The Mighty Reuss River

With some grass planted on that hill, I ended up doing a little creek-building this afternoon.

Mixing up some PVA white glue plus black and white paint to make a gray blend, the creekbed was painted and some Woodland Scenics Talus applied.

This is an old favourite for riverbeds. I think its made out of some sort of pumice  (so it's fairly light in weight) that has been tumbled to take off the sharp edges. I have some 'large', and 'medium-fine' stuff, so made some 'superfine' by crumbling up larger bits with pliers.

This, and some different shades of 'grass' down by the creek, was all glued down with diluted PVA. As an aside, using a plastic pipette is my greatest step forward in scenicking - it allows you to maintain so much control over where the mess is going. My second greatest advance is in wetting the scene lightly with isopropyl alcohol first - applied from another clean pipette.

With the creek in place (but not dry yet), and hastily staged passenger train, just imagine a few trees and the scene might start to look ok.

Up the creek towards Wattinger

Wattinger Curve classic

More Hill Skeletons

Some quiet progress has seen the skeletons of a few more hills form themselves on the front of the layout. In the below pic, the Upper Wattinger bridge (and the only tight curve visible on the layout) is in the foreground, with the classic Wattinger scene behind.

Here is the short bridge between the tunnel-under-Wassen-church and the Muhle (mill) tunnel. The real bridge is far taller and curves the opposite way, but hey, it fills in a corner. The Church (its spot visible just left of centre) should be taller (but any taller and it would be too tall for the middle level of track), I'm in-indecision about whether to put a roadway above the left portal of the Church tunnel. It would hide the tunnel portal, but might make the church seem even lower than it should be. My tracks also diverge off the bridge going into the yard, so in summary, I'm going to give myself zero stars for this scene in advance of the finished abomination.

The grass is always greener

As scenery starts to flow, the engineer in me tends to stand aside and make way for the bearded, smelly artist who will season the layout to taste.

Speaking of seasons, while I loved Wassen in the winter, building a convincing snow scene isn't something I would consider for my first foray into Z. So... something with blue skies, green grass and leaves on the trees it will be.

After venturing to the local hobby shop - which maintains a tiny, but useful selection of scenery items - I elected to buy the items they had in stock and start planting grass.

The 2-3 layers of glueshell (PVA white glue and old phonebook pages) seems to be strong enough and has actually stiffened up the layout overall torsion-wise even though its only 2/3rd completed.

So I brushed on diluted PVA and sprinkled on some Peco Meadow Grass with a touch of their Spring Grass which is a little lighter in colour as a base layer. It's a little odd using this fairly dated 'dyed sawdust' type of scenic material that we once used decades ago before Woodland Scenics (etc) got more creative. Isopropyl Alcohol was dribbled on to settle the stuff on steep slopes before more diluted PVA was dripped on with a plastic pipette.

Golly, it's very green. As if someone less conservatively dressed than I left their crushed velvet blazer on the layout. But then Switzerland is a pretty green place too.

The passenger approaches Wattinger curve; an intermodal heads up the middle level above the town and will cross the Middle Meienreuss bridge shortly; and a couple of covered wagons near the Command Post on the upper level.

Wattinger

Middle Meienreuss bridge (minimalist edition)

Flat out - another container wagon.

I mentioned last time that I have a few 'Res' stake wagons that lost stanchions in the post. It turns out that the tops pop off these quite easily, so it might be possible to turn one into a container flat.

There are many, many types of these as mentioned earlier, but I'm going to make one of the deep-sided ones similar, but not exactly the same, as this one:

Unfortunately, the Marklin chassis is a tiny bit wide, so when I add a thin plastic overlay the sides will stick out a little further than they should, but such is life. Hopefully it won't be too obvious. The sides were cut from some thin Plastruct strip that happened to be the same height as was required. I drew the angled lines on the plan to help me position my ruler and get the angles right.

They were duly stuck on. A set of containers was prepared: The K Line one was made into a 20 footer...

 A few ribs, bottom sill and tiedown hooks (from the Res shell) later:

And some detail and paint later:

It might look a bit crummy up close, but hopefully it will look ok in the middle of a train.  Its saved a bit by the nice Yang Ming container on top, which I think was from an American AZL doublestack model. The twistlocks' here are painted on blobs of yellow and weathering is primarily a washing of thinned paint dusted in places by that Tamiya weathering chalk. I tried to make some 'rusty pools of water' on the top of the gray container, but I'm not sure I got away with it...

While I was in the dungeon today, I went back and added a few more steel wire coils to the Res wagon with black thread, dusted some very thin gray paint  to take the edge off them, and weathered them all with a little rust.

The first container wagon (in the background) has been upgraded with a black 'data board' stolen off the Res wagon top, a re-blued container, and some weathering.

I need to add a handbrake wheel to the blue one, but other than that, it was a pretty quick build.

Rollin' on Dubz... RES wagon with wire wheels

I've acquired four of these 'Res' wagons (apparently the 'R' stands for 'flat wagon' in European) which came along in a freight set. I quite like them, but four is probably too many. I have some ideas for the two badly-packed ones that received a few broken stanchions in the post, but in the meantime...

The models are lettered for the German DB railway. Swiss SBB have them in their generic light gray colour too. While browsing the web for loads to put in them, I was taken by the example below carrying coils of steel wire. I've borrowed this image from www.photos-ferroviares.fr, so I hope they don't mind. If so, I'll remove it.

A quick splash with some paint washes followed, using the two Tamiya acrylic colours I own (rail brown and light gray).

 That's looking a mile better.

Next, I raided the house sewing facilities for some appropriate coloured thread.

And wound 30-40cm long strings around a tube of brass (that was probably a tad big) with a dab of PVA glue for adhesion.

Best not to wind too tight, as it's hard enough forcing the bales of steel off the end of the brass tube with your fingernails as it is.

Glued down, they look pretty good. I'm a few rounds short... but have run out of thread. Might have to make some black ones and add a touch of paint.

Not bad for less than an hour's work.

Continuing Mountainification

The hills continued to grow today. The PVA+whitepages glueshell takes about 2 days to set and with a couple of layers is pretty strong. For today's coverage, I used a less-watered down PVA mix.

A few details have been added into the landscape:

• In the above pic, bottom-left is the underpass and road to the Wattinger curve photospot
• in the middle of the pic, the Sustenpass road S-curves under the viaduct and the small road underpass to the farms behind branches off to its left
• up to the left of the pic you might be able to make out the zig-zag farm trail up to the Command Post, which is the little knob on the top level where there is a green stripe in the paper.
• in the Meinreuss gorge to the right, you can see the two rail bridges and the Sustenpass road bridge between its two tunnels.

Growing Hills

After track painting, ballasting is another thing that logically should be done before tunnels encroach, but I reckon this is pretty chicken and eggy. You need embankments to stick ballast to, and if hills don't go in first you end up covering your nice ballast in glue and plaster. I'll probably grow as much scenery as I can, ballast, and then close off the tunnels.

My preferred method for building scenic forms involves chicken wire (so you can mold the hillsides till they look right) and Woodland Scenics plaster cloth (because it's fast, sets into a hard shell, and is relatively mess-less.

On the other side of the coin, that method is also relatively heavy (remember that the layout is a featherweight so far) and relatively expensive. The plaster sometimes cracks and will often shed dust over time.

So this time I'm going to try a lattice of thin card to build the forms (and boy does it look pretty appalling in these pictures) stuck together by the cheapest, stringiest, nastiest hot glue gun that you can buy for $5 at The Warehouse:

This worked reasonably well - although it looks pretty flimsy, the hardshell on top should add strength.

With the hot glue gun and some strips cut from cardboard collected from the recycling over the past month, this is pretty fast to build and tweak. You may also note some black foamboard forms in place for the road and some of the buildings of Wassen.

Now to coat the skeleton with some lightweight skin. The first experiment was with pages from an old phonebook (again, borrowed from the recycling).  In the blue plastic tub, I mixed approx 50:50 PVA and warm water with a few drops of dishwashing liquid and stirred it all up. The ripped up bits of phonebook paper were dunked and applied a few layers deep.

We'll find out tomorrow just how stiff this is...

Beginning some scenery

View from the front for once...

It's been a long slog slaving over a hot soldering iron of late, but now that the mechanics are in reasonable shape it feels like time to start growing some scenery...

All layouts are exercises in compromise, and this one especially so as it tries to fit several kilometres of climbing and winding track into the size of a door.  Mechanically it all fits and it runs, but in terms of the layouts overall effectiveness, the rubber hits the road when the scenery goes in.

For here we find out if the various features 'fit and work' as we'd hoped.

The first thing I need to do is to add some bases for things like rivers and roads that are had to add level and flat after the hills start growing.

Here we see a simple flat white card base for the Reuss river as it passes under the 'upper' and 'lower' (where that wagon is) Wattinger bridges. The famous Wattinger curve lies just beyond, and in the distancee, the tracks go under a plinth-like table structure which is where the landmark Wassen Church will sit:

At this stage, I decided to paint the rails brown as it's easier to do this before they get enveloped in tunnels and cuttings:

A piece of unpainted track in the background for comparison...

I used some Tamiya acrylic brown that was lying around and a fine brush. In past lives, I've sprayed automotive primer from a can, and although this is fast, it tends to be quite red in colour ...and gets everywhere...

Latest Habbiinsings

I mentioned in an earlier episode on these Habbiins wagons that a silly Transwaggon decal might be added to the side of one at some stage. 

I've owned an ALPS decal printer for about 20 years that I have a love-hate relationship with.  It's expensive to run, temperamental (making it even more expensive to run) and only runs on Windows XP. I do have an XP computer lying around but don't really feel like finding it, unpacking it, plugging it in and seeing if it still talks to the ALPS at the moment. 

And while the ALPS is great for lettering and printing out the simple 'vector' images that I've drawn up using CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator, and similar programs, it really struggles with 'raster' bitmapped images from the likes of Photoshop, or images that you might borrow from the interweb. Mainly because its ancient drivers struggle to mix colours and produce an output that isn't all dotty and lo-res like a video game from the 1980s.

The solution is to use a laser printer for these raster images because they'll readily print at 300 or 600 dpi - plenty of resolution for a model. I don't happen to own one, but my local library and local print shop do. While I did find a colour .svg vector image for this logo online, spending 20 cents on a copy is better than an afternoon swearing at the ALPS, so off I went armed with my images in a word processing document, a sheet of plain clear decal paper (purchased from MicroMark in the US about 5 years ago) and a ruler. 

After a bit of iterative fiddling to get sizes correct, PDF-ing, transporting via a USB stick and so on, out it came. And on it went. I measured 23mm, and it printed out at 23mm, but it should be a tad bigger. I suppose I didn't take the ribs into account. And it should be a bit lower down the wagon side. But hey, close enough and proof that ye olde decal paper hasn't crumbled into dust.

Getting the runaround

There's not much to see in the below video clip that you haven't seen before, although for once: proof that a complete loop of the layout by fully traversing the uphill and downhill mains is possible.

There is one short 30cm section of the 'inner' uphill siding that still requires track, but all sections are wired up except for the strange siding at the back of the yard that you must back into. It's all provided for on the control panel, but needs 10 minutes and some wire to hook up.

In Control

Time to tame the electrical demons.

The back of a control panel. Starting to drill some holes for block isolation switches:

These are DPDT center-off switches which will route power to a block (for example, the "Up Main"). The theory is that with the switch in the up position, power will be routed to the track from the "UP" controller, if down, from the "DOWN" controllers, and, as the name suggests, no connections are made when the switch is in the center position.

If I wasn't so impatient I would have something clever done with that front panel but can't wait now...

The input power buses starting to be connected with copper telephone wire:

Input plug from the two controllers connected to the busses behind:

Connected to the track sections tag board:

And tacked into place on the layout:

A few more wires to attach ...

Gettin it together

Five strips of Peco Z flex track arrived in the post a few days ago. They've sat neglected in the corner of the trainroom since, while periodic rituals involving pondering were performed.

I know I should complete the wiring and build a control panel, but today I accidentally glued a section of foamboard trackbed in place, so figured I might as well go to town while the ball was rolling. This is why I scored 55% in School Certificate English.

An hour or so later I'd managed to lay the double mainline up to the 'summit' and connect up one of the passing loops at its hidden station. The apex of the third level of track is where the uphill mainline loops around to become the down main while also providing (minimal) storage so that an uphill train which has just summitted doesn't have to immediately go back downhill again.

looking 'south' towards a non-existent Goschenen which would be a few miles beyond my summit sidings

Looking 'north' from the summit storage sidings and Wattinger

There's still plenty of feed-wiring and track soldering to be done before a train can finally loop around continuously up and down, round and round, ad-nauseam under its own power, and I do need to see if I can eek out the storage siding trackage at the summit from the few remaining centimetres of track and few fishplates I have left, but it does seem like a milestone has been reached

Half of the untested summit trackage foolishly glued in place

Organising a Rat's Nest - wiring tagboards

As someone who has been using DCC since 1995, it seems strange to be 'stepping back in time' to a DC powered layout.

As Wassen is a whimsical distraction that I've already spent more than enough money on, adding a bunch of Z decoders and fluffing about with all of that isn't likely to happen at this stage, if at all. Especially as this seems to be a pretty simple layout with just an 'Up' track and a 'Down' track and some storage sidings.

However to make that work involves electrically isolating the track into sections and powering only the ones that you want to actually run trains on at a particular point in time.

By my count (and I did run out of fingers at one stage), there will be 9 or 10 sections on the layout: two mainline tracks, 5 sidings or isolatable sections in the yard at the bottom, and two or three up top.

As you "saw" earlier (if you'll pardon the pun), I used a Dremel cut off wheel to cut gaps in the rails. (If I'd had some plastic insulating rail joiners I might have used those, but they don't always hold the track in perfect alignment.)

Until now, I have soldered the minimum number of wires onto tracks and hung them all together in a temporary fashion to be able to run a train around for testing purposes. Obviously that's only a partial short-term solution that had to be tackled at some stage.

Today I decided to make this all a bit more kosher, wiring up all (ok, 'all but one') of the sidings:

...feeding all the wires properly through the baseboard (easy in foamboard!),

...and attaching them all to a tagboard so its a bit easier to understand and debug as required:

I've put the tagboard into a spot to the right-rear of the layout that is reasonably accessible, labeled it with a marker that you probably can't see here, and used different coloured wires where possible to make troubleshooting and adjustments easier.

Over the Top

Since it's armistice day (Nov 11), it seems appropriate to steel myself to go over the top and embark on a final big push to the summit.

Lacking the necessary bits of track right now, I'm having to make do with foamboard to see what the path across no mans land looks like. Hopefully that will be resolved shortly and the rails will be able to take their first vertical steps in some months.

Tentative steps. Looking 'north'

From behind. Mug (NZMRG Porirua 1994!) for scale for the benefit of Am-Fet

How small is Z anyway?

While N scale certainly has a better selection of rolling stock, when I first hit on the idea of "Wassen on a door", for obvious reasons, Z was the only scale that was considered.

Why? Because it's small. Small-enough-to-fit-a-lot-of-track-on-a-door small.

Well it's supposed to be small. But when the first of my Z purchases was unboxed, they weren't as tiny as had been expected. The locos certainly don't get lost on your workbench, the track is workable, and as we've seen recently, you can even 'model' in Z.

So to respond to a recent question/comment/request - how small is it really?

Here's a side-by-side comparison that can be readily set up with models on hand - a Z scale Swiss Re 4/4 (1:220) vs an N scale North American Dash 9 (1:160) vs a New Zealand DC in NZ120 (TT 1:120).

Crikey. After having only played with Z this year and not seeing an N scale engine out in the wild for some time, Z suddenly seemed a lot smaller than I realised. Or probably more accurately, N seemed a lot bigger.

In comparing apples with motorcycles, it's fair to point out that a real General Electric Dash 9 is a lot wider, taller and longer than the other two locomotives, but empirically, it would seem that Z is indeed smaller than the others by quite a margin.

But its not tiny. That would be T gauge.

A Desk, my Kingdom for a Desk...

The spate of recent rolling stock work can largely be attributed to the purchase of an old computer workstation and office chair from the Salvation Army charity shop. A modeling desk being an item that's been missing from my wardrobe for the past two years.

The desk had a slide-out keyboard tray which was cut down and re-installed to make a second shelf where the monitor used to go. On the right are slots for a CD library that will become more shelves for small projects in time. I suppose its fairly small, but that's entirely appropriate for the current Z scale projects. And it forces me to keep things tidy...

I also like being able to whizz around the room on my chair.

A further purchase - not yet installed - is a $4 old clamp-on bed headboard light that will be attached to the top shelf or beside the window to provide additional lumens when required.

Best $30 I've ever spent.

InterRegio 4 - on the run

While I had the cars apart for their makeover, the opportunity was taken to trip or remove the buffers that I thought might have been upsetting the cars on tight curves and causing derailments.

Seems to have done some good, as I ran these around a bit yesterday with no problems whatsoever.

Are they perfect? No of course not - neither my painting nor the Marklin canvases underneath.

...But they do capture the 'essence' of an InterRegio train; and my modeling philosophy has always been that a 'close enough' model will always look better in a bigger scene, which allows me to steam through these things relatively quickly rather than seeking absolute perfection - or never finishing anything before losing interest.

One day I'll make some decals. I promise. In the interim, as far as I'm concerned, without my glasses on and squinting from the other side of the room: This train looks the shiznit.

InterRegio - 3

Things proceeded at pace during a few short visits to the trainroom today.

The first class car came apart and was processed in a similar fashion to the two 2nd class cars. There were subtle differences - there are no end steps so the masking tape covering the unders didn't have much to hold on to and the 'gotcha' at the end being that the 4 pieces of 'glass' window inserts went back in a specific order and not in any other way.

The Marklin Panorama car is a bit different in its construction. Rather than the roof coming off, the body comes off the chassis on these, and the main curved glass pops out from the outside:

Despte this, it was tackled in a similar way to the other cars.

The roof grey had to come down a bit more than on the existing livery so I scored a line down to the appropriate distance with a knife and hand-painted down to it with a similar shade of custom mixed grey.

The red patches on the ends are a bit bigger on this car so my painting with the $2 paints ended up a little more lumpy. I also went mad and hand painted the yellow strip on top of the red that signifies first class on the prototype. This worked out considerably better than expected so the same was also applied to the first class car.

 All in all, the train looks rather decent I reckon:

The real heros have been the black marker covering up the silver window frames and the acrylic paints - especially the Tamiya White. These are touch-dry in minutes so you can be on to another colour in no time, so my attacking of this passenger train was reminiscent of a bull loose in the proverbial china shop.

Just as a reminder, this is what they looked like a few days ago.