Any Train Simulator/model railroading geeks here?

[adsii1970]

For those of you who do not know... here's a website about the Kadee coupler system:

https://kadee.com/animation/c1.htm

Kadee focuses on HO and related narrow gauge rail systems. In the mid 1970s, I think, it began producing N scale couplers using the same technology. Soon, the N scale sales began to catch up with the HO scale demand, and a separate company was formed: Micro Trains... and they still have their own couplers:

http://www.fiferhobby.com/micro-trains-n-scale-conversion-couplers/

Just as with the original Kadee coupling system, these also use magnetic decouplers to add realism to the freight yard or siding.

For model railroaders wanting to go with a prototypical operation within freight yards and sidings, this allows you the ability to hands-free decouple your freight consists.

 

 

Edited February 19, 2018 by adsii1970

[Green Baron]

Wood for the basic frame and what will later be the subterranean shadow station including spiral for 20cm of height difference in 2.5 circles.

All measures in cm, all wood is pine. The frame parts are 12*3, the frame consists of 2 sections of 250*160, giving 500*160.

The feet for the whole thing have 8*8. It must stand freely, only the short sides have a connection to walls/pillars.

Plywood for the ground level and rigidity of everything is 2 pieces of 250*122*0.8 and a few smaller ones. The spiral will be of 5mm plywood because the 8mm is too rigid to bend it.

Now give me 10 min. pls :-)

*sound of electric drill and smell of white glue and cursing starts here*

Edited February 20, 2018 by Green Baron

[Cydonian Monk]

There was a T-Gauge layout on display at our show in Houston / Stafford this past Saturday:

At 1:450 scale it’s too small for my tastes. The locomotives are driven by cell phone motors, powered from the rails like most other legitimate scales. The wheels on the locomotives and freight cars are magnetized, and the rail is steel; you could probably hang the layout upside down and the cars wouldn’t fall off. Very smooth and slow running for its size. 

Edited February 20, 2018 by Cydonian Monk

[Green Baron]

There is a lively cat here. Anything smaller than 5cm and auto-mobile will be hunted, caught, thrown about, chewed up and left laying aside.

Cool that it is technically possible to build such a small model railroad ....

 

I started with the first of the frames. More documentation soon(tm) :-)

Maybe i should rethink the "cellar" height. 20cm leaves enough room for the cat to cause a nightly devastation in the station. Or i need something to close the sides, sliders or a curtain.

I keep the saw dust to mix it with the plaster later. Oh, did i say i don't want to model ? Bah, that was a few days ago :-)

 

Edit: oh, the finger is NOT in the foreground ! Unusual perspective that is :-) But the people have real size ?

Edited February 20, 2018 by Green Baron

[adsii1970]

12 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

There is a lively cat here. Anything smaller than 5cm and auto-mobile will be hunted, caught, thrown about, chewed up and left laying aside.

I am in the same boat. Last week, while at Pet Food World (no joke, there is a store in one of the neighboring cities which is called that), there are ultra-sonic electric plug-in cat repellers. Apparently it is at a frequency that only cats can hear. I can see these being purchased in the future... and I don't even need a fortune teller!

12 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Cool that it is technically possible to build such a small model railroad ....

Yes, it is, but the question becomes why? For those of you who are reading this thread and have NO understanding of scale, here's a help:

I model N simply because I like the idea of being able to run a twenty to thirty car consist around a track. But to each his/her own. The T scale seen above is actually smaller than the Z scale, which is... just... wow... tiny.

12 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Maybe i should rethink the "cellar" height. 20cm leaves enough room for the cat to cause a nightly devastation in the station. Or i need something to close the sides, sliders or a curtain.

Why not use either a curtain or sliding doors that can be removed when the layout is not in use? It seems you are talking about building a shelf system... and possibly a double shelf system at that. Now this is not my layout, but here's what I am talking about:

A groove system would allow you to fit a door along the lower level, keeping your destroyer of the layout precious kitty from destroying the scenery on the lower level...

13 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

I keep the saw dust to mix it with the plaster later. Oh, did i say i don't want to model ? Bah, that was a few days ago :-)

I keep charcoal and wood ash as well. Sift it completely and take out everything but the fine powder ash. Then add glue and paint (I mix in a few drops of flat black). Completely mix it up and you end up with a thick mud-like putty you can use to model asphalt or concrete roads... and the only thing you will need to do is to add black paint (I use a tempra) until you get the color you want. Let it dry for a couple of days once you've formed it, then come back and add your markings, finish, etc...

Edited February 20, 2018 by adsii1970

[Cydonian Monk]

1 hour ago, Green Baron said:

Cool that it is technically possible to build such a small model railroad ....

 

1 hour ago, adsii1970 said:

Yes, it is, but the question becomes why?

I was at the table next to those T-gauge guys all day and I never really heard a good answer as to why. Apparently it’s very popular in Japan, but then again so are lots of things that make me scratch my head. 

They ran the layout all day off of a couple 9-volt batteries, so there’s that to consider.  

 

1 hour ago, Green Baron said:

Edit: oh, the finger is NOT in the foreground !

Nope! He’s pointing right at the locomotive, and you can see the shadow. These things are TINY. 

[adsii1970]

8 minutes ago, Cydonian Monk said:

I was at the table next to those T-gauge guys all day and I never really heard a good answer as to why. Apparently it’s very popular in Japan, but then again so are lots of things that make me scratch my head. 

They ran the layout all day off of a couple 9-volt batteries, so there’s that to consider.  

It would be perfect for a brief case sized travel layout! But... again, just because you can might not mean you should...

[Green Baron]

lol, they could play with it after work in the "room" of a capsule or box hotel !

[Shpaget]

24 minutes ago, Cydonian Monk said:

 

I was at the table next to those T-gauge guys all day and I never really heard a good answer as to why.

They take up less space, so more stuff!

Also, they can run upside down, but I'm not sure why would that be a significant plus.

7 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Plywood for the ground level and rigidity of everything is 2 pieces of 250*122*0.8 and a few smaller ones. The spiral will be of 5mm plywood because the 8mm is too rigid to bend it.

Uh, let me tell you my experience with thin plywood. Just for reference, we use ceiba plywood pretty much exclusively for our layout, including for this part. Your pine may differ slightly, but I wouldn't expect major differences.

We have three spirals on the layout. When we started working on the first one, we started from the level that goes from 10 cm below floor and slowly climbs to about 60 cm above floor where the spiral starts. In order to achieve compactness, the idea we had was to use two sheets of 4 mm ply cut in segments and glued and stacked like bricks, so the finished product would be one single piece. We would place one sheet, spread the glue, place the other sheet over it with half of the second sheet overhanging so it connects with the next segment on the lower layer. The sheets were stapled together to hold them until the glue dries. Everything went well so we prepared a whole lot of plywood, cut them to size and stacked them in a corner so we can just take the next piece without needing to stop the work to cut some more. We made various jigs for the table saw and jigsaw and prepared enough plywood for roughly entire spiral that goes from 60 cm to about 320 cm (some 25 turns, each about 4,5 m in circumference, double track).

So, place a sheet, spread the glue, place another sheet, staple, repeat. Sounds simple enough and it was, while we were working on the floor level. The horror story starts as soon we started to climb above the floor. No amount of staples, clamps and supports we could throw at the thing managed to keep it together. It was bending at the joints and delaminating all around. It was too flimsy and bending horribly. The glue wasn't drying nearly fast enough and staples didn't hold.

So, we ripped it all apart, and went back to 10 mm plywood. The first two spirals were done with it, no major issues any more.

Fast forward 3 years, we still have a whole bunch of 4 mm plywood precut into perfectly nice 90 degree circle segments sitting in the storage and the next project to do is the third and final spiral. So, in order to save some money on material, we'll use that plywood, but this time we'll be smarter and glue up the pieces before trying to install them and not even entertain the idea of one continuous piece made by gluing pieces in brick like formation. We'll just use the 90 degree segments glued in pairs for combined 8 mm and connect them with iron plates (the method we used on previous two spirals, but with single 10 mm ply). We glued all that up, let it dry for a week or so and went to work. We finished the entire spiral, 11 turns, if I remember correctly, did all the wiring (about 100 feedback sensors, some 20 turnouts and power wires on each turn). Each layer ended up being an oval composed of four 90 degree turns (two adjacent on each end), and one 30-ish cm long straight segment in the middle on two long sides.

It was not good. The plywood was still too flexible and flimsy. Even with metal bracing vertically connecting all the layers every 30-50 cm it was not rigid enough. We've spent about half a year fixing and mending the damned thing, adding additional reinforcements, but the trains kept on derailing.

So we decided to fix it once and for all. We bought 15 or so sheets of 15 mm plywood and disassembled the entire thing. Me and one colleague were working on disassembling, keeping track of all the wires and track pieces (very important XD), while three others were taking the disassembled layers, tracing them on new plywood sheets and cutting them out. For added rigidity, we cut out entire one turn from a single sheet, with all the exterior branches we could fit on each sheet. Once the entire old spiral was out, we started putting in the new wood. 15 mm proved to be bendable enough, we had no problem with it not cooperating.

It took us about two weeks, but it was probably the best thing we decided to do with it.

As for the 4 mm plywood, the pieces that were used on the spiral went to trash, but we still have a pile of unused precut segments. It's been about 6 years since we cut them.

I still hate them.

Don't use thin plywood.

[adsii1970]

2 minutes ago, Shpaget said:

Don't use thin plywood.

I used thin plywood in a previous layout. Met a man in Marion, Illinois whose entire layout is on a 3/4 inch (1.905 cm) furniture grade plywood. It was in 2007 when I met him and most of his layout was made in 1978. No real major signs of wear. So, when I get to that stage, that's exactly what I am planning to do... and yes, it will be expensive.

[Green Baron]

Thanks for sharing your experience, @Shpaget !

I am not proficient with plywood, but with normal full wood. Normal wood out the full stem can be heated and then bent into astonishing angles without delamination of the rings. That's how recurves in classic wooden bows are made. But the technique will probably not work with plywood as the glue will dissolve before the wood gets soft enough.

Hmmm, my first idea was even to use 2 layers of 3mm plywood and glue them together into shape. But 3mm isn't available here, i would have to travel to the big neighbour island, Tenerife to get it. I tried a circle with the 8mm before but holding it in place needs a huge force (radius is 515mm, i don't have the space for big circles, slope will be around 2.5%) and results in a lot of tension. I somehow can't imagine that 15mm pine plywood could be bent at all.

The other material i had in mind was poplar plywood, which is a lot lighter than pine but not quite as rigid. It is used in boat making for the interior. And it is expensive

Being warned now i better go on a research in railroad forums ....

 

Btw., the wood i got isn't exactly diy-store quality. It is a lot denser and heavier. I'll better give the frame a few days for acclimatisation before connecting it firmly with the plywood sheets. More photos tomorrow :-) And maybe a sketch of how i imagine the spiral.

Edited February 20, 2018 by Green Baron

[Shpaget]

Hmm, apparently we talk about different bendings. We took one whole sheet of plywood (170 x 240 cm) and cut out a 20 cm (enough for two tracks) wide oval out of it in the shape of the spiral viewed from the top. Then we cut the oval in one spot and lifted one side of the cut by 10 cm to meet the next layer of the spiral. That's all the bending we did. 

[Johnny Wishbone]

Heres my 2 cents of advice on building train tables:

1) use screws not nails for assembly.

2) attach the legs to the table frame with carriage bolts. Use washers on both sides and countersink the bolt heads flush with the frame.

I used 2x6 pine boards for the frames and legs and 5/8 inch thick plywood (not OSB). My tables weigh a ton but you could hit them with a real train and they’d probably survive it (not really, but you get the point).

[Shpaget]

15 minutes ago, Johnny Wishbone said:

not OSB

Yep, OSB, MDF, particle board and similar bottom of the barrel stuff is something to avoid.

Plywood and timber/timber (natural, not engineered wood) are pretty the only types of wood we use.

Particle boards just fall apart and break.

As for nails, I'm pretty confident we don't have a single nail anywhere on our layout, and certainly none used for construction.

Edited February 21, 2018 by Shpaget

[Green Baron]

Have not done much today. From what i read in aGerman forum (stummiforum) i am at the lower border of thickness of plywood, but still ok. Will finish the frames tomorrow and post apicture, but the plywood work will take time. I expect the spiral at the end of the next week and i expect it to be pretty rigid.

[Johnny Wishbone]

Some more advice:

When attaching your plywood deck to the frame, most people's first inclination is to zip down the four corners of the deck to the frame. And then they get irritated when the plywood is bowed in the middle or there is overhang on one side, etc. See, there is no such thing as a straight board; all boards have warp in them, especially if you are using a soft wood like pine and/or you live in an area where the humidity changes a lot. Even if you used a builder's square to ensure you had right angles in your frame, it will still be crooked. Better to start attaching the decking to the frame at one end and work your way down along both sides. That way you can use a rubber/plastic mallet to whack everything into the proper alignment as you go (or just kick it with your foot). Thats what I did, and my tables always turned out perfect when I was done. A nice flat and level tabletop with no overhang on any edge.

[Green Baron]

In my case the sheets will be glued in place, fixed with a series of screw clamps while drying and then receive a screws every 40cm or so. I hope nothing tears, so it'll take a day or three until it's fixed and dried out.

Am doing good progress, but now watching the spacex webcast :-)

 

Edit:

Half of the table frame:

 

The other half is almost done. Problem: the intra-habitat variability. As nice as the wooden floor (not parquet, real planks) is, it has a significant wave height that cannot be ignored. I found small sheets of 3mm plywood which i will use to feed under the feet. Also the corner has no 90° but 89°. The other side has 91° but it is occupied. The almost rectangular rectangle leads to problems with the other half of the table which gets in the way with a pillar (like the one in the background) in a slightly different way than precalculated.

 

Edited February 22, 2018 by Green Baron

[Green Baron]

The frame is almost done. The three legs in the front need to be fastened and the whole thing will be doweled to wall in background. Also i must rasp down 1 millimeter or so from some of the legs, due to the floor's topography. That is the plan for tomorrow.

It is very stable and will become even more so when the sheets are in place.

[Johnny Wishbone]

On 2/22/2018 at 9:15 AM, Green Baron said:

The other half is almost done. Problem: the intra-habitat variability. As nice as the wooden floor (not parquet, real planks) is, it has a significant wave height that cannot be ignored. I found small sheets of 3mm plywood which i will use to feed under the feet. Also the corner has no 90° but 89°. The other side has 91° but it is occupied.

My tables are in my basement, which has a poured concrete floor. I still have to shim the legs of my tables because the floor is uneven, so don't sweat things like that.

As long as it is sturdy and stable, its good. In the end, nobody is going to care what your table looks like; they're going to be more interested in what you're running on top of it.

 

[Green Baron]

I have laid out the tracks for the shadow station for demonstration. In the background is the place where the helix will be. The zigzag on the left is the incoming track. The station has 10 tracks. The rightmost is just for transit. Then come 5 tracks for freight cars, the two longest have 2.9m, enough for 13-14 cars. Then come 4 tracks for passenger cars and trains. This part will have a switch to switch off the track current so that the interior lighting of passenger cars don't draw to many mAs while parked. They all have leds but nevertheless ...

I will use up most of these ugly tracks with bedding for the underground part ;-)

 

Edit: don't use a saw for cutting tracks. The stuff is hard and will have ugly flashes (?). Invest some funds for a miniature grinder with a cutting wheel. Much cleaner cutting, less swearing :-)

Edited February 25, 2018 by Green Baron

[Johnny Wishbone]

19 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Edit: don't use a saw for cutting tracks. The stuff is hard and will have ugly flashes (?). Invest some funds for a miniature grinder with a cutting wheel. Much cleaner cutting, less swearing.

Get a Dremel. Best investment a hobbyist can make. Also, get the plug-in type vs a battery powered one. The batteries just dont last long enough IMO.

[Green Baron]

9 minutes ago, Johnny Wishbone said:

Get a Dremel. Best investment a hobbyist can make. Also, get the plug-in type vs a battery powered one. The batteries just dont last long enough IMO.

Dremel 3000, plug-in. I already broke a cutting disk when it dropped from the table :-)

Don't expect more reports before the coming weekend ....

[Cydonian Monk]

Just started work on a new structure for which no dimensions or other measurements are available and yet photos are. When I start into a project like this, the first thing I do is build a mock-up to make sure my guesstimates look right.

I used to build these mockups out of scrap balsa wood or styrene, but folks had a tendancy to declare the mockups good enough and keep them instead. So now I use card stock, which is admitedly easier to work with, and can be unfolded and used to make the guides needed for cutting.

I’m also in the “lumber aquisition stage” of another new project... it’ll be a small, 5 foot by 1 foot display layout that also provides extra bookshelf space. I wanted to start this a few months ago, but good quality dimensional lumber has been non-existent in Houston since Harvey. (And this lumber came from New Zealand!)

 

[adsii1970]

On 2/23/2018 at 12:20 PM, Johnny Wishbone said:

My tables are in my basement, which has a poured concrete floor. I still have to shim the legs of my tables because the floor is uneven, so don't sweat things like that.

As long as it is sturdy and stable, its good. In the end, nobody is going to care what your table looks like; they're going to be more interested in what you're running on top of it.

One of my hobbies is furniture making, although I have not done it in a while. When I begin my layout. I plan to mix cabinets and glass-door book cases under my layout.

[Green Baron]

Very nice idea, mockups from cardboard. Will keep that in mind for the future when it comes to life in the scene.

Right now the western canary islands are struck by heavy wind and rain which is typical for the time of the year and won't last long. But i don't want to cut the plywood sheets inside because of the dust, so i must wait.

In the moment it seems to me that the 8mm plywood glued and screwed with 4*30mm screws every 20cm to the rather heavy frame is stable enough. Once fixed i can lean on a cassette size 80*90cm and it'll bend maybe 5mm in the middle. Later, when it comes to the ribs for the second storey (ground level) the connections between floor and ribs will provide additional stability. I am heading for a distance between ribs of 30cm. Anyway it'll still be possible to add additional beams to divide the cassettes. That is necessary where two sheets meet in free air, without a supporting beam, which happens, thanks to my ignorance improvising talents.

I can already estimate that the size 5m by 1,6m is not enough for what i want, i might need an annexe. Which is no problem spacewise.

Will keep you informed :-)