Stephen M. Priest, MMR and editor of Railroad Model Craftsman will be speaking about the first two years of the HO Scale St Louis Division. This railroad is 3400 square feet and is about 1/3 complete. It features the Santa Fe Railway in 1978. The route is fictitious although the Santa Fe did repeatedly try to acquire and or build a line from Chicago through St Louis to Kansas City. We are building the railroad as if one of these attempts early last century had panned out. The railroad features state of the art benchwork, wiring and hand laid trackwork from Fasttracks. It also features innovative lighting with 100% LED use for all illumination both in structures and in rolling stock. Electronics planning will include DMX lighting and sound allowing time of day and night to be computer controlled. DMX can also create such effects as thunderstorms that roll across the layout from end to end featuring lightning and thunder. The railroad is being built by a group of 15 modelers in the Kansas City area under the direction and design of Stephen M. Priest, MMR. Join us for a look at a new railroad for a new century.
See how I made the transition from BN 682 (ex GN 462D) in Tacoma to KCS #20 in my basement. I will show the project from scrapping to restoration of the F Unit Cab as a full scale "prop" in my basement. It makes for a fascinating and unusual story. Images and narration.
The clinic details modeling my fictional Oregon Coast Railroad to be believable as a prototype railroad.
The clinic shows how using a prototype's history as a reality check can bring life to a railroad that never was. Photos will show how water features and layers of textured scenery duplicate Oregon's forest landscape. Other topics will include building a region and era appropriate car roster and the good and bad of kits.
The layout appeared in Great Model Railroads 2014.
The Pennsylvania Southern is a freelance layout set in 1980 in western Pennsylvania. Topics for discussion include layout philosophy, train scheduling, train operation, dispatching, and supporting paperwork.
Over the last decade I have been building and operating a medium sized garage layout based on the 1958-1960 Northwestern Pacific in Northern California. Several previous clinics covered the design philosophy of producing an operating, not static, representation of this prototype. This clinic extends the discussion to specific areas, largely equipment and scenic issues, where special effort was required to achieve this goal.
Join Jim as he relates his adventures over the last 9 years working to recreate the 2 foot gauge Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes in his backyard in a combination of scale and gauge that has him scratchbuilding or kitbashing almost everything.
This is the story of a secret O scale layout in Australia where I provided a control system to automatically run up to twenty trains at a time for the owner's enjoyment.
The owner was a private individual and all who worked on the layout were sworn to secrecy.
Since the layout was built in the late 1970's, perhaps fewer than forty guests have seen it.
The late John Armstrong visited once while I was there and he remarked "Even for me, this is a bit over the top".
The owner passed away last year, hence the clinic title. Eight minutes of a recent professional video will be included.
The scope of the layout plus a very large 1/32 scale collection was most impressive.
The train collection and parts of the layout were willed to the Workshops Rail Museum in Ipswich, QLD Australia for public display.
Introduction and tour of the UCW. Views of recent changes to the layout including new dispatcher and agent office, moving and construction of a new active staging area (aka. The Mole) and changes to the layout. How the agent uses Flex-Bill to generate switch lists, wheel reports, and manage customer waybills. Staging trains using barcodes generated in Flex-Bill.
Model Railroad Planning editor Tony Koester recently completed a lot of scenery, including various types of farm crops, and structures for his 1954-era HO railroad in preparation for the December 2014 MR feature on his railroad and a follow-up MR Video Plus shoot. He'll discuss recent enhancements such as automated interchanges with 'foreign' railroads, automated 'Interlocking in a Box,' more realistic but easy-to-use waybills, timetable and train-order operations, digital-photo backdrops, and weathering with PanPastels.
