Complete revamp of the ICG tracks at Ruston, LA

I had always planned to have the ICG tracks disappear between the backdrop and a tree line at Ruston.  The more I thought about it and talked with some friends, the more I thought about redoing the entire area.

I had always thought about putting a farm scene or Mobile home court between the ICG tracks and the Rock's mainline, but the trouble starting showing up when I wanted to install a small siding/run around on the ICG tracks to help improve operations.

With turnouts to throw and couplers that would need to be uncoupled, having a tree line that would semi conceal the tracks, I would have to reach over the tree line or scenery and have to reach to the backdrop, about 18", which wouldn't be bad.  But I could see a constant scenery repairs being needed.

A friend suggested that since I removed the short siding earlier on the Rock main near Tioga Jct. that I move the ICG track out away from the backdrop and "Hide it in plain sight" close to the Rock's trackage?  So I started doodling some plans and came up with this:

 

Once I found something I liked and thought could work I played around with some older turnouts that I had on hand.  When I decided it could work, I ordered some new turnouts and got after it.

Here's a quick video I made of how it'll work.

 

 

 

Re-alignment at Tioga Jct.

Since I reduced my Ops plan several years ago, the short siding at Tioga Jct. near Winnfield has no use any longer.

Back when I had two locals that worked North and South out of El Dorado, the South local would work Union Scrap in Winnfield, which it usually only needed a couple of gondolas.

Since there wasn't very much room there and only that short siding, the local would leave most of its cars sitting in Dubach and drag down only the few gons needed.  Once it worked Union Scrap, the power would run around the loaded gons and return to Dubach, grab the rest of its train and make its way back to El Dorado.

Now only the NB local works Union Scrap and it's a trailing point switch, so no run around is needed.  So the other night I called out the track gangs and I had them remove the siding and realign the tracks at the junction.

This is what I started with:

Here's a quick video of how I reworked it.

 

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.