the photo to known dimensions and other photos, I made some adjustments, came up with basic dimensions, and began to assemble the basic structure from 1/32 basswood sheet, using old fireplace matches for stiffeners:

I settled on wooden craft beads from eBay held up with dowels to create the balls at the top:

Then I used Elmer's Wood Filler to build up the curved shapes:

This starts out in a violet shade, but when it's dry and ready for sanding, it turns to a wood color.

Now ready for sanding:

The sanding has turned out to be easier than I had expected, but it's still a pretty long process. It's a question of sanding close to the shape, then filling in where needed, and sanding some more.

As I study photos, I realize these don't need to be perfect or perfectly smooth, as the concrete has spalled and eroded over more than 100 years, and I'm not sure if they were perfect in the first place.

They're also deceptively large and will turn out to be the major feature of the T-Trak module where I mount them. In fact, since I guesstimated dimensions to fit the module and Kato Amtrak equipment, I probably made them smaller than actual scale. They should be ready for paint and installation in a few days.

Two Test Runs

Having basically lost patience yet once again with the NCE defect rate -- around 30-50% across every product in its line except the boosters and cabs -- I decided to swear off NCE Illuminators for all but T-Trak modules and am in the process of replacing them for lighting on my HO layout. I would have preferred to stick with something that runs off the DCC bus, but I do have two 16V AC circuits that cover the whole layout with plenty of terminal strips, and the Woodland Scenics Just Plug system will run off 16V AC from a power pack.

So I got a Just Plug light hub as proof of concept and installed it under the benchwork at the Manhattan Transfer stub terminal.

I only had enough LEDs to fill two ports, but they work well.

I took a new Broadway Limited SW7 in Indiana Harbor Belt for a test run. Broadway Limited locos are very sensitive to dirty track, but this one isn't too bad. I ran it down to pick up an MP boxcar at Forley Lithography in Manhattan Transfer.

The building behind the PRR semi trailer has Woodland Scenics Light Diffusing Film and a Just Plug LED installed, powered from the Light Hub shown above. The street lamp and the lighting in Red's Hot Dog stand is an earlier project running off the existing 16V AC circuit. More buildings in this area will be lighted off the Just Plug system.

You can see that the area under the building above the roof of the Penn Central baggage car is lit. This is also off a Just Plug stick-on LED. I plan to add more of these under this building, which serves as the Manhattan Transfer terminal head house, to light the platform area there. This would not be possible using the old incandescent bulbs and encourages me to detail this area further with newsstands, platform gates, and so forth.