Weekend Update 8/5/12

[soo]

  Jeff, hey man, you want curves,,make curves. They cant go below the mandated 21" min radius. Was'nt Mel crooked anyways???. Time for work..

  Adios Wyatt

[Bendtracker1]

  Jeff, hey man, you want curves,,make curves. They cant go below the mandated 21" min radius. Was'nt Mel crooked anyways???. Time for work..

  Adios Wyatt

There ya go Jeff!  Put nice bend in it!
I've never been to Blue Island myself, but I've score a bunch of pics of the place from the net while hunting down Rock Island photos!

Thanks for the comment on the yard!

[Rossford Yard]

The curved yards (yours, potentially mine) do illustrate the MRR topic of just how much advance track planning you can do on paper!  (and I'm a landscape architect by trade)

I laid out the general configuration (I mean, how much can you do in a 10 x 24 room?.  That said, I did briefly consider an "E" shaped layout with really narrow shelves as an industrial switching layout.  The closet and door arrangement set where the helix would be to staging and we used the internet to get the real track arrangement of Blue Island, blowing it up to lay out on first a 30" hollow core door (which became the desk in the room) and then later on the plywood.  We even started with the Altas 11 degree crossings, because BI is about 13 degrees.  But it looks sharper at ground level, and we tried 22.5 and then 30 to shorten the amount of distance between bridge, crossing and Broadway Ave.

The rest of the Blue Island side from Broadway to the curve was sort of eyeballed in.  The other side will be all Gibson Yard, or the Mel, or mabye the B.I.G. yard (Blue Island/Gibson) since we are really combining the switching funtion of BI with the long, flat yard of Gibson, complete with full round house even in 2005 (and now)

BTW, in response to one poster, we reduced the size of that roundhouse, to keep the reach in that area below the four feet originally envisioned when we were doing the full roundhouse.  Half will have to do in representing it, in the name of access.

[rogergperkins]

  A belated reply to PAL about the church in my photo earlier this week.  It is a Hallmark Christmas ornament released about 2006. I did some sanding on the roof to remove "sn*w" and repainted to roof. 

@Roger Holmes, Wow!  Like the photos of Chicago you just posted.  We were there the last week end in July and staying on South Michigan Ave., but got over to where the L loop runs.  You have captured that area very well even with the poetic license taken for location of the church. 

[Smike]

During-Adding bushes and small trees

David, you captured the feel and look of the geology and the flora of Appalachia. Well done! Thanks for sharing.

[mmagliaro]

PRR K4 problem solved thanks to a Starmans special.  Here is the detailing of the Trix shells I have been working on.  For 30 or 40 year old tooling, these MiniTrix shells are actually quite nice expecially when detailed and painted.



(... other pictures clipped to keep this short)

Wow, that is really a wonderful K4!.  I agree with you, the shell is pretty darn good on that
old Trix.   You fixed the big problem the old Trix has: the wide driver spacing and simplified valve gear.
Can't wait to see it painted.  Excellent!

[Kisatchie]

...You fixed the big problem the old Trix has: the wide driver spacing and simplified valve gear...

Holy flying termites! How on earth do you unsimplify valve gear? It's beyond my comprehension.


Hmm... nope, not saying
a thing...

[dougnelson]

Wow, that is really a wonderful K4!.  I agree with you, the shell is pretty darn good on that
old Trix.   You fixed the big problem the old Trix has: the wide driver spacing and simplified valve gear.
Can't wait to see it painted.  Excellent!

Thanks Max.  The drivers and valve gear are from a Fleishmann German 4-6-2 and that work was done by Hans Starmans - and it runs like a Swiss (or should I say Dutch) watch. 

The Trix shells must be at least 40 years old, because mine date from the early 1970s.  I should have some photos of the finished model next week.

[Alwyn Cutmore]

Hi Doug,

That is a great dress up of the K4. It will be interesting to see what it can pull. Cannot wait to see the final result. You will need to do another video.

Regards

Al

[R L Smith]

I spent an enjoyable few hours operating trains on Michael Winicki's delightful layout.  It was fun running trains through realistic scenery and the switching was challenging enough to keep me on my toes - literally and figuratively as I ran a switcher on the upper deck and had to check swithpoints!











Ron