Weekend Update 7-27-2008

[TrainCat2]

Glad someone figured out what to do with Lee.

[choochin3]

Nice hat Lee!

Carl T.

[GonzoCRFan]

Guess I'll keep a look out for the blue SD80Macs that sometimes come through Warren and park at the steel mill overnight. But now that I'm looking...

You're gonna have to look really hard if that's in NS-land...they're down to just 4, and I believe all of them live in the South Fork coal train pool. 7205, 7208, 7211, and 7215.

[Day One]

I've been working on my second sound decoder install in another 2-8-4. I've been taking a lot of pics along the way so I can put together a good write up about it too. The write up is coming along but will be a while still before I'm done.

Here's a few pics of the second install. I did things a bit differently this time. I wanted to see if it was possible to add an exhaust cam to this engine since I've been pretty unsuccessful in programing this decoder in a way that it will match wheel rpm's to exhaust chuffs at reasonable level. I was able to get the cam in and functioning but it's a bit touchy. I need to adjust a few things to see if I can get it working reliably. I hope I can becuase it's been THE MOST difficult DCC install I've ever done. I really hope it was worth the effort.

[up1950s]

Day One 
If that method fails , maybe you could trigger a 2 lobe cam off the tender wheel . The difference in rotational speed due to the smaller diameter wheel might be offset enough by just having 2 lobes instead of the 4 on the driver . It also would reduce the draw bar wiring .

[Chris333]

Guess I'll keep a look out for the blue SD80Macs that sometimes come through Warren and park at the steel mill overnight. But now that I'm looking...

You're gonna have to look really hard if that's in NS-land...they're down to just 4, and I believe all of them live in the South Fork coal train pool. 7205, 7208, 7211, and 7215.

Last year I saw one 4-5 times coming from Ashtabula on the NS. I'm always on my way to work without a camera.

[kiwi_al]

Just a bit of tinkering

GE 70 tonner



FM 12-44
A bit blurry - sorry

[soo]

Love the caboose,,, great work!!

Love the paper mill area, would be a great area to switch.

  It seems to me that alot of the modelers here like to push the envelope with their skills,, which is a great thing!!

  Three pics from me,, first two,,, I have started to set my switching layout back up. I need to tape and float the joints and screw holes, then repaint. But for now I can run some trains.. Maybe I can go to a hobby shop and see if they have train buddies for sale,, gets kind of boring by yourself...LOL.

  The last pics are from my weekend visit to Pampa, Tx.. which is about 40-50 northeast of Amarillo,Tx. Kewl point about Pamp,, they have two large industries there,, Celanese Chemicals,,, and Cabot Carbon Black.









  That chemical plant is huge!!! They even have their own switchers ,, a leased pair of 1001's or 1500's on flexicoil trucks.

  So there ya have it.

  Adios Wyatt

[Matthew Roberts]

Nice wyatt!

Think of how dirty that would've been in the '60s or earlier! 

[atsf_arizona]

Late addition - I managed to get my NMRA National Train Show 2008 layout photos up online at the following URL:

http://www.pbase.com/atsf_arizona/national_train_show_2008_layouts&page=all



It's got a collection of all scales, including HO, N, Z (including the historic Western Pacific
Z scale layout done by Model Railroader back in 1986).

Hope you enjoy .

[Day One]

Day One 
If that method fails , maybe you could trigger a 2 lobe cam off the tender wheel . The difference in rotational speed due to the smaller diameter wheel might be offset enough by just having 2 lobes instead of the 4 on the driver . It also would reduce the draw bar wiring .

I really wanted to do it that way! Eliminating the extra wire would have let me just have one 4 wire plug between the tender and loco instead of a 2 wire and 3 wire plug. Disassembling the drivers was something I had never done before and was something I thought about a lot before I did it. Getting the cam and electrical pickup to fit on the axle and then between the frame was a challenge. Making a wiper that would work, mounting the wiper, and then getting it all in the right position so it chuffed at the right time were all things I had to deal with. And then I had to reassemble it all and hoped it worked. I'd never re-quartered drivers and the alignment marks I made when I took it apart ended up being covered by the cam when I went to re-assemble it. DOH! So yeah the tender wiper would have been nice. But in the end I opted not to for several reasons. Chief among them was the fact that the inboard wipers used on the tender for electrical pickup cause a LOT of friction on the tender wheels. Seriously, this thing will not roll on it's own down a 10% grade! Adding a cam and wiper I feel would have just stuck the wheel in place. (I've already noticed flat spots on one wheel set where it stopped rolling due to a small bit of gunk build up on the wheels) I really hope these will free up over time but my first unit now has about 6-8 hrs of run time on it and the wheels still stop and slide over bumps in switches and poor track joints. The whole point of having the cam is to make the chuffs sync to the drivers so I really was left with putting the cam on a driver.

[Caleb Austin]

(quote)While there, I stumbled across two of these old beasts. 

They're old enough that I can't readily identify their lineage.  Fallen Flags has a photo of one, but it's only listed as an MRS something or other, which doesn't mean anything to me.  A little help with the photo captions, if you can provide it, please... (quote)

Theres a lot of military stuff that used to be serviced by train in that area. I've seen a pic somewhere of an engine like that heading into camp peary in Williamsburg. its cool to see that they were not all scraped.

[Chris333]

http://www.rr-fallenflags.org/eshr/eshr2085a.jpg


These are a RS4TC built for the Korean War: