Previous Posts

Growing legs

Work on the city scene continues. On Friday I soldered the ends of the track to a strip of PCB material that was securely attached to the module. This means the track is now well attached, but the alignments can be subtly tweaked when required. Here you can see the cork base butting up against the 5mm MDF strip across the ends, and the PCB material on top of that.

That means the basic track laying is now complete!

Saturday saw the module relocated to the garage and the dining table rediscovered. On Sunday I put on my worker hat and started building legs for the module. Here you can see them being positioned and attached. I used a slightly different system for these legs, with some large triangles of ply to give it strength and rigidity. Due to the tight confines under the ...

An engaging build - part 4

Continued from part 3...

I've not detailed how I built the station, the church, and Rachel's Building. The remaining builders are either kitsets, or more of the same, so I won't bother going into detail on them. What I will talk about though is something fun Rachel and I did shortly after the grande-reveal, which is adding street lights.

We selected our street lights on eBay, and then patiently waited for them to arrive. Then it was all hands to the deck as we set about installing them.

First off we decided where we wanted lights, marked their locations, and drilled some holes. Now we needed to poke the wires and lamp pole down through the base, and through 2 inches of polystyrene. Simply pushing the wires down wouldn't work, the sharp tips of the wires would soon decide to head off in dif...

Canyon taking shape

I took a day off from work on Friday and spent it all downstairs in the garage. Much got done! Among the more exciting advances is this:

Yes, the canyon scene has taken a giant step forward in the rock department. As of the last update, I had the sides of the rockfall shelter in place, but no roof. Since then I've made a roof for it. A pattern was initially made, then transferred to 3mm MDF and cut out with a jig saw. Then with Dremel in hand, I sanded off the corners until it fit nicely around the rocks. Some 5 minute epoxy secured it in place, while I filled the gaps with some kind of gap filler.

Meanwhile, the rocks were a few different shades, and I needed to blend them in to the rest of the scenery. I started with some white...

Station tracks almost completed

Well, at long last, I have the track down on my station entrance module.

I still need to glue it all down and securely attach the track at the end of the module, but the middle part is all done. Underneath there are about 30,000 wires attached to every piece of track; hopefully this means there will be no stalls as trains negotiate the many points.

And here is a short of the Narita Express negotiating the turnouts to move onto the first platform track.

The sheer number of tracks is quite impressive. It starts off as two through tracks and expands out to 10 tracks at the o...

City scene continues to take shape

A month since my last update on the city scene! Yikes. Progress continues in a haphazard fashion, broken here and there by trips to Christchurch. A while back my wooden sleeper stock arrived, ready for cutting and gluing. After a few misadventures I decided the best way to assemble them was:

Print out a full size template. Coat with spray on adhesive. Place the turnout over the template and mark where the PCB sleepers are. Hopefully they line up with the sleepers on the template! Often I found they didn't which made things interesting. Remove the turnout. Place the stripwood on the template, trim to length, press into the glue. Rinse and repeat. Once all done, stick the turnout to the ties.

St...

Simulating Railroad Crossing Lights

Everyone has seen a railway crossing before, and if you're a railfan you've probably spent more than a few hours stuck behind them waiting for their infernal blink-blink-blink to stop so you can continue chasing your train!

How do you make your model crossing blink like that though? The simple answer would be a 555 timer in astable mode with some set and reset triggers. But that would be easy, and when you're an software engineer everything looks like a software problem. So instead, we attack the problem with a sledgehammer and use an Arduino.

Kidding aside, there are very valid reasons why you might want to use an Arduino for such a simple problem. Suppose you're using the excellent Arduino CMRI library to connect your layout to