glacier express

Populating the Glacier Express

Yes it's the Glacier Express again! First off have a look at the real thing traveling through utterly unrealistic scenery that you could never get away with on a model railway. As my granddad would say, "Switzerland is one big model railway"...

... back to the model world. There are many things that stand out about the Glacier Express, but as a passenger perhaps what you'd be most thankful for are the massive windows that the Rhaetian Railway (RhB) has put on their carriages.

And so of course Kato has put massive windows on the model, which leads to a problem...

Upgrading the Kato Glacier Express

The Kato Glacier Express (Kato No. 10-1145 and 10-1146) is a great set, but there is one glaring problem:

Passengers traveling from one carriage to another must long jump from carriage to carriage. Not good. For such a beautiful set, it seems a shame to put such gigantic gaps between the carriages; apparently this was done so that the train could negotiate 100mm radius curves, however that seems like an odd design objective for an otherwise beautiful looking model.

So I did something about it.

First of all I bought the Kato/Roundhouse close coupling set (No 28-186) from RailNippon. I was pleased with their prompt service, good prices, and simple postage. The instruction sheet is very Japanese, howe...

DCC decoder installation for the Kato Glacier Express

The Kato Glacier Express is a beautiful model of a very iconic railway. It's also the first European train that I've purchased. There is one glaring problem with it though: it's difficult to put a decoder into. I believe Digitrax now makes a drop-in decoder, but I don't have the luxury of such things, so instead I've spent the past few days hard wiring an NCE Z14SR decoder into it.

Dismantling the shell

The first step is to completely dismantle the loco. Start by gently prising the sides apart so that the top pops off the chasis.

 

Focus stacking

I bought a new camera the other week, and reports of a good snowfall up in the mountains had me itching to use it. So today I packed myself a lunch, grabbed a book, and hit the road, heading for my favourite spot again.

There was less snow on the road this time so I was able to park just around the corner. I opened up the laptop and started picking up some ATCS transmissions. Soon I had a pretty clear picture what was happening out there... nothing. Never mind, I had my book to keep me company and knew that in an hour or so the regular Glacier Express passenger train would be coming through.

Sure enough, a couple of hours later I saw the track occupancy circuits on the ATCS lighting up, so I headed out and set up for my shot. Unfortunately with no other traffic on the line there would be no crossings or breaks here, and hence I'd only get the one shot.