Building a Drawbrige

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,…

Building the River

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…

Building Mountains

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…

Getting the Electronics to Work

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…

National Garden Railroad Convention (NGRC)

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…