The On30 Guy

I’d guess some of you might be wondering where I’ve been. Busy, in a word, with work and other issues. The most recent tidbit to rear its ugly head is the realization that we have a wasp infestation somewhere in the basement — and it’s in either the walls or the ceiling of what is supposed to be the layout room. That means bad news — the whole basement needs to be ripped out and rebuilt — and good news — the basement can be rebuilt the way I want it!

Right now, there’s a fireplace situated in a corner of the basement. It’s angled, and so it eats up a huge amount of space. I also believe that the area surrounding the fireplace is where the wasps are hiding and that it’s also hiding the water shut-off for the hose-bib on the back of the house. So, that’s where I’ll start demolition.

Our plan is to replace the fireplace with a pellet/wood stove, which will be free-standing, and will allow me to make a smaller chimney chase. That means that the corner will be more useable for layout space (not ideal, but at least useable).

So, now I have to get up the inclination to box everything up and get it stored somewhere, figure out where the money for the renovations will come from, and get to work.

Tags: Design and Construction, Miscellaneous // Add Comment »

Fooling around on a scooter....

I’m fooling around with a new version of the web site CMS, a system called WordPress. They’ve recently released a major version enhancement, version 2.6, which incorporates a lot of functionality that’s really pretty cool, that used to require a zillion add-on plug-ins and hacks.

The picture at left was taken on our last trip up to Maine, at one of the entrances to Acadia National Park. It’s where we spent a lot of our time the last trip, instead of going to the National Narrow Gauge Convention, a few hours away in Portland.

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The Thatcher’s Inlet series, published in RMC in the early 70’s, was what got me interested in narrow gauge railroading. Now, the whole series is available on line. Thanks!

Tags: Inspiration // Add Comment »

I’ve made a bunch of changes to the On30Guy site, and more will be on the way. The idea is to make the site better reflect my modeling direction. To that end, I’ve started to delete a lot of the older content, much of which was out-of-date anyway.

I’ve chosen a new design for the site, based on a template by Anthony Baggett. Of course, I’ve already started modifying the design to better suit my needs, and more tweaks will be forthcoming.

One of two neat features I’ve added to the new site is the ability to e-mail an article or page to a friend. Just click on the little envelop icon next to the article or page title, and fill in the form that will pop up. The entire article or page will be delivered to the recipients’ e-mail. The other new feature is the ability to create printer-friendly versions of a page or article on the fly. Just click on the little printer icon next to the article or page title, and the page will be re-rendered in a format that will look great on any printer. Scroll down to the bottom, and click the link to print. Any comments posted to the article or page will be included as well.

That’s the news for now! At some point, I’ll actually get some modeling done.

Tags: Miscellaneous // 1 Comment »

Good friend and fellow On30er John Weigel has finally launched his Peterboro Railroad web site.

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I’ve reported in the past that I was having serious trouble with the Sellers turntable model, and getting it to rotate smoothly. Here’s what I’ve learned:

As built, the center of the turntable floats about 3/32" above the cast "pivot" bushing. All of the weight is carried by the little wheels at the end of the bridge. On my particular model, one of the wheels does not precisely track the ring rail (the other three wheels line up perfectly). This, coupled with the slight slop in the bushing, allowed the bridge to bind up when the turntable was "armstronged" around.

This evening, I fooled around with the thing a bit, and tried inserting some washers on the shaft between the cast bushing in the pit, and resin block in the center of the bridge. When I reached a thickness that raised the center just a hair above ring rail, suddenly, the turntable rotated super-smoothly! As I thought last May, a larger bearing surface in the center of the bridge does the deal. My task now is to find two nylon or Teflon washers exactly half thickness of the area I need to fill. Finally, I’ll add a collet on the bottom of the shaft to hold the bridge in place and apply just a little friction to the whole works. Ideally, I would like to use a pulley and another nylon bushing for that, to accommodate future motorized or hand-cranked operation. But, I’ll take what I can get.

Tags: Design and Construction, Modular // Add Comment »

…No, not me. The railroad.

I’ve been in a bit of a modeling slump, pretty much since last year’s Kimberton meet. With the exception of re-assembling the modules upon our return home, I’ve done nothing on my layout, or the modules. There have been a few reasons:

1. Lack of time
2. Lack of available cash
3. Dissatisfaction with my available railroad space
4. Dissatisfaction with my track plan
5. Ambiguity towards my chosen railroad theme

Items 3, 4 and 5 are, in many ways, inter-related. First, Maryland’s Eastern Shore is pretty much flat. Modeling flat-lands effectively generally requires a fair amount of space in any scale, even if only trying to model a single town or industry.

Second, by trying to make the small room a multi-purpose room, I had reduced the amount of space available for modeling to maybe 1/4 of the room. This might have worked in a smaller scale, but not so well in O scale. This also restricted my track plan, and made for an exceptionally short run — the entire line could be traversed, at “prototypical” speeds, in under 2 minutes.

Finally, modeling the Eastern Shore is not what attracted me to narrow gauge modeling in the first place! My attraction to narrow gauge dates back to the mid 70’s, to a series of articles in RMC, in which Dave Frary and Bob Hayden were using HOn30 to represent funky Maine two-foot railroads. In fact, when I moved into the On30 world back around 2000, I looked into HOn30. Unfortunately, I found it plagued by many of the same problems that Dave and Bob encountered 25 years earlier — poor operational performance of the N scale locomotives used as a basis for the engine conversions. Bachmann’s excellent On30 models provided the answer to a poverty-stricken modeler who had been bitten by the narrow gauge bug.

It took a couple of trips to Maine, and a couple of rides on the WW&F to kick-start my brain to the point that I realized that I was heading in the wrong direction — along with the acquisition of a couple of the Bachmann On30 Forneys. I initially reasoned that they would be “appropriate” for my railroad, since the operations would have been “similar” if there had been narrow gauge on the Eastern Shore, but I still wasn’t satisfied.

Other issues with Eastern Shore modeling in a small space is that there’s no easy way to hide fact that the layout has to turn a sharp corner every few feet. In Maine, there are bona-fide hills that can be used to disguise a layout corner, and provide a geographical reason for the railroad to make a curve. I also dispensed with the idea of making the room multi-purpose. It’s now going to be strictly a model railroad room, which will house my layout, my On30 modules and my working area. A sketch of my new track plan is below (you can click the image to see a larger version):

There are a few revisions yet to be made, but, conceptually, this will be the plan. I’m going to re-arrange the small yard and limestone loading business at the upper right, and the two-track pier in the wharf area will be flipped and moved to allow for a little more interesting operation and modeling there.

The large yard at the bottom of the plan will utilize two of the three existing yard modules (an aerial view of the yard layout is here). I decided not to use the third (turntable) module as part of the layout, since the primary road power on the railroad will be the Forneys, which were designed to operate as well backward as forward. Even so, the yard is a little overwhelming when compared to the rest of the layout, but I still really like the design and operating concept of the yard.

There’s one place that may cause some issue if I use the Peco flex track and switches: the tail of the run-around on the peninsula in the center of the layout is going to be just long enough for one engine or one car, and the run-around itself is a little on the short side. Since Peco doesn’t make curved On30 turnouts, I have to take a different route, so-to-speak, or be limited in that area of the railroad. For that reason, I’ll probably go to hand-laid track for the non-modular areas of the layout. Standard turnouts will likely use the Pecos I have on hand, modified to be installed on wood ties.

Now I just have to get back to those modules — Kimberton’s coming at me again!

Tags: Design and Construction, Inspiration // 2 Comments »