I've been running quite a few trains lately - just coincidence that Christmas is coming - in order to assess some of the clearances between the rolling stock and the layout scenery structure. It's super critical as you build scenic additions to your model railroad that you leave room for movement of the cars as they circumnavigate the track, and if you have passing tracks, that there is enough room to allow both trains to pass without a tremendous crash and loss of freight cars and locomotives. In my case I was evaluating some mountains and tunnel portals on my new scenic additions near Mud Run, but inevitably running trains points out some other glaring issues that you'd thought had already been taken care of, or you ignored, or are new problems because you dropped a little glue or plaster in the wrong place. It can also show you where scenic elements are too close to the track, and in the event of a derailment can mean reworking that scenery.
I also had a few additions to my freight car fleet. The first was my new Accurail 2-bay covered hopper which was having trouble staying on the track and staying coupled to the car in front of it. The coupler was tightened down and checked for height and I think I finally got that straightened out, but the wheels were still derailing around the sharpest turning portions of my layout. Now this car is very short compared to everything else on my layout except my cabooses, and I'm thinking that the geometry puts a lot of stress on the wheel flanges. There is only one way train cars can turn and follow a track, and that's caused by the inside wheel flanges pushing against the outside turning rail. That stress pivots the truck and until there's no stress on the wheel flanges.
(Here's a photo of the end of a wheelset. The inside flange (the portion of the wheel with the larger diameter) on these wheelsets doesn't seem to be wide enough to keep the wheel following the track).
On model railroad cars (which are typically made of light plastic), those wheel flanges are really important. I noticed last week while running my coal train that one of the open hoppers was always derailing at a switch - and it was always the same wheelset that did it. I tried adding lots of weight to the car (didn't help). I examined the wheels and scraped some residue off of them (didn't help), and then got an old pair of wheels off of an old Tyco tank car. Tyko stuff was really popular when I first got into the hobby. The stuff was cheap, had horn-hook couplers and truck mounted coupler pockets and were great for a modeler on a fixed budget. They were also fairly expendable on a layout where there were a lot of derailments that led to stuff falling to the concrete floor in our basement. I've saved a few of those cars (mostly for memories). Good think too - because their wheel flanges are slightly larger than the Accurail wheel sets that they included in the kit for the covered hopper. I popped in four to replace the ones on the car and wa-la, no derailments. I'd like to get a caliper at some point and measure to see what the difference is. This does mean I need to weather the wheelsets to match the rest of the car at some point soon! (They need some rust!)
There was also a failed attempt to put an Accurail kit together from several years ago - this one was an 89' flat car for Trailer-On-Flatcar (TOFC) service. I'd reached the point in the assembly when you inserted a pin through the truck to secure it to the base of the flat car and I broke the pin putting it in. Last week I decided to glue that pin with some CAA adhesive and I did get it to hold, but there was a little bit of the adhesive that impeded the trucks from turning as freely as I'd like. When I ran the car on the layout it would derail (like a lot!). Frustrated, I tried to free of the truck and was mildly successful (but not completely - it would derail less often). I also tried replacing the wheel sets with Tyco's and that was a bit better (but still didn't completely fix the problem. I again tried to loosen up the truck and... broke the plastic pin again. So, I went nuclear. I found a short wood screw, drilled out the old broken pin out and inserted the wood screw through the truck - and she's now running like a champ and I can add this flat car to my TOFC train - my $20 expenditure (which had sat in the box since the failed assembly attempt) was not in vain. That does mean that I have to find two more trailers to put on top of it however.
(This photo shows one end of the flat car with the "friction pin" inserted (without snapping it off) correctly and allowing free rotation of the truck (that's the thing that holds the two wheelsets)).
(This photo shows the so-called "Nuclear Option", where I drilled a hole through what remained of the friction pin and inserted a wood screw in it's place).
(And here's the semi-completed kit (finally!)) Looks too new - like all of my TOFC cars. Eventually they will all get the weathering they deserve).
Another tip - Rail Zip! I don't know how the stuff works, but it's GOLD! My friend Sam Marderness recommended it a few years ago and I'm glad I bought some. There were a couple of areas on my layout where locomotives were slowing down to a crawl. A little bead of Rail Zip on each rail prior to those areas, run the locomotives over it a bunch, and no more problem areas.
The old Athearn blue box kits also are a good source of wheel sets that seem to have larger wheel flanges than the Accurail-supplied versions - at least for the only two kits I have from the company. I don't mean to bash Accurail - I actually like their prices and their kits, and maybe for a better constructed track they'd be fine. I just know that my railroad has some tough transition points (switches, double-back curves, grade transitions that make it tough. The cool thing is that I found some solutions that work. I did get online and do a little research - there are a lot of model railroaders that swear by metal wheelsets and Kadee couplers on all of their rolling stock. I can't argue with that philosophy, but it does require some additional expenditures that I don't care to pursue at the moment.
That leads me to another soapbox - the cost of model railroading. If you are extremely particular about what you'll run on your layout, you can pay some staggering prices to get something that matches the prototype that you're modeling. Some modelers only want the best - that's hard to argue with, but most of us are funding this hobby with what's leftover after paying the bills, and some of our wives can't see the value in maintaining standards for the sake of realism. Most of the people that visit your inner sanctum aren't going to point out that your flat cars you're using to simulate 1976 were actually built in 1980. At some point you make compromises and buy what you can afford and what's out there to buy. Lately I've been finding covered hoppers for upwards of $50 per car and I just can't justify that expense. If I can get something similar for under $20 and make it work, I find joy in saving money while saying "good enough!". There are some suppliers still out there (Accurail and Bowser come to mind) who still offer kits you can find that are good enough for me. That doesn't mean I don't keep looking for sales - I also have some Atlas MasterCraft flat cars that are very well made and ultra-detailed, but I got each of them for around $20 about 10 years ago.
The cost of model railroading is digging me today - my vintage Prodigy DCC system with "two digit addressing" probably manufactured in the 1990's appears to have bit the dust. I bought it off ebay at least 15 years ago - it's served me well and doesn't owe me a damn thing. Still, this means the hunt begins for a replacement. I was running trains this morning and I couldn't get enough power to my locomotive consist pulling my TOFC train. Even adding locomotives to the consist (6!) wasn't getting me normal performance. I parked that train and got the coal train out that was running fabulously yesterday. After a short run it started bogging down on grades and now will not move.
The question is - how much DCC do I want and need. The equipment runs from at least $150 through $1300 for new stock. I could try to find a replacement used system like the one that bit the dust, but I haven't seen too many of those anymore. Point is, if I want to run trains, I need a replacement....
I did some research on the DCC systems that are out there and arrived at the conclusion that if I could get a booster system somewhat on the cheap that I could go with MRC's Prodigy Express. The Express kit is a cheap ($145) starter system with the same hand-held throttle as the Prodigy Advanced, but the power output is only 1.6 Amp at max. That means for locomotives drawing about half and amp continuously, you can only run 3 or 4 at a time. I want the ability to move two trains (of 3-4 locomotives) at a time on the same set of tracks, so I need to double that capacity - hence the booster. The other option (Prodigy Advanced) would give me the same output capacity as my defunct 1st generation Prodigy system but the cost is more like $300 new. I explored booster options and MRC makes (or made) two different boosters. The current production item (MRC 1521) will run you about $150, but I did find two older Power Station 8 units which output 8 Amps. I bid on one on ebay that was closing today and was the only bidder for quite a while at $50 with a max bid of $66. $70 won it, but I'm not too upset about that. There was a used Power Station 8 up at Charles Ro Supply for $25 (as is). I bought it hoping that it works. If it does, I saved a good bit of money. There's also a chance that if I put the booster in line with the old Prodigy that it might be enough juice to run through the old Prodigy as the control unit (but I'm not holding my breath!).
Here's the booster, and IT WORKS! Still in bubble wrap in it's original box, and I don't think anyone ever used it. I've seen them going for about $150 on ebay.
Saved quite a bit of money taking the gamble. Better yet, I routed the old Prodigy system through it, and IT WORKS! I don't necessarily need to buy anything else but I will be keeping my eye out for a newer system with a larger group of capabilities. Here's the whole DCC system (the Prodigy system is kinda crappily mounted for the time being - I'll improve that in the next few days).
Bought another short covered hopper - these would typically transport things like concrete. The Lehigh Valley is famous for its limestone mining operations and concrete plants, so I plan to have a short local concrete train that would have run from the valley up into the Wyoming Valley. I've been hunting on the cheap and found an E&B Valley Railroad Company kit (Delaware and Hudson). I've started the assembly and the kit's nice, but the instructions are cryptic and the illustrations are just pictures. Anyway, I've been making some progress. Some of the small parts are a bit of a challenge for my big fingers, but I think the end result is going to be pretty nice. I hope to finish this one and weather it similarly to my Erie Lackawanna covered hopper from Accurail. I'm going to keep my eyes peeled for similar cars.
and I completed assembly a few days ago and weathered the car (you can see the finished product on the "Bad Weather Means It's time to weather" blog entry. Ran it with my other concrete hopper and I kept getting disconnections. Inspect the knuckle coupler and discovered that the little tiny spring that closes the coupler was missing on one end of the car. I had a few leftover springs (purchased from my deceased supplier that had a little shop in the Forest Hill train station - sadly I won't be getting any more springs from him, they're having an auction of all his old stuff next month and I don't think I want to sit through that auction - he always had way too much junk). Replacing those springs is a real pain. I use a toothpick through one end of the spring and put it into the receiving peg and then gently lift the toothpick free and push the other end of the spring into the other peg with a knife or a very small screwdriver. I'm still getting the coupler unhooking, and I suspect the coupler height needs an adjustment or I need to replace what's on there with an offset model. It's always something.
I also won a used MRC Prodigy Express DCC unit a couple of weeks ago. Figured that the problems I'd been having lately with my old Prodigy unit might be a hint to upgrade. I hooked that unit through the booster and it seems to work well so far. My first order of business was to upgrade all of my locomotive addresses to 4-digit values (that's probably the nicest new feature of the Express system. For instance, my CR 6751 (an ex-Penn Central C628 with a Conrail patch out) was addressed in the old Prodigy as "1" because my available addresses ranged from 1 through 32. With the new system, I can address each locomotive by its road number. More digits, but in this case, that's not necessarily a bad thing. The other nice features about the Express are that it has a much smaller footprint and the handheld unit has a display to give you feedback.
I think I mentioned that Accurail had a note in the 2-bay covered hopper that said for $4 they would send 12 sets of road numbers for the same hopper. That way you can buy 12 of the same kit and make 12 completely different cars (different numbers). Pulled that trigger and bought not only the decals, but 3 more covered hoppers - thanks to my son Aaron and my daughter-in-law Alyssa for getting me an ebay gift card for Christmas that I used to buy the cars. I ended up buying from a couple that has a shop just northeast of Harrisburg. The place is called "Trains in the Valley" and they have both used and new stuff. What was attractive to me was their attitude toward shipping - shipping for the first car was $8, but if you bought more, the cost to ship was still the same. When I got on their site, Trainsinthevalley.com, the will ship for free if your order is more than $50!
As you see in the picture above (if you look closely, these hoppers are numbered "21351, 21354, and 21357" using the decal sheet you can see in the middle right of the picture. Smaller numbers for the car ends are also supplied, and I carefully applied them over the standard Accurail-supplied number "21387". My plan is to eventually weather all three of these cars - and I'll do the weathering a bit differently on each car. I captured the weathering in the blog entry on the subject "Bad weather means it's time to weather".
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