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…
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…
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…
I finally got the first phase of the track, signals, and turnouts wired up. I was able to test out each of the boards. I had trouble with the BDL186 showing the occupied blocks. After a lot of checking I noticed the green network light was not behaving as the other circuit boards did. This…
Some videos of the model g scale train in my back yard.
papa carney 