workbench update

Making inclines

A small but useful bit of progress on my latest module...

The Mt Adams Railway is, surprisingly enough, a mountain railway. That means there are grades. In the past I have used Woodland Scenics incline sets, which are very good for quickly building up gently inclining railway grades. The problem is, they aren't sold in Masterton. I also have a lot of spare polystyrene, and a hot wire cutter. So why not make my own?

So I clamped my hot wire cutter in my WorkMate portable workbench, and marked out a 1 in 22 grade on a piece of polystyrene with a piece of masking tape. Then I carefully cut along the line on my cutter, making sure it was all nice and square. The masking tape makes it easy to cut straight as it acts like a ruler, stopping the wire from wandering too much.

Then I cut out a zig zag template on my laser cutter:

Mt Adams Railway benchwork progress

Progress continues on my latest module...

Today I did a little more on my new module. The polystyrene foam had glued up nicely overnight, so I cut out some 7mm ply for the station base. I cut some beading to size to hold it in place along the front edges, and for the sides against the foam I cut some thin MDF to size.

This nicely finishes off the polystyrene, so there are no rough edges to catch and start spreading little staticky white beads everywhere!

While I was at it, I glued some thick LVL to the insid...

New module!

Exciting news from the Utraina Dept of Interior Development: at long last, a new module is being built!

It seems like forever since I last built a module for Utriania; in fact, I started Ranuska back in Janurary, 2014! Ranuska took a long time to get built, and since then I have suffered a bit from analysis paralysis, as I wondered what my next module should look like, how it would fit in to my mix of large scale railroading (earlier modules) and light rail & trams (Ranuska), what the track plan should be, etc etc. Basically I wanted my next module to be perfect, especially if it was going to take 2 years to make again!

But then I was browsing JNS forum one night and came across an amazing Hakone Tozan themed micro railway:

Model Railway Laboratory

Lately I've been beavering away on a project to add wireless remote control to some of my trains. It is a fairly complex project, the hope though is that by having wireless controllers in each loco, with a battery on board, I can alleviate a few pet modelling peeves of mine:

Unreliable running on dirty track, uneven track, dusty track, track that hasn't been cleaned in the last 30 seconds... in short, anything that Isambard Kingdom Brunel himself hasn't laid! Costly DCC decoders; DCC decoders that I can't reprogram or tweak to suit my needs; DCC decoders that only have 1 way communication; Inability to mix DC and DCC on the same track; Poor slow speed running, on both DCC and DC.

So nothing too complex!! We'll see how far I get.

As part of this, I need a way of testing my code. My day job involves writing a lot of code, and writing a lot of code to test my code. Luckily for that we ha...

Introducing the Snake Train

My LRV is coming to a close, so I decided to tackle something different. In my stash I had a couple of B-Train Shorty Izukyu Series 8000 kits, which are a fairly generic looking fictitious commuter train, used as a backdrop for some kind of Japanese teenage drama. Anyway, they're pretty cheap to get hold of, and ripe for modifying.

I figured that with a little work, I could turn these into an interesting commuter train. I thought perhaps some flexible gangway connections, and changing it to use Jacob's bogies would make it interesting.

I started off by assembling a body, but leaving the floor off.  A replacement chassis/floor was easily made up from some 1mm styrene. The end-most bogies I mounted using the existing lugs on the bogie. The pivoting Jacob's ...

Breda LRV - couplings

Work continues on my Breda LRV project ...

My LRV is very nearly finished. One thing I felt it was missing were some couplings. I had some Kato 11-704 couplers which are just the right style for a light rail vehicle. I very carefully built up some supports for them out of styrene, only to discover the they needed to be lower. So I made them lower to clear the body, only to find they now fouled the rail..!! So I did some more tweaking, in the end I just drilled a small hole and used an M1.4 self tapping screw to hold it in place. Works really well! Those 1.4mm screws are very handy, I bought a 200 of them off eBay for a fiver.

And the finished result: