Empty Grain Box (XGB)

Here's a random 40' boxcar sitting in my HO model of Stacy St. yard in South Seattle set in 1973. It needs to be weathered more, but that's another subject. Add ACI labels, take off roofwalks - also other subjects. But for today, have you seen the 2020 print edition of "Great Model Railroads" by Kalmbach Media? The first featured layout, by Clark Propst, has a really interesting sidebar about how he made his car card and waybill system more realistic by letting his conductors decide which empty boxcars to spot at which grain elevators along his modeled midwestern railroad (M&SL) branchline. Since you're reading this, you're as addicted as I am to over-thinking model railroad operations, so bear with me.

All he did was write "XGB" on the car card behind the waybill pocket. And, to quote him, "Instead of getting a sleeve for every empty boxcar, trains are issued a single sleeve with a slip that tells the conductor how many empties are to be dropped at each elevator on the branch. This is more prototypical than forcing the crew to spot a specific car." He uses plastic "sleeves" to hold both the "car card" information, and, inserted on top of that, the single waybills that he uses. So, if a conductor receives a sleeve with instructions to spot 3 mty cars here and 5 mty cars there, he finds 8 mty (XGB) cars in the yard and puts them in his train. He doesn't care which ones, and nobody else does either. When his run is finished, the grain elevators now have mty cars to load, and their car cards are sitting in the respective car card box on the front of the layout. In between sessions, he can insert waybills showing where the now loaded car needs to be shipped next.

Since I use the preprinted MicroMark car cards, the "X" seems a bit redundant with the "EMPTY CAR" already printed on the car card, visible when there is no waybill present. Now, what if I simply crossed out "RETURN TO" and replaced it with a list of viable uses for car. I could write "Available for:" and then list out "grain, lumber". The conductor of a local would get a "train brief" in a plastic sleeve, with the number of mty grain and lumber cars needed that day at various spots, make up his train as needed, and go. Better yet, if the yard had a yardmaster on duty, the yardmaster could make up the train using that train brief, and then give the train brief with car cards to the conductor. Along the line, the conductor could make his/her own decisions about which mty cars to spot at which spots. If either one of them wanted to write up a switch list, I suppose they could, but I'm not sure why it's needed, since they already have the train brief and the car cards in hand.

I'm liking the flexibility of this idea. The train brief could also have information on any other blocks of cars that would be included in that train, such as loads billed for specific towns and spots. Presumably the yardmaster would have those blocks ready to go by train time, which the train brief would help guide. In the past I have relied on a "train instruction card" which said simply "pick up cars destined for x, y and z." Now I'm thinking of turning the train instruction card into a sleeve like a car card, with the standard blocking instructions for loads and specialized empties, and the ability to hold additional slips of paper indicating the empty car orders for generalized empties, such as grain and lumber. If there were too many, or not enough empties available during an op session, well, that sounds like a real railroad, doesn't it?

What do you think of this idea? Here's a photo of my "variation" on Clark's brilliant idea:

Playing at the turntable

 

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? The turntable in Everett needs to be ballasted and weathered, but what the heck, I spent an hour today just playing with it. Putting away a few locomotives that were blocking the turntable lead track, and such. The stock Walthers motorized turntable worked flawlessly. Once it was done, I had to take this picture. You'll notice that everything is in focus - this is the result of a software program called Helicon Focus, which merges multiple images of the same scene with different parts of the scene in focus, into one image, such as you see here. It's quite quick and easy to do. I propped up my iPhone on a nearby steady surface and focused on each engine in turn, taking 7 photos altogether. This is the resulting merged photo.

Of course, a "real" turntable would have some empty tracks ready for the next inbound engine, right? Also, since I'm supposed to be modeling the BN in about 1973 after the merger, can you see which engine is not supposed to be there? Only the hard core railfans will be able to tell. And I'm not talking about the two GN GP's that haven't been renumbered yet, either (911 and 710). I'll get to that eventually.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy looking at this picture as much as I do! :) Model railroading, at its deepest down core, is about locomotion. Serious locomotion.

Video shots with side-arm tripod and OSMO gimbal cellphone holder

There's a lot to unpack in today's blog title. Here's a video about it. I've been doing a lot of video editing and photography lately, so it's on my mind. Last week I watched a clinic presented by Craig Symington, a beloved columnist for the Narrow Gage and Short Line Gazette, and he shared that he used two side-arm tripods to get his camera deep into his layout, and to get lights where he needed them. I went and bought one, which is actually called an "Impact LS-CB6 Combo Boom Stand", and tried it out. I like it. It allows me to position a camera or light fixture right over the layout, and as low as needed to get to eye-level view without touching the actual surface of the layout.

For model railroad videos, you often want to pan the shot to follow a locomotive. This can be awkward while reaching over the layout, so I decided to try my OSMO Mobile 3 gimbal cellphone mount's auto-tracking feature to see how well it would automatically track a train. You can see the results on my video linked above, but the bottom line is that it didn't do too well for a quickly moving train close up, but it might be ok pulled further back, or with a slow back and forth switching activity. I've ordered a 3-axis camera mount to put on the boom stand, so I'll be able to try comparing manual tracking with the auto-tracking that the OSMO provides.

One of the challenges of the operations-oriented model railroad videos that I've been making lately is you have to simultaneously operate the locomotive, uncouple cars, fuss with car cards (in front of the camera) AND pan the camera to keep up with the train's motions. It's a bit much. I'm hoping the auto-tracking of the OSMO will give me a little relief.

Craig has said that he uses two of these side-arm tripods - one for a still camera, and one for extra lighting where needed. I don't know yet if I'll go that far. I do know that it makes sense to put one cellphone on a regular tripod in the middle of the room to shoot my overall setup, while simultaneously using the side-arm for close-up video of the train action. Stay tuned, we'll see how well it goes.

If you haven't seen my series of operations-oriented videos, watch them here.

LCC first steps

 

Why turn on an LED with a simple pushbutton, when you can get a complicated computer program to "configure" a complicated LCC circuit board, so that you can turn on an LED with a pushbutton?

The simple answer is - because you want your model railroad to have working signals protecting interlockings and control points.

The photo above is just the first baby step forwards. This simple configuration of an LCC-Signal node allows me to turn on 5 different LED's with 5 different pushbuttons (on the other side of the vertical "test board" on the right). It took 15 hours or more of study and experimentation to get to this point. Hopefully the rest of the learning curve will ease up. Rest assured, if it does, you'll be hearing more about it here.

Signaling is a big subject. Bruce Chubb spent his whole life developing tools for model railroaders, and had a 13-part series of articles on it in Railroad Model Craftsman a few years ago. I skimmed them and wondered if I would ever have the guts to try doing it.

Then Seth Neumann of "Model Railroad Control Systems" gave me a "free" signal head one day in 2019. The perfect gateway drug. You can see three of them in the picture above, one all lit up. They cost just over a buck apiece. They don't look like much, as a model of a signal head, but oh, boy, when those LED's light up, you can feel your hands instinctively reaching for the locomotive controls. 30 years ago at a swap meet I had bought a kit to build a signal head, but had I built it? No.

Seth is a big proponent of Bruce's Computer Model Railroad Interface (CMRI) program, and uses it on his layout (and many others). I saw Bruce give clinics on it, and bought all three of his detailed instruction books about it, and started plowing through them. A lot to figure out, lines of computer code to write, wires to run, etc. Easy to procrastinate on this.

Meanwhile, the NMRA worked out some "industry standards" on "Layout Command Control" (LCC) and a company called "RR-Circuits" started selling components to set it up. And I watched a Zoom clinic given by Jim Betz on his new layout, and there it is, he slapped an LCC in there, just like that! If he can do it, why can't I? How hard can it be?

So I decided to try it. Here's a picture of the initial setup, that I plan to use to power some signals to improve the operation of the Delta Wye on my layout. I got some inexpensive signals from Seth, proved to myself that I can make them light up using the LCC-Signals node with a test board of pushbuttons, so I guess the project is underway. I'm still afraid, but less than I was. The important thing is, it's underway, not stalled. A few days ago when I got stuck, I posted a question on the LCC groups.io site, and within an hour six helpful people had suggested answers! What a world we live in!

From left to right, this shows the "Power Point" regulated power supply, the USB interface box for plugging it into the computer for JMRI access, and the LCC-Signal "node" board, with the "test board" sticking up with all the pushbuttons on it for testing. Pretty cool. On the layout, the test board will be replaced with a cable out to the various turnouts, so the signals will be able to give the correct indication based on actual turnout position. I'll test it all at the desk first, and then put it on the layout and wire up the turnouts, which thankfully happen to already be powered by Tortoise switch machines that have extra SPDT contacts available. Whew!

I'll believe it when I see it. But this IS a first step.

Wrestling with a BLI locomotive

 

This is a fine looking SD7, sitting in Interbay, isn't it? Last week, Ray Wheeler, who used to work for the BN in the early '70's, told me SD 9 BN 6004 was often the locomotive used to switch grain covered hoppers in and out of the Cargill export grain terminal at Seattle's Pier 86. I was eager to use this information, because he (and others) had also told me that how I operated the arriving grain train on my recent YouTube video was, basically, incorrect. This was an opportunity to correct my mistakes, and improve the layout's operations to be more prototypical.

Hearing about the locomotive number BN 6004 "rang a bell," and I quickly found it in my active storage area of "excess locomotives." I had purchased it in 2016 from BLI, along with a "Rolling Thunder" sub-woofer system, to try out their innovative approach to making locomotive sounds more realistic on the low frequencies. The sub-woofer worked as advertised, amazing my friends by filling the entire house with a low-frequency rumble not unlike what you would experience standing next to an SD7, or in an earthquake. It drove my wife crazy, though, so I only use it on the rare occasions when visitors are curious and she isn't at home.

But there's another reason I had the locomotive stored off the layout ever since 2016. BLI, in what I understand was a derivative of the older QSI decoders (which I also had trouble with and eventually banned from my layout), flaunted the NMRA DCC standards and produced a DCC decoder that, in addition to transmitting low frequency sound information to the Rolling Thunder unit, has a number of divergences in its functions from what I was used to in the SoundTraxx and ESU decoders in the rest of my fleet. After I fiddled with standard CV's like 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, it still came to a screeching stop instead of displaying momentum-like behavior, when I reduced the throttle setting quickly. There was nothing in the very sparse documentation that came with the locomotive to explain what to do, so I put it on an high shelf and never incorporated it into my operations, even though it was the perfect locomotive for my railroad and era. That was 2016. I swore to never purchase another BLI product again.

Between then and now, I invested a lot of time in learning how to set up braking functions in my Tsunami and ESU locomotives, even to the point of presenting clinics on it. This involved time spent looking up manuals online and playing with both JMRI DecoderPro and ESU LokProgrammer. I can't say I enjoyed it, but the end result is that all my (80) Tsunami and ESU locomotives are now speed matched, can be consisted together, and respond to the brake button (F9) with the same deceleration rate.

So last week, when Ray said BN 6004 was THE locomotive for switching strings of hoppers into the grain terminal at Pier 86 in Seattle, I thought I would try again to get it running better. With difficulty, I found that BLI has a couple of documents on their website for free download that list the various CV's and their nominal purpose (mostly without explanation). After trying a few things, I finally came across a CV185 called something like "brake sensitivity" (whatever that means) with a default setting of 20 and a range of 0 to 255. Using "programming on the main" (POM) with my NCE throttle, I randomly tried setting CV185 to 200 and, like magic, the problem of rapid deceleration vanished! With CV3 and 4 set to values of 12, and CV5 and 6 set to 80 and 40 respectively, the loco ran smoothly enough that I decided to call it good, slapped on some pan pastel weathering, and placed it in the engine terminal, as shown in the photo above. It will now be the main actor at Pier 86 on the Burrlington Northern.

If I wanted to spend another three (or more) hours on it (which I don't), I could probably try to study the BLI documents some more, and experiment some more, and figure out how to re-map functions so that when I pressed F9 I would get a braking deceleration different from the existing CV4 deceleration. But even then, the consisting features (like headlights and sounds) work so differently on BLI locomotives from the other locos that I wouldn't be able to use the loco in a consist anyway. So BN 6004 will remain dedicated to the grain terminal, solo, for the foreseeable future.

I have a lot of respect and gratitude for every company that invests in making products for model railroaders, and that includes BLI. My wife likes to say "people are just people." So I guess "companies are just companies." They have to decide what products will sell, at what price points, what they cost to make, whether to outsource their decoders, how much to invest in user manuals and support, and so forth. I simply get to benefit (or not) from their various decisions. There are probably modelers out there who have (doggedly) figured out how to get what they want from the BLI decoders, and don't want to deal with learning about the other brands. I'm just not one of them, that's all. I would pay more for a locomotive that I could easily then figure out how to use after I bought it. This blog is about my own personal experiences of this wonderful hobby of model railroading, not any sort of comprehensive or objective evaluation of anything. It pains me that I avoid BLI products just because I don't want to climb yet other learning curve, because they sometimes make products that would be perfect on my particular railroad (BN in the early '70's in Seattle). That's all.

The pros and cons of loose loads

 

The picture say it all - loose loads look great, until you accidentally knock a car off a cliff. Then you have a big mess to clean up. It will probably take me more time to clean up this mess than it would have taken me to make a simple balsa-wood insert for the car and glue some copper ore on top, years ago when putting the car in service. My train layouts are full of examples of "short cuts" that I took while constructing them, which I'm now paying for in unintended (or in this case, predictable) consequences.

Another issue with open loads is, if you put your finger(s) in them by accident, well, they look kind of weird. Here's an example, this time with a standard gage car in aggregate service:

I like the way the load exposes part of the rusty slope sheet, which would be harder to do realistically with a solid load. And, in a way, I like the "plot tension" associated with operators handling loose loads in their trains, making sure they don't have a derailment, or worse. But on the other hand, to empty them out involves picking them up, turning them upside down and re-railing them back in place on the layout. With a removable load insert you can usually take them out without having to pick up the car.

Yet another example of the many trade-offs involved in an operating model railroad!

Bayside Geeps

This is why I love modeling the BN in 1973 - all of these GP and SD locos in such a variety of paint schemes! Lately (thanks to encouragement and tutoring from friend Tim Taylor) I've been applying decals to re-number some of the models from their legacy road number to appropriate BN numbers, as was done after the merger in 1970 but before they were re-painted in BN green. It will take a while to get them all done, but the photo above is a sample of them that appeared parked one day at the "Bayside turntable". Of course, on the prototype BN the turntable was at Everett's Delta Yard, not at Bayside, but sometimes in model railroading you just have to make compromises. Also, I need to finish the track and scenery near the turntable. All in due time. The point is to just enjoy these stunning locomotives! 

By the way, notice the clear depth of field in the photo. This photo is a composite of 6 photos I took with my iPhone, focusing each one on a different part of the scene, and then processing all 6 photos together using a computer program called "Helicon Focus". I just learned about this recently, although it's been around for years, and it's really changing the way I take pictures on the railroad now.

The SD9 in the foreground - notice its coupler. This is a "long shank" version of the "scale head" Kadee coupler, and the long shank is needed to keep the pilot from fouling the uncoupling pins of any cars that it might try to hitch to. The alternative is to cut the uncoupling pins off all your cars. I decided to use the longer coupler instead, despite its slightly strange appearance.

Finally, I apologize for the brick building held together by a rubber band. I've been busy laying track for the past 25 years and just haven't gotten around to finishing up some of the buildings that are needed in some of the scenes. In this case, the brick building will be replaced with a version of the "Scott Paper Co." paper mill in Everett, so it will eventually look quite different, and hopefully more realistic than it does currently. You can see the MILW and SP&S wood chip cars there, in the process of being unloaded. No bad smells, though, so far - I don't plan to model those.