Full operating session on the Little Rock Line.

Something I've often wanted to do was to video an entire operating session on my layout.

I've had a lot of questions over the years about my layout (though it's nothing special or spectacular) that I've always tried to answer. Mostly with images, but I always thought a video would tell the story even better.

Now, after Dave helped me to get an operation plan working with the use of JMRI, I thought it might be time to give it a try?

A few weeks before I had the session with the new crew from Omaha give things a run, I was running solo sessions making sure that things were actually working before I invited others over and wound up with egg on my face.

While running one of these sessions, I decided why not try videoing it? It was the weekend of the 4th and I had some time to kill with a 4 day weekend.

This will not win me an Oscar or any other award, but I did it for several reasons.

One, to give it a try and see what I could do with the editing software I have.

Two, to show others what happens on my layout during a session.

Three, to allow Dave to see what he helped me create.

Four, to maybe inspire others to do the something similar.

Five, it was also kind of fun.

Like I said, it's not quality material, but it will show what a typical session on my layout involves.

The lighting is not the best, editing the videos, sometimes made the grass REALLY green, like neon green.

I did take the time at least to edit out my arms, gut and my ugly mug out, so at least you won't have to suffer through seeing that, and not too mention

my Railroady words, as some call them.

There are 15 videos in all.

They start in Biddle Yard in Little Rock, AR, we follow the SB local first all the way to the yard in Alexandria, LA.

We watch as the train flips to the NB and grabs a string of cars that were staged for the NB train.

Then we follow the NB back to Little Rock.

Along the way most every town has some sort of switching, but several towns get bypassed as JMRI did not schedule any work in those towns on this session.

Anyway I hope some find this interesting?

Oh, and BTW, watch for the disappearing box car.

https://youtu.be/gc5yXVoV4gU?list=PL32Ycc7bBlCemffBXpJfykkRJUT6KHC_c

 

First session with new friends and JMRI Ops

Today I had the pleasure of hosting the first operating session with some new friends while running the first session with the newest iteration of my JMRI Ops.

I'm happy to say things went real well, both with the Ops and with the new crew.  Unless they're just being nice to me, they all said they had a good time and things worked smoothly.

Would be glad to have you all back again.

Left to Right: Ray, Willie, Ely and Peter.

Before Willie was able to show up, Peter and Ely were working the SB Winnfield local at Haskell, while Ray keep a vigilant eye on their switching duties.

Peter and Ely are still working the same train, this time in El Dorado.

Willie is at the throttle of the NB Winnfield local this time, while Ray is planning their first moves in Winnfield.

Once again, thank you all for coming over this morning.  Had a great time and looking forward to the next session.

I ran into Peter and two of his friends back in February while at the KC N Scale Weekend, we planned to get together earlier, but I got caught up in JMRI Ops and was trying to get something together so it would be more than just a "Meet & Greet".   I think the wait was worth it? 

Also want to give a shout out to a couple more of my friends:

Quin for stopping by as well.

For Dave C. who helped me out with JMRI Ops and making my Ops work as expected.

Thanks!

 

Flatcar decks.

I have never been a fan of the plastic looking decks that come with most stock flatcars, then again I can't think of too many others who like them either?

I have had decent luck painting them to resemble wood decks, not a hard process and not too involved.

But I decided to try something different.  I found some of the preprinted decks online and found a decent image that I could download and clean up in my image software.  After cleaning up a few items I played around with adjusting the colors and the lightness of the image to give them a grayer appearance of heavily sunbleached looks.  

I had moderate luck with them, nothing outstanding to write home about but they are better than looking at the plastic painted decks that match the carbodies.

The hardest and most time consuming part of this was getting them sized to fit the cars I wanted them applied on.  As far as printing them, the color will vary a bit once printed and the black ink tends to have a bluish tint, so I tried printing a few on some old Manila folders that I had in the office, which did change the tint bit. 

The next step was to weather the cars before gluing the decks on.  For glue I tried using some of the Elmer's Glue Sticks for application, which seemed to work pretty good.  Although on some of the cars they have little spikes on the surface that need to filed down so the prints can make good contact.

Once the glue dried I gave the entire car and decks several light coats of Dullcote to seal everything up. I'm not sure I'll do this to all of my flat cars?  But it does give you a nice variation to the painted ones.

Finished the cabooses

I really should have waited to get the decals in hand before I painted the cabooses or went back and painted the roof edges red before applying the decals.

While the block lettering fit nicely, the speed lettering is a bit too large. I painted the roof edges black according to images that I found online. If I hadn't painted the roof edges, both would have fit much better.

The K4 decals are OK, a touch thicker than Micro Scale, if you look real close you can see the outline on some of them, but not terrible. Overall I'm happy how they are turning out. I do like the Kartrak ACI labels! I need to go back at some point and add them to my locos as well.

I also added window glazing that I made from clear sheet plastic and lightly dusted with weathering powders.

This first image was taken before I added the brush guards, but with the stock Athearn caboose, you can see the amount of weathering I applied. Before weathering, it was very close to the Athearn model.

Here's the MoPac airslide hopper with it's final weathering.

With these wrapped up, I'm going to get the layout setup back so I can test the new files we made finalized in JMRI Ops and see how well they work.

Cupola caboose painting

I've made a little progress on the two cabooses this week.  After getting the holes in the roof plugged and filled I got a coat of TCP light primer shot, followed by the red, then the yellow ends and finally the black roof.  Masking was pretty straight forward on them.

The two little silver stands on both sides of the cupola is what I'm assuming are some sort of vents?  They were made from .040" styrene rods which were heated slightly and flattened.

I still need to paint the handrails white, apply silver around the door windows, you know, the tedious stuff.  I was going to try my hand at drilling out a window on the end to right of each door, but since these are not an exact match for the prototypes, I may just forego this bit of frustration?

 

Cupola Cabooses

Decided to take a little break from JMRI Ops and do a little modeling.  I had planned to work on a few more locomotives, but decided to keep the project a little smaller than what I did with the GP35's and the U33B's.

This is one style of caboose that I have never had in my collections, but recently after watching some old  films turned to video and posted on YouTube of the Montezuma branch, I thought I'd like to add a couple to the fleet.

(Neither of these are my photos.)

So I started out with a couple of Micro Trains standard cabooses like these:

The first thing I needed to do was to remove the roof walks, upper ladder rungs and fill the holes.  Not sure if I'm going to fill in the windows at this point or not?

Instead filling the holes with some sort of putty, I decided to snip off the stems that hold the roof walk in place and then jamb some styrene into the rest of the holes on the roof and try carving them.

It looks a little rough but I'll try to file things down a bit more and then paint should cover the worst of my sins.

The second one is in process.

 

Graphite for tracks and application

Recently there's been talk about track cleaning across the forums again.

One of which has been the application and use of NO-OX ID.  Up until recently I've shied away from this process as it's a pretty lengthy process but it seems legit and a lot of modelers have had great success with this stuff.  I guess you could call me a doubting Thomas?

Applying a greasy substance to the rails, then removing it just doesn't seem logical to me.  But I understand what the material is.  My father used it on connection for his CB radios back in the day and it does help to prevent corrosion to exposed connection in the outdoors.

Well I finally broke down and gave it a try.  I followed the instructions as they were explained with only one exception;  I didn't run my locos over the layout to help spread it out and so that the wheels got a good coating either.  I have a large fleet and I didn't want to exposed them all to this if it didn't work.  So I only ran a pair of them for the test.

Well I will say that it did make a difference, but for only about two months or so, then the stalling and stuttering returned.

According to the Prophet Joe Fugate and his list of Polar vs Nonpolar products, I looked into some of them and chose to use my last can of CRC-226, but it was about empty so I bought a can of WD40 Contact cleaner and started using it instead of my long time cleaner: 70% Isopropyl Alcohol.

I used one of the Woodland Scenics Rail Buddy to scrub the track, then cleaned it with the WD40 Contact Cleaner and again, things ran great.

It was about this time that I stumbled across a post somewhere about someone using Graphite on the track.  This looked interesting and after watching a couple of videos I decided to give it a try.  One of the videos was posted by Scott Thornton (One of the IAIS modelers) where he used and old section of flex track connected to power and ran, or tried run one of his locos.  Without stopping the video, he ran it up and down the section and the loco stalled and stuttered pretty badly.  

He took it off the track, shut the power down and took a stick of 4B graphite and wiped it up and down the length of the track.  After putting the loco back on the track, it ran smooth as silk without any stalling or stuttering.  I had to try this!

I started out wiping my track down with a Woodland Scenics Tidy track cleaner kits using one of the Felt Pads doused with WD40 Contact Cleaner.  I allowed this to dry/evaporate and then applied the Graphite as I had seen in the videos, just short, light strokes on the top and inside of the railhead in random places around the layout, maybe 6"-8" every 4' or 5'?

I placed the first loco on the track and applied power.  That loco did not once hesitate, it just crawled slowly away.  As I kept running it, one thing I noticed was that the headlights did NOT flicker one bit.  I added another loco and connected a length of cars and let them run several laps around the layout to help spread out the graphite.

Over the course of the next month or two I would run a train just see how well things would be.  Each time I fired up the layout, the train worked just as well as it had right after the application of the graphite.  We even ran a couple Op sessions and everything just worked.

One day I did noticed that some stalling and stuttering returned? So I applied another light coat of graphite and things went right back to running smoothly.  After talking with a friend, the subject of dust came up.  It got me thinking that my layout is in the basement and my ceiling is open.  Got looking around and I noticed there was a fair amount of dust on the layout.  

It was decided to give something a try.  I picked up a pack of the Woodland Scenics Dust Monkeys and dug out an old gondola.  My thought was to add a hefty amount of weight to it so I could push it easier and added the Dust Monkeys as a sweeper that it would pick up any dust before it got on the loco wheels.  

My experiment worked and the loco ran just as smooth as it did after first applying the graphite.  So I let the layout sit for awhile. Then I dusted off about 12" of track, sat the gon and loco on that section and ran it.  Again, it ran very smooth!  I checked the Dust Monkey and it had two dark spots from where it touched the rails.  The dark spots were graphite, that I'm sure of, but I could also see a small build up of dust.  So it seemed to work and I planned to continue this.

But then I had another thought.  What if add another car behind the loco that would apply graphite as it rolled along behind the loco?  I was told that too much graphite is not a good thing either.

So enough of my rambling thoughts, let me just show you what I came up with for my cleaning train:

The old Bachmann gondola with buckshot for weight and a dust monkey.

An old ROCO track cleaning car.

After running this a bit I noticed the two black streaks of graphite that stained it and it gave another idea.  If I added a small amount of graphite to where the two black steaks appeared, this might help apply some graphite to the rails as it ran and also help to spread the graphite out?

Here is what the cleaning train looks like (but I had to add another loco as the ROCO adds a lot of drag).

So far over the last year or so this is all I have been using, and I have used it each time before I run an ops session.  I let it run over the layout allowing it to make several laps, for the sidings I will generally only apply a couple of swipes on the spurs.

So far I have not had the need to clean my tracks, this seems to do the trick and I will continue doing it this way until something pops up and I see issues.

Milwaukee Road airslide hoppers

I've been wanting to replace two of my Milwaukee Road Delaware Valley or Bowser airslide hoppers with some nicer Atlas airslides.  

I started with an Atlas Frisco hopper because it had most of the lettering that I needed and the undercarriage was already painted black.  Which meant I only had to remove the large Frisco lettering, the reporting marks and the car numbers.

This was done using 91% Alcohol applied to the lettering and then using a toothpick I started rubbing it over the lettering.  Within a few seconds the black ink started to let loose.  After about a minute or two of constant rubbing, the lettering was gone.

The alcohol didn't affect the gray base color.

Once I had everything removed, I shot the entire car with a coat of Dullcote and applied the Microscale decals.

Overall a pretty simple job.  Of course, now that these are done, Atlas or Micro Trains will announce their versions.  Oh well...

One is for me and others I did for a friend.