Weekend Update 1/13/13

[up1950s]

[peteski]

...pretty but where is the damn train?! I've been waiting and waiting and no train! 

[up1950s]

...pretty but where is the damn train?! I've been waiting and waiting and no train! 

Car lovers never highlight the streets , but train lovers can find and admire the everything about railroading . What does that make us ?

[chicken45]

Took me long enough!
Finished my SPF Design F25 kit. Great little kit etched brass kit.
Bowser crown trucks, FVM wheels, and Z scale couplers!
What do yinz all think of this? I weathered it with a ink wash, hit it with a few powders, a little dry brushing, and finally dullcoat.
Did I overdo it?

[up1950s]

That looks terrific Josh , gonna load it ?

[chicken45]

That looks terrific Josh , gonna load it ?

You bet! Eventually it will get a generator or transformer of some sort.

[mmagliaro]

chicken45: That PRR car looks superb!  What are "Bowser Crown Trucks" ?  Does Bowser make some line of N Scale PRR details?

[Lemosteam]

Josh,  shhhhhh.  Max has a habit of buying out all remaining stock and I still need some! 

F25 looks grrreat, just like the rest of your modeling!  Carry on.

[Hornwrecker]

Nice F model Josh.  Who makes that kit?  I forgot, and I was just looking at it last week.

I've been painting rocks.  Starting to look like them, but my color differences aren't showing up yet.  Maybe tomorrow when they dry a bit.

[chicken45]

chicken45: That PRR car looks superb!  What are "Bowser Crown Trucks" ?  Does Bowser make some line of N Scale PRR details?

Hi Max!
It's the trucks they use on their H21 hoppers.

[chicken45]

Nice F model Josh.  Who makes that kit?  I forgot, and I was just looking at it last week.

SPF Design http://prrspfdesign.weebly.com/

Allen is on these boards, 71Jeep, I believe is he.

[Puddington]

With my little engineer home sick three days this week, and a great deal of that time sleeping, I had some quality modeling time....

Two years of "on and off" work has finally completed the detailing, renumbering and weathering of all ten GP 7's & GP 9's for the Sub's roster.... the last one was done Monday..... gotta love the damage that DB's do to paint...



I also followed up on the dual service GP 9 with a dual service Montreal Locomotive Works built RS 10. The True Line Trains model is a very nice starting place with only a few minor issues (one car body filter position is off for the CPR version...oh well) but the lettering wasn't "right"....



To thin and wimpy looking for the "block lettering" scheme... well; that was fixable and, as I was adding a steam generator and changing the road number anyway....

I used Micro Scale decals to re letter the unit and changed the road number to a unit that spent time in BC. The "usual" improvements were made; cast on mu's were painted, the steam generator details, a "beaver crest" on the leading nose, indiciating passenger service and of course, weathering (albeit lighter than most - passenger units saw the wash rack more often....)

The only "glaring issue" is the fuel and water tank... it's not right for the RS 10's with the steam generator but short of milling the frame (as I have pointed out in another thread) I will have to live with it.....

Anyway; Canadian Pacific Railways DRS 16f class MLW RS 10 8574 is ready for duty.....





Here she is, taking point and coupled to another dual service unit with the "Valley Flyer"...........



LATE EDIT: Jon (Central Vermont) showed me a pic of an Atlas fuel tank very close to what I need from their old RSd 11............. this might just be the trick.............(and that is why you hang with the best at "da Wire......" )

[chicken45]

Josh,  shhhhhh.  Max has a habit of buying out all remaining stock and I still need some! 

F25 looks grrreat, just like the rest of your modeling!  Carry on.

Max doesn't model the Pennsy anymore... So we're safe, right? 

[cv_acr]

Car lovers never highlight the streets , but train lovers can find and admire the everything about railroading . What does that make us ?

Better?

 

[mark dance]

OK...those of you not interested in operations can skip ahead now!

A few weeks ago I showed the tag system I plan to use to  replace the labels which “mark” the cars in my current car forwarding system.  This week I created the industry-centric Excel spreadsheet which does the demand generation and car requisitioning steps of car forwarding.  I tried it out Thursday as I restaged the C&W for next week's ops session.  It looks very promising and should cut my restaging workload down dramatically.  I expect it to simulate car movement very realistically as no car is fixed in a cycle but can be grabbed for whatever demand is suitable for it.  It also is very forgiving as the spreadsheet provides a guideline but the tags which are pulled and "mark" the cars are the ultimate reference, not a computer program or data base.  So no need to track car numbers and to assure everything ends up in the right place like in a switchlist system as the tags auto-correct for mistakes…all tagged cars will eventual make their way to the right place.

As a reminder, here are the tags on the cars...



And here is a laptop computer trolley - 25$ at Staples! - which makes retagging convenient. 



Here is a close up of the tag container system on the trolley. 



The tags for destinations are in the segmented bin below, all sorted by town. The cups above are for Nelson yard and staging destinations like Cranbrook and Spokane.  They are also removable... so if an industry calls for 4 empty XMs , I just dump 4 tags for that industry in the Nelson cup. When I get to Nelson I find 4 untagged XMs (the MTs) and parcel the tags out. If there is more tag demand for a car than Nelson can fill, I "requisition" more cars from Cranbrook by dumping the balance from the Nelson cup into the Cranbrook cup...then I proceed to Cranbrook, and stage the train with the right cars.  The time saving for me comes from having to restage only the Cranbrook and Spokane trains from staging with the required cars, not all trains as I have to do today

I first pull the tags from all the spotted cars.  They have made it to their right location and need a new destination.  Unspotted or misspotted cars are left tagged as they are 'In transit".  I then tag the loaded cars for their destinations per an excel spreadsheet and requisition the number and type of cars for input loads and MT cars, again by using the spreadsheet to tell me how many tags I have to pull.  The tags are dumped in the paper cup representing their desired source location.

Below is one of the industry-centric worksheets with many working columns hidden. All supply requests (left) and load/MT destinations (right) are generated automatically when you seed four random numbers on the first sheet of the Excel file. This sheet is for the industries on the Kaslo sub which, when combined with the Slocan sub sheet, creates the work for the Slocan/Kaslo wayfreight. Similar sheets exist for all train jobs.  At the end of the session I can just copy the cars from the left yellow column to the right yellow column as a starting point for what cars should have been delivered. An optional step is to true this "delivered" column up manually with a quick once-over of the layout checking that the volume and type of car is correct…this step isn't really needed but even in this case there are no need to read or enter car numbers.





Finally the spreadsheet makes some summary sheets to help anticipate problems before I restage the layout.

The summary below shows the cars which have been requisitioned from Cranbrook (East staging), a mixture of Loads from "points East", and overflow demand for MTs that Nelson is unlikely to be able to meet. This is just an estimate however as the final demand is determined by the tags I pulled and the cars on hand.



And this summary shows the seed random numbers in the top left but the interesting content are the "hot spot" tables. The spreadsheet uses conditional formatting to flag whether the specific jobs are likely to be easy, standard, challenging or impossible based on car volume. These parameters will be tweaked over time as I get more experience with the system. The table in the upper right shows the likely result of different average levels of the 4 random numbers.  Looks like I may have to take the Rossland Sub train myself!



Thx for bearing with me!  I may submit this to the Dispatcher mag if a search proves this is novel and could be useful to others, especially N scalers where reading car numbers and carrying car cards can be a hassle.

Oh, and I also  made good progress on my JMRI laptop issue.  For those running JMRI to connect to your layout's DCC system, please be warned it doesn’t play nicely with 64 bit Windows 8, which is what my replacement laptop was delivered with.  However if you create a "virtual machine" running 32 bit XP inside Win 8 and run JMRI from inside that window things appear to work nicely.  Great! I should be able to salvage several weeks worth of investment in my JMRI Panel (which the Dispatcher uses to control the train order signals on the layout).

Small victories!

Have a great weekend.

md