Features Selected for the South Shore portion of the layout.

Dear Followers.
Here is the list from the previous post:

Great Lakes Port with at least one ship

A Laker style ore ship

A Great Lakes Cruise Ship, the SS South American

A small Steel mill

An amusement park with animated rides including a roller coaster

A theater representive of the Chicago Theater

40-50 feet of the CTA Elevated ("L" in Chicago terms)

A downtown section of buildings

Here are my selections that I have determined are the best fit and will provide the most interest and value to me and to visitors.

Great Lakes Port with one ship

A Laker style ore ship

A small Steel mill

A selectively compressed theater representive of the Chicago Theater

40-50 feet of the CTA Elevated ("L" in Chicago terms)

A downtown section of buildings

The Great Lakes cruise ship is almost 9 feet long so that has been eliminated.  The Laker ship is much shorter being only 65-1/4" long.   The amusement park is too big for the layout and the South Shore's route did not serve any amusement parks as far as I can tell.  The theater will either created from my existing theater for the time being but may be re-built to be more representive of the Chicago Theater using selective compression.  The real theater if built to scale would occupy 42 by 53 inches.  The Port, the Laker ore ship, and the Steel Mill will occupy the same general area on the layout East of Calumet River.

Thanks for reading.

Features Wanted on the South Shore

Following is a list of features I would like to include on the South Shore railroad.  However, I do not have the room for all of them so I must choose which ones to eliminate or I will never even come close to finishing the layout to some acceptable degree of finished.  This list is in no particular order and being on the top of the bottom of the list does not imply relative importantance.

• Great Lakes Port with at least one ship
• A Laker style ore ship
• A Great Lakes Cruise Ship, the SS South American
• A small Steel mill
• An amusement park with animated rides including a roller coaster
• A theater representive of the Chicago Theater
• 40-50 feet of the CTA Elevated ("L" in Chicago terms)
• A downtown section of buildings

It should be obvious that this list must be trimed down.  That will be a difficult job no doubt but must be done very soon.  I am publishing it here and it is open for comments please.  There are eight items to this list.  I may remember a feature I left off this late at night and will add whatever I need to tomorrow sometime.  In the meantime feel free to comment.  I am thinking that at least one or two things need to be removed.  Email me at jay@thebeckhams.us if you care.  Thanks.

My Sixth Turnout made using the Fast Tracks Jig

 

I am using the Fast Tracks #5 jig.  The only brand of rail that fits these jigs correctly is Micro Engineering rail.  The rail is Code 148 and the type I had on hand was Weathered.  So I built six turnouts and then sold the remaining rail.  In the future I will use only Non-Weathered rail as I had a lot of soldering issues because of the weathering.  In fact Jim and I had to remove the Weathering from the top, bottom, and sides to properly solder the rails to the PC board ties.  Also I used Plibond cement to glue the wood ties to the rails.  It is OK but not the best method.  The first two turnouts were in locations somewhat difficult to reach so the glued ties helped.  Three will be used on our staging yard and they will be easy to reach so I may add spiked to better secure the rail to the ties.  I plan on shortly adding some photos of Warren's scenery.  A lot has been completed since I last posted in photos.  So maybe over the weekend I can take some and post them.

Major Announcement

As many of you know I have been going through a very tiring process of trying to finalize plans for my railroad.  I have interests in many things related to railroads and other things e.g. ships and amusement parks to name a few.  I also love the mountains and mountain railroading.  So after being pulled by these sometimes conflicting interests I have reached a decision that I earnestly believe I can live with.  Hopefully you all as casual observers of this very difficult process will be pleased that I have finally settled down and set some bounties for the layout.

Basically in a nut shell, the layout will consist of two unrelated but connected railroads, the Western Maryland Railway and the Chicago, South Shore, and South Bend Railroad.  They have a common connection of the C & O as being owned by the C & O at various times.  The WM of course was purchased by the C & O/CSX and still operates what is left under CSX.  The South Shore was owned briefly by the C & O also but is now an independent railroad again.

The WM will run and haul coal and other freight mostly within WV.  A connection with the C & O will allow interchange with the South Shore.

The WM portion will be modeled after real locations and the South Shore also will be modeled after real locations and both with operate as prototypical as possible.

Also a future addition to the urban portion of the layout will include a short section of CTA L (elevated) from downtown to the suburbs.  The South Shore portion will go from downtown (Randolph Street Terminal) to Gary, IN.  Traffic East of Gary was and is very sparse.  So this covers 80% of the railroad's traffic.

My theater that has been seen in some older posts will be re-designed to represent the Chicago Theater in Chicago near the loop.

In the next few days I will be posting photos of the WM side of the layout showing the mountain scenery of which some is finished and other portions under construction.  I will also post an updated layout drawing.

I have also deleted out of date postings from this blog.

Signal and CTC Circuit Boards

Here are photos of three boards I had made for ease in building and controlling signals as well as wiring my CTC board.

Signal Control Circuit.  8 bits via CAT5 cable controls 12 LEDs in four signal heads.  Can therefore control an OS section with a two three color signal heads for each route and one two head three color signal for the point end of the turnout.

Breakout board route eight wires from a CAT5 cable to eight screw terminals.  Many uses when using CAT5 rather than single wires or phone cables.

Same breakout board but with Molex connector which allows connection to DIN24, DIN32, DOUT24, DOUT32, or SMINI boards.  Eliminates building molex connectors and crimping molex pins.

Progress Report on Wood Trestle

Here is a snapshot of the deck of the wood trestle I am building for Blackwater grade.  It is almost a scale 160' long and 80' high.  The deck will be painted later and NBW castings will be added.  Built with strip both commerial and some homemade stringers.  The rail is code 125 and I am using Right O' Way's rail joiners which have the bolt detail cast into them.  Snapshot taken with Kodak Easyshare C180.  Better photos later.

Second Part of CTC is nearing completion

Backside of Lower Panel with Switch Wiring only. No LEDs wired yet. The use of RG45 connectors allows panel to be unpluged and moved to a work bench for repair or for changes.  This board has seven Breakout Boards.  Each has a RG45 connector.  Each DIN32 and DOUT32 cards also have Breakout Boards.  A simple CAT5 patch cable connects them together.  When the LEDs are wired they will connect to our custom Signal Control Circuit board (SCC) which controls 12 LEDs with an eight wire CAT5 cable.  The SCC then connects to the Breakout Boards via a CAT5 cable.

Front of Lower Panel

Half of the CTC showing Model Boards and Lower Panels