Small Steps and Big Impacts

Sometimes, small steps can dramatically improve a scene.  A recent example is the scene of the bridge over Skaneateles Creek.  First, click on the link for a quick look at how it looked before - and, for comparison, here's a shot showing how it looks today:

The technique used here was simply to apply 'puff ball' trees directly to the backdrop.  While the puff ball trees have much less intricate detail than the 'Super Tree' kits, they work well as backdrop trees, mounted behind the foreground trees.  Instead of an obviously amateurish painted forest canopy, now viewers see real, three dimensional forest canopy, with a distant painted hill to appear miles away.   

This is much more pleasing to the eye than the scene in the link above, right?  I'm pleased at how this came out, and will model all additional shallow scenes in the same way.  My eye is fooled by the backdrop and my focus goes to the railroad.

I had to play with some black & white imaging in Photoshop - I'm very happy how this looks now.  

And, finally, for you locomotive fans, here's a shot of recently-finished C40-8W 6155 sitting at Onondaga Yard.  This is an Atlas model I purchased used.  I have added a DCC sound decoder and a few details, along with weathering, and now the 6155 can join the fleet.  I was never much of a fan of Quality-painted Dash-8 W's, but they do make a pleasing model of a 'plain Jane' unit that was a regular in the Syracuse area.

Here comes the autumn!

~RGDave

"Emergency, Emergency, Emergency!"

Those three words rarely bring good news to follow!

Early in the morning of September 8, 1994, westbound train SEBU with four locomotives and 53 cars went into emergency as it passed upgrade through CP277 on the Onondaga Cutoff, just after 4 a.m. and still well before dawn.  The train notified the dispatcher and came to a stop, and the conductor then walked back to see what the issue was, only to find the following scene:

All cars were on the rail, but between the 5th and 6th car of the train, a mechanical defect caused some slack action to literally tear the coupler and its entire mounting from the frame of CN 377249, an empty covered hopper headed to Buffalo for interchange.  As the train was crossing over between tracks 1 and 2, this was a big mess, with both main tracks blocked.  Delays to priority intermodal trains started almost immediately.  

The train crew contacted the Mohawk Dispatcher, who in turn got in touch with the Trouble Desk, which immediately dispatched a mechanical crew with a boom truck to get out and clear the coupler from the railroad, as well as to assist the crew in getting the defective car set out.  With no coupler on the west end of the remaining train, locomotives from TV-5 were commandeered to push the back to the SEBU's train west up to Onondaga Yard, with the conductor protecting the head end.  The car was set out, and SEBU then started his scheduled work at Onondaga Yard, albeit with a conductor who wasn't too happy with how that run had gone!  Meanwhile TV-5's power reversed to go back to their train and continue their run west, now several hours late.  

Once the regular Mechanical Department guys came on duty at 7, they fired up their block truck and used its knuckle boom to repair the defect on CN 377249 at Onondaga Yard.  The car will be added to an outbound freight later in the day.  No injuries, just a team of railroaders working together to get the job done right.

For me, stories like this one - an actual mechanical defect leading to a very realistic emergency situation, in turn requiring a realistic response to keep the railroad open - are part of what makes Operating Sessions such a great part of the hobby.  Having an HO scale railroad that can even generate prototypical problems is just a fantastic thrill - you never know what problems will pop up during a session on the Onondaga Cutoff, but rest assured the guys running will figure out how to deal with it!

~RGDave

A New Experience

It's a great hobby that allows us to be able to experience new things - in my case, after model railroading for more than 30 years, September 3, 2015 still will stand out:  We had our first operating session with fully remote dispatching.

Thanks to the internet and the capable networking skills of J. Alex Lang, as well as the signal design skills of Nick Anshant, the Onondaga Cutoff was remotely dispatched via CATS/JMRI software and radio from Jacksonville, FL for the first part of the session, and Pittsburgh, PA to close things out.  Crews talked into the radio, and by wiring a radio to the computer and Skype software, the remote DS could hear crews and talk back to the radio.  The DS lined switches and signals on their computers, and hardware moved on the OC.

More to come on this soon, but this was just too exciting not to mention immediately!

~RGDave

A Little Progress is Still Progress

Summertime with a young family, and an extended community with many teachers, is a time of weekend trips, camping, and family activities.  Between that and working full time, summer months are not a high-volume production time for the Onondaga Cutoff.

However, there is still time to do a bit here and a bit there, and those bits add up.  Here's a late afternoon photo of recent scenery construction west of CP-280. 

A few more trees have grown in on the hillside, and I am wrapping up the first layer of ballast for the east end of the major yard on the railroad, including leads into CP-280. Ballasting interlockings is a painstaking process, worked on a few ties at a time, all while working to get the colors and profiles correct despite avoiding stones and glue on moving parts of interlocked turnouts.  This is the first layer of ballast in the yard, with smaller crushed 'walking' stones yet to come as a finishing touch near the ladders and North Runner (the track running on the right side of the ladder tracks into the distance).   

Enjoy the waning days of summer!  

~RGDave

Summertime, Again!

Over the last few years, a pattern has developed that limits layout time during the summer.  With so many outdoor activities going on, and all sorts of family gatherings and weekend trips to organize, time for progress on the Onondaga Cutoff is limited.  Still, I aim each day to make some sort of effort to move things along, however small that may be.

This car has a neat story:  At the last operating session, an operator donated a car from his freelanced shortline to my roster.  It's a great model that he lettered and weathered himself.  All I had to do was install the resistive wheelsets for block detection on my layout.  CPN 2016 will enter sand service on the Onondaga Cutoff.  And, while I was at it, I finally finished up the PC flatcar at right with heavy weathering as well as resistive wheesets.  The PC flat will enter the MOW fleet.  Both of these were relatively quick projects - a total of 1 hour spread over three nights - that help to keep progress moving on the layout.

A recent locomotive project was to model a Union Pacific SD40-2, to add to the fleet of run-through locomotives on the roster.  This engine came factory decorated from Intermountain as UP 3367, but in the as-delivered paint job from the 1970's.  Following great advice from Joe Atkinson, I removed the lettering and added decals to bring the engine to its appearance in the mid-90's.  Here it is, ready for weathering!

In addition to rolling stock, small windows of time are perfect for adding small details that help a layout stand out.  I finally got around to adding the joint bars to represent insulated joints at CP 282, beneath the big signal bridge there.  The joints, while subtle, really make the scene more complete, at least to my eye!

Much more challenging projects are on the horizon as we head into autumn in New Jersey.  With the help of my daughter Susie, I started to make more background trees to continue scenic progress behind Onondaga Yard, and will need several hundred more of those for scenery to continue on the M&E.  There are also a variety of locomotive projects at hand, including a relatively challenging kitbash to create GE C30-7A's in the Conrail livery.  Plenty of updates to come!

~RGDave

Modeling Modern Details

Model railroading is not a 'new' hobby - in some form it has been around for more than 100 years, and the hobby - like the industry - has changed over the years.  In the 1940's and 1950's, route-mileage peaked on the prototype, with spurs and branches into almost every town in America.  I can see where this would be a great era to model.

However, much of America's manufacturing base moved away from railroads before 1990, and that is what my generation grew up with.  We know very well that modern railroads have as many abandoned spurs as they do active ones, and a plausible eastern model railroad set in 1994 needs some abandoned spurs.

Details available to us today are remarkable and make the hobby very rewarding.  Here is a recent detail project that I completed on the M&E, replacing a frog on an 'abandoned' turnout with a section of jointed rail.  Frogs are high-maintenance items, and if there is no use of a side track, railroads can reduce track maintenance costs by removing the frog even if some of the rest of the turnout remains.  I used Details West rail joiner bar models to 'bolt' the new rail in place of the frog on this Shinohara #6 switch, and with the addition of some ballast and some grit, grime, and weeds, we have a nice mini-scene that helps illustrate the era of the railroad.

More details like these will follow as time passes - always plenty to keep us busy on the Onondaga Cutoff.

~RGDave

Marking the Rear End

A project that has been on the back burner for a while has been adding working marker lights to the rear end of my Amtrak train consist, in accordance with NORAC rules.  Amtrak is a tenant on the Onondaga Cutoff.  Conrail maintains the track, and Amtrak uses the Conrail main line for their Empire Service.  Any passenger train needs to have red marker lights displayed on the hind end, and while the new Walthers Amfleet cars come with the lenses installed, there is no provision for the distinctive red lights themselves.

These cars come beautifully detailed, but lighting was not included.  Walthers does sell a nice LED light board designed for these models specifically, and the cars include trucks and pick-up contacts installed from the factory.  Adding to the frustration is the tab system they include does not hold up to the installation process.  I therefore hard-wire the contacts between the frame and the board, which has proven to be much more reliable.  

For the hind end, though, lighting wasn't the only thing required.  Marker lights were still needed.  I therefore purchased a set of Miniatronics red surface-mount LED's pre-wired with leads, and included resistors to get the light to the correct intensity.  The results are worth it!

Lining this up was more work than it should have been, compounded by the fragility of the contacts and hiding wiring from view through the side windows.  But, in the end, now Amtrak 273 & 276 running via the Onondaga Cutoff will have the hind end properly defined!

~RGDave