Follow the details of Papa Carney’s construction of his model railroad
Oringally building the g-scale drawbrige was planned for much later in the project as I knew this would be complicated and would have to be built from scratch. No vendors that I found offer a drawbrige. But working on the layout, the bridge was in a main path and during the work on the mountains,…
One of the key design features for the model railroad layout is a waterfall and river. It just adds a lot of activity and interest in the layout. I added a concrete spillway before starting the layout to handle the water coming down from the driveway. The spillway ends with a drain line into the…
Well the mountains are finished. We had a big weekend with Tony, Chele, Dominic, and Kelly to spray mortar on the mountain. We used a sparying tool from https://www.mortarsprayer.com to spray mortar on the mountain. All of the mountains had been covered with chicken wire and mortar soaked sheets. The mortar had dried and now we…
I finally finished all of the track laying, track wiring, and turnout controls. I still need to finish wiring my signals, dwarf lights, and end stop lights but I decided to start on my mountains over the holidays. I planned on building a wood structure to support the shell, cover it with chicken wire, cover…
I have been spending a lot of time with the grandchildren on the model railroads but they always ask about the big trains. “Papa we saw big train today and it was very interesting”. So I found a place in Bryson City, NC that is a scenic railroad ride. They had just added a steam…
After we got everything wired up with the Digitrax components we started to have several problems. When we moved the locomotives the sound would shut off and locomotives moved slower than I though they should. We originally though it was because the layout was so big 600 ft of track. But the zone / sections…
I spent this week learning about what I don’t know about garden railroads. I am in the San Fransisco Bay Area (specifically Santa Clara, CA) attending the NGRC convention. There are about 1200 attendees this week. The mornings start off visiting 5-7 layouts at people’s houses and the afternoons typically at clinics to learn how…
Brandon and Chele were home for a little over a week after the beach and we got a lot done on the train. We were able to wire up all the track electronics and the turnouts connecting them to the (8) DS64s abd (5) BDL168s which are Digitrax products. Papa got to test the programs…
It has been a good week to work on the electronics, Finally in Atlanta I have a week of no rain. Since I am working 2 jobs, it is tough to get several days in a row to work on the train layout. So I have been getting up early and going out at dawn…
Since all of my electronics were performing correctly it was now time to determine how to automate the processes. I have selected JMRI which is a Java based open system that connects to model railroads. As I have talked about previously I have standardized on Digitrax and I have connected my computer running JMRI to the…
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