PMR 2kX+ Construction Part II

Still far behind the original time plan, I managed to make some major steps forward in construction. Not as major if you look at it from the outside, but they are quite important. Actually, it was only two steps.

Step 1: The City

The City of Waldbrunn is the center of action here with its big station. Now, the major part of it is completed. The streets are all on the floor and the buildings are all glued between the streets.
The greyish thing in the middle ground on the left hand side is a very crappy construction of my own – it is a Google censored house. When Google was to introduce StreetView in Germany last year, lots of people had the company censor the pictures of their houses, leading to whole streets being just blurry swamps. I took a screenshot of such a censored house and glued it on cardboard to make a monument for the retardedness of the average German citizen.

Not even that well to see here: there are three streets. One leads from the left (in front of the censored house) past the station building to leave the scenery in the back besides the drugstore – you can’t see the drugstore sign on the house to the right but believe me, it’s there.
The second street runs behind the censored house and in front of the post office (the big white one) to join the main street right across from the station. There is a little city square here on both sides of this second street, left of it the square is occupied by the well and to the right it’s just an empty space in front of the post office. Not even unrealistic, many cities in central Europe feature such places.
In front of the station building is another empty space covered by street foil – the station parking lot. I should place some cars on it to make it obvious. Furthermore, the bicycle stand belonging to the station is placed here. Originally, it is supposed to be to the right of (ie behind) the station building, but nobody would see it if it was there. And it took way too much work to put that together so here it is on the wrong side. I’m so punk.
Anyway, the third street in this city runs to the left of the abolished house ruin. The background story is that it ran alongside the station platform (and originally I had planned to make it so as the black lines indicate) but as the area in the lower left corner of the photo will be a giant construction site for an addition to the existing station the street has been torn up all the way to where it ends now. Here is a picture of the work-in-progress of this very scene:

Here you can see the drugstore sign, btw. Anyway, the black lines indicate the routing of the streets as pre-determined. I had tried out many constellations, but the way it is now the streets and buildings are arranged perfectly. Of course the toy excavator was not there to work – it will be part of the construction site scene later. Another problem I had is obvious here; I had purchased platforms said to be in design according to Waldbrunn station. Well, they are, but they are way off colored. Very light gray for the platforms itself and the ironwork roof construction was green. I had to paint the ironworks black, but how to paint the bottoms in the dark gray of Waldbrunn? I had ordered paint for that but it has the wrong shade of gray – false display of the color at the online shop. The solution presented itself when I borrowed my step aunt’s box of water colors I wanted to use for the greenery (more on that later) – the right mixture of water and black paint created a great shade of gray that works perfectly with the existing color of the station building. I didn’t succeed in finding that mixture but I got close. As I found out the human eyes is much more tolerant when it comes to dark colors (which is why the ground is painted black in the above picture) so this works okay. Then there is the roof too so everything is not as problematic anymore. The blue middle platform is in its final position now as well, in the second picture it is just temporarily placed there for illustration purposes.

Step 2: The Greenery

The title refers to the green grass/forest pieces of the place, mainly those in the background of the scene. As I did not want to waste expensive grass mats on the background, I figured the paper with its natural rough surface would make a great base that just had to be painted green. For this I borrowed  my step aunt’s water colors. For the first try I decided on the slopes in the background to the right, where the outer track lifts up high. Where the tracks part I made three “towers” out of toilet paper rolls. They are bringing some irregularity in the slope between the two tracks and add depth. The paper was then glued to these towers and the ground to form the slopes. Looked good already, now the color.

The hilly structure adds realism to the scene

I dipped my brush into the saturated dark green and painted like the devil, but by the time it had dried up I realized it was too bright, too cartoon-like. So I experimented. Put some brown and orange patches here and there and later added the almost-neon light green color. The result looks really good to me. This is how I will paint all the rest. Too bad I ran out of the light green… so I’ll have to obtain a replacement container of light green and then can go on.

In order to add to the three-dimensional experience I will plant trees between the tracks here so the train behind is not always visible. That ought to make it look much better.

In addition to all that fuzz I managed to put together a new train. I used to have basically only the ICE train and a little steam engine which could pull all kinds of cars. I have cargo cars and I had two sixties-style passenger cars. Recently, I managed to score a third passenger car as bargain. Now this train has two passenger cars and one restaurant car, looking much more realistic. Moreover, I found another bargain, namely a class V200.1, later rebranded to BR221. It was manufactured in the early sixties to pull long-distance passenger trains. Fits very well to the cars, and with this new engine to pull I can now operate three separate trains.

PMR 2kX+ Construction Part I

My project has finally completed its latest leap forward. The most important aspect: I have completed the wiring for the power supply so that trains can be controlled from the control stand now. Before I had to press naked cables on the rails, hence a train could never take a full round. The controls for the two main tracks are completed, as the track for the third circuit hasn’t been laid yet this can wait.
The wiring for the remote control of the most important switch tracks – those which I can’t reach by hand, that is – is almost complete and is kept from completion mainly because I was too lazy so far. Wiring turned out to be more difficult than expected. Lying flat on my back, working with cable rests of all imaginable lengths there was some need to improvise. Nevertheless, nobody is going to look under the table so as long as it works it should be fine.

Furthermore, as can be seen in the above picture, I have completed the work on the basis for the city. The big question here had always been how to make some closed, solid ground to build, paint, glue and work on. As you know from previous posts on PMR2kX+, I use short portions of cardboard rolls as a foundation. That needed to be covered somehow though, but I had always thought cardboard would be insufficient as there is no single piece that is big enough to cover 150x90cm and using several ones would make it uneven. So I bought that kind of masking paper used to cover the ground when painting a room. It is a sturdy, rough material made of recycled paper and quite cheap. However, it is easily ripped so maybe not a perfect base to put even light houses on. I decided to just try putting the sides of a rather big cardboard box on the rolls and it wasn’t so bad after all.

For the edges of the wood panel I continued using the extremely strong and thick cardboard I had already put up on the outer edges of the whole thing.

Having the edges of the single pieces of cardboard covered with tape everything looked not as bad as I had expected before. However, this couldn’t stay the way it was so I put the masking paper on top of it anyway, with great results.

The paper layer evens the ground, leaving only minor bumps which should just make it a little more realistic than a plain even plateau.
Moreover, the rough surface of the paper might even make expensive floor mats and fibre superfluous. Just painted in green this shouldn’t look too bad as a grass surface, painted or left gray might look enough like dirt or gravel. It’s worth a try.

That is as far as I have gotten with the city so far. Priority numero uno for now is to complete the wiring as the train operations are the key part of a model railway. Afterwards it’s making the city, the layout has already been tried out and only has to be applied now.

Waldbrunn station

Speaking of train operations, the test runs have been more than satisfying. I had originally planned to provide power supply at several points along the tracks but as it turns out one is enough, the trains run smoothly. Parallel operation with two trains, one on each circuit, went just amazingly. I had always dreamed of running several trains at the same time and now for the first time in my life I am able to. The tracks remained at the correct distance from one another – at seven meters they could have become crooked and gotten too close for trains to pass each other safely; inclines are managed well and yes, I have staged races which are really fun.

Another, perhaps the most crucial point of all, was whether the crossing from one circuit to the other would go well. I was too cheap to invest in isolating track connectors (track connectors are little metal clips which keep the tracks firmly together) and instead just glued the two switches on the ground without any connection. There were two possible problems arising here. The first being that when the rails aren’t aligned perfectly the trains would derail. The second that there might be an electric connection, in the worst case shorting the whole thing and maybe even damaging the engines. But to my delight even that worked without any problems, the trains jump the circuits happily ever after.

PMR 2kX+ Assembly – Part II

I am lagging far behind my original time plan for many reasons but that’s okay. Now, finally, I have been able to finish phase 1 of the construction.

 

 

The key part of this is laying the main tracks and supplying them with a cardboard layer underneath. That is for the purpose of noise reduction. The tracks are solid pieces  and laying on a naked wood panel they amplify the vibrations made by a passing train greatly. I figured and was proven right that a simple layer of cardboard would fix this problem. So I got boxes from the supermarket and made a track bed out of them. This isn’t hard work and still took me forever to finish, for several reasons.
Most of the time I used double-sided tape to  fix the tracks on the cardboard (so they could be removed from it without any glue being left stuck on them) while I glued the cardboard to the wood with multi purpose glue.

As visible in the picture at some points the tracks are nailed to the wood – so they won’t move out of place when the single panels are taken apart. The negative effect of this is that the nails mainly destroy all the work the cardboard does for noise reduction. When a train passes the position of a nail you hear a loud “romp“. Happens, it’s not the end of the world.

The biggest challenge were the ramps – as mentioned before I had to elevate the outer track to run across the windowsill. Now, the original plan was to leave the outside track on level zero and instead elevate the inside track in this area so the problem would have been there anyway.
I was able to use some of the experience gained in my bridge building adventure for the ramps but still this was a bit more difficult. First, the correct angle had to be maintained, at the same time stability was key and lastly the ramps include the curves at the ends of the plate. At one point the ramp even crosses the panel border. Making two ramps that just touch was impossible as I couldn’t make them even enough for a train to pass safely. Eventually I realized that I couldn’t glue a ramp on here anyway as then I couldn’t pull away the panel anymore as it was blocked by the window sill. I solved it by just making one single ramp (the one in the picture) and glue it to the left panel while it just touches the right one. Removing the right panel would leave a part of it hanging in the air. Seems to work well.

 

 

The curves were the really interesting part as here I had to take into account the incline, the curve itself and the tilt a high-speed track has to have. It all wasn’t as bad after all, although it took me some tries to get it right. For the tilt, I simply used burned up matches left over from the Christmas Candle Madness (CCM) to lift the outer edge up, and glued the inner edge directly to the cardboard. It worked and although the tilt is barely visible to the naked eye you do sense that it looks much more natural than a plain curve, and the spirit level speaks a clear language:

 

 

 

Big steps forward have been made in the city/main station part:

The most of it has been elevated to 5cm above the wood panels utilizing pieces of huge cardboard rolls that are used to transport new carpet. Sawing these apart is a lot of work, that stuff is tougher than wood. But it is worth it, they serve well as a support for the city, although I will not fill the whole area with them side by side, I just put them were they are needed to support a building or the tracks.
I’m still not really sure as to just cover them with masking paper from the paint section of the hardware store or if I have enough equally thick cardboard lying around. Considering the masses of boxes I have collected over the past time, this shouldn’t be a problem though and be worth it as it would make everything much more stable.

 

Waldbrunn station

 

Meanwhile I have gotten me the last needed things from the model railway store (www.smdv.de) – mainly platforms. One that is supposed to match the station. It does match the station, in terms of size and shapes, but not color… so I am now in the process of painting it in the correct color, using Revell paint. Revell paint, however, has gotten much stronger over the years I haven’t used any, now I have it on my brush and even only got it off my fingers by basically peeling off the skin. WTF.
In the picture you see a blue platform. I have two of those but only assembled this one so far for test purposes. It’s Kibri’s “Bahnsteig Sulzberg” and fits really well between the tracks.
Furthermore, this picture already shows the final city layout. I have made some changes and now I think I have reached the best I could get out of the three buildings. In the foreground, there will be a construction site. Also clearly visible is the edge support I made. Simply glued tick cardboard vertically at the edge of the scene, so it can support whatever will finally become the ground material.

Next up is the wiring. I already punched holes in the wood and stuck the cables through them. Power supply for the two major electric circles, that is, and the wires for the remote-controlled switches. I hope I have enough cable already accumulated, otherwise I’ll need to go out and buy some.

Adding some action to PMR 2kX+ – social criticism in 1:87

While raw construction slowly proceeds, my right cerebral hemisphere came up with a way of making the city on my model railway come to life.

First of all, I have settled with the name Waldbrunn for the city. No other ideas really took shape and the train station building had signs reading this name with it so I just glued them on deciding that Waldbrunn is as good a name as any.
Btw., I settled for the names of the two little villages as well: the bigger one (village I) shall henceforth be known as “Wahlheim”, the other (village II) as “Waldbach”. Those two names are, other than that of the city, of literary origin instead of practical.

Anyway, back to topic.
I decided that the scene around the Waldbrunn central station should be quite busy with construction work. A modernization of the old terminus station to make it fit for 21st century rail traffic. While construction has already begun, the German petite bourgeoisie is coming to life and does what it always does when a big infrastructure project takes shape in Germany: it projects its discontent with its own life onto the project and makes it a reason to blame the government for the own dissatisfactory lifestyle. As protests arise, the political opposition parties intervene to use the heated atmosphere for campaigns to gain some voters.

Yes, Waldbrunn is a microcosm of the deep social issues that thwart progress and improvement in this country and has brought this great nation into deep economical and political downfall. I view this scene as a piece of art protesting the state of our society and democracy, the “anti-everything” society in which people will protest just anything, not even bothering to inform themselves properly but just parrotting and throwing stones.
The main instrument of visualizing this heated situation in the peaceful little town are posters and banners which I will place around the station and the construction site. Let’s take a look:

A typical official notification board you find by every construction site. The national railway company (DB AG) has rounded up the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development and some EU foundation to ship in money for the huge project. An artist’s rendition of the planned project should show everybody that what is planned here will be huge, futuristic and innovative (I am sorry for stealing this picture off Stuttgart’s K21 project) and the DB mascot “Max Maulwurf” (Max the mole) adds a little fun perspective to the project with the caption “we serve you the future”. As you can see the name PMR 2kX+ will live on after completion of the real model railway project, narrowed down to the upgrading of the 1:87 scale station. A name like “W21″ would just not have been subtle enough…

Now, the petite bourgeoisie, which is really predictable – they are against anything the government does – has organized itself in a protest organization, the “Bürgerinitative ‘Hauptsache Protest’” (citizens’ action committee ‘Essentially Protest’) which will fix these banners on a half-demolished house that has to give way for a new platform in the upgraded terminus station. As usual they found something to complain about. Why tear down an old inhabited house? Why build a new platform? (Of course the years before, they have kept on complaining about the desolate state of the way-too-small station in Waldbrunn, demanding an upgrade.) Their idea: take the chance to abandon the time- and space-wasting terminus station and just build a through-station! So now they are protesting the building plan, demanding a through-station to be built instead. (Yes, you are sensing sarcasm here.)

And so they created these two banners. The above one reads “Terminus station” crossed out – to show that people do not want a terminus station, because the government builds one (not because terminus stations objectively suck ass). The second one is a little more creative reading “Bahn Frei!”, a double-meaning phrase literally meaning “give way”, but which could also be read as “(set the) railway free!” Next to it the unmistakable demand: “Through-station NOW!” and in small below the name of the action committee.
Now these are illegal banners fixed for all to see on the demolished house by the side of the railroad. But there are also a few more official voices speaking here:

Placed by the communist party of Germany, this banner states a true fact: “Terminus station Waldbrunn: dead-end for progress.” In real life, of course, this party would never voice out a true fact or good argument, and especially not anything I personally would agree with. But, however, they do keep their sails under the wind constantly, always adjusting their positions and arguments to what the majority of the voters (yes, that is the badly informed unsatisfied stupid petite bourgeoisie) currently think, hoping to catch some votes. So if, let’s say, in real life a city wanted to upgrade their terminus station instead of replacing it with a through-station, a poster like this might even come up, as soon as the petite bourgeoisie would have started protesting against it.

And here, in the same manner, the green (hippie) party. Having never really been of political significance they thrive on bigger parties which need the greens to form a government coalition. And so the greens have profited a lot lately. As life quality in Germany declined people were generally unhappy with their lives and it was easy to get them to project their feelings on big projects, as I tried to explain before. The greens have been swimming in this stream very well, eventually nudging the petite bourgeoisie to clash against nuclear power plants and demand coal power plants to be built instead, just to be informed by the greens that coal power suddenly has become bad again (after a short period of being considered the savior from nuclear power). Naturally the greens were very active in Stuttgart as protests there got out of hand and even became violent. So yes, here we have the true masters of manipulation, and in Waldbrunn they rigidly enforce their successful strategy: be against it, no matter what it is.

So there you have it, Waldbrunn will be a cauldron in which the emotions of little plastic people are boiling high. We have the government and the railway company, the reds and the greens, forming an arena in which the confused citizen is being tossed around bouncing against the chests of the puppet masters, making no effort to get out by listening to arguments but even participating in heating up the situation by being stupid and – well played greens – against it.
This allows for a lot of fun for me as the model builder. I could place some figures to form an angry mob throwing stones at construction workers and police officers. Possibilities are endless, but the social-critical artwork of mine is already far developed by only hanging the banners and posters.
Lastly, they should trigger some interesting discussions among visitors. I already know exactly who to invite when it’s completed…

PMR 2kX+ Assembly – Part I

Finally, my uncle came by to bring the wood panels I will build my model railway on. Setting them up was done quickly as they are light and the principle is very simple, they rest on normal wood supports. The edges of the panels are reinforced to prevent them bending, which easily happens with particle board. Moreover, I had done my calculations based on the assumption that the room would have 90-degree angles and straight walls – a mistake with such an old house.

 

Unfortunately, the supporters aren’t high enough so the railway surface will not be above the window sill but under it – thus resulting in the track running elevated and across the window sill. That is not so bad. The asymmetry of the room was a bigger one but with some cautious saw work they could be solved. The single panels were fixed on each other by simple screws, so they would not move around but stay solid. Also, this makes it much safer for me to crawl over the surface without the panels flipping.

 

The next step was to lay the tracks. This was easy work and adjusting the whole construction to be in the right place turned out to be the much more time-consuming thing.

 

 

Interesting surprise in the end: I had a lot of track pieces left over. And the space turned out to be much bigger in some areas than it had looked in my digital plans. And so I used the leftover track to make another (the fourth) station – a cargo loading dock. It had always angered me that there had not been sufficient space to make one and I would probably have to park my cargo cars in the passenger station or take them off completely when not in use – now I got one after all. I fumbled around for a while, also considering the loading dock building I am planning to get for this, a cheap model by Piko. Theme of the cargo loading dock area is that this used to be a stop directly on the busy main track once, but in later years the main track was rebuilt to meet modern requirements and it came to run where it runs today, leaving the cargo station a dead-end. The tracks run into nowhere and are already being conquered by nature (ie grass and bushes growing over them), and they are used as a parking spot for unused cargo cars.
Along with the planning of this exciting little scene went the consideration of the whole village layout, and this is what I got:

 

*the loading dock will be behind the yellow cargo car

But the village is only phase 2 anyway, first I will build the city with the big station as this is way in the corner of the room and I can not access it if I can’t climb on the table – and I can only climb on the table where the village will be.

 

The next step will be to cut corrugated cardboard (have to get some boxes from the supermarket) in shape and glue the tracks on them. the cardboard will serve as a noise-cancelling bedding as the vibrations of passing trains are greatly amplified by the tracks and the wood panels. Immediately after that I will let this grow into the third dimension. My idea with the toilet paper rolls somehow exploded into a collection of all kinds of rolls, mostly poster rolls. And since our company’s offices have just been upgraded, the carpet guy left me some of the big rolls carpet is transported in, measuring 16cm in diameter and two meters in length. They will serve perfectly to support the elevated city and the elevated part of the village, along with village II in the background. Only then will I do the electrics (wiring the power supply and the electric switches) as the cables will need to run through the rolls. By the end of the week, the first train might already run.

Building me a bridge for free

This happened more out of need than out of free will. The plan for Project Model Railway 2kX+ features a bridge. No problem, you can buy bridges of all sizes and architectural styles for model railways. After all the golden rule for model railways is that nothing is impossible. But about 99% of all available bridges are straight, while mine is curved. And that is when you are lost and all the beautiful models are worthless for you. And so it was up to me to build my own bridge – and save a lot of money.

The situation

The track on the bridge consists of two R1 curved track pieces. That is a 72° arc of a circle with a 356.5mm radius. Passage height is required to be about 9 to 10cm. As the bridge crosses four parallel tracks there is not much space for pillars to support the bridge.

Material

As mentioned, there was no cost for material involved. By using garbage, I can save on a lot of money with this and it works just as well as expensive stuff. And so I have been collecting cardboard, which could be used nicely for my purpose.

For the “pretty” parts of the bridge I used one of these colorful boxes used to ship sensitive goods like bottles. Since my stepdad gets wine from business partners every now and then, he could provide two of these boxes, one in a nice saturated yellow and one in a dark blue.

 

The surface structure appears nicely to me, in H0 scale it looks just like corrugated metal. And the color reminds me of these modern railway and sometimes road bridges built since the 1990′s. This covers the sides and the blue material will make the pillars. Originally I planned on a girder construction above the bridge but I will get to that later.
The bed is made of sturdy corrugated cardboard.

Construction

The very first thing I did was crack the numbers and do the math. Especially in curved tracks, the structural clearance is essential, and with a girder construction on both sides a miscalculation would consist in the bridge being useless. Long story short, I figured that about 25mm outside the rail (where the wheels will be) would be enough. I came up with the lengths of the sides, the outer one would be 480mm long, the inner one about 410mm, really roughly.
To begin, I laid my two track pieces on the cardboard and simply drew their shape on the surface as a basis for the construction of the track bed.

Mathematically constructing the track bed

Now the next problem, the first practical one: I had figured out the lengths of the circle arcs on both sides of the track – but how to draw an exact arc on cardboard? A normal-sized compass can not draw a radius of 384mm. So how do you make a circle when you can’t make a circle? Make something with lots and lots of corners! So I set off connecting the ends with the center line (which I could easily determine since it is where the track pieces meet), determining the center points of these lines, drawing a line through them exactly so long that the 25mm structural clearance was given. Then I connected these newly determined corner points with the existing ones, repeating the procedure over and over. When I had 15 corners determined I had basically created parts of two equilateral 80-angles and the edge lines could barely be told apart anymore. My track bed had 16 sections, each spanning 4.5° of the circle. To let the numbers speak: the lengths of the straight edge sections on the longer side (each section 30mm) added together is only 3mm less than the mathematical arc. That was definitely enough, so I cut it out along the edges.

As corrugated cardboard does not allow for cutting exactly in millimeters or one-figure angles, this was the best it could get. And honestly, it is close enough to a circle. Since there would be a cladding on the sides which would not strictly follow these edges it would be round all by itself.
You can see my construction lines and the regular sections on the cardboard. Do not mind the lines not marked in blue, they are the result of an act-before-you-think action which I quickly abandoned when I figured out the easy way to make this equilateral multi-angle. The two lines in the middle are the edges of the track, so the structural clearance is clearly visible.

Thus we already have the basics of our bridge and it could go like that – but of course it looks ugly. And now comes the lovely yellow cardboard from the lovely yellow box to make a cladding/side/balustrade/form a trough-shaped track bed so the gravel won’t fall out.
I knew the lengths of the arcs already and I had calculated them for a reason. Now I knew how long the claddings would be and I cut long strips out of the box. For the height (ie the width of the strips) I determined 15mm to be sufficient. In H0 scale this is 1.30m.

The material these boxes are made of is very thick sturdy and can’t be bent that easily. A close look at the profile revealed the secret: the inner (back side) layer, like the front colored yellow, is just plain paper and not stable at all. Behind it is a layer of wavy cardboard, then another plain one and on the outside the layer with the fine waves. Even only removing the back layer made the whole thing way less stable and when I had peeled off the inner wavy layer I could bend and shape that stuff like printer paper. Optical side effect: the profile is really flat now and there is no need to figure out how to hide it anymore.

Now came the tricky part. I glued these strips to the edges of the track bed about half-high but it turned out to be very difficult to tame such long paper strips with only two hands for the time it takes for the glue to dry. They did not turn out all straight but nobody will see afterwards. Also, the glue looked nasty but no worries about that, it will be hidden anyway, if not by construction of the bridge itself then by gravel at some later point of time.
It took some time to get the glue to dry and everything to sit in its place, but the result was quite satisfying.

Good thing I hadn’t thrown out the back layers of the yellow cardboard. This paper was now being glued to the back side of the balustrade to hide even the last bit of cardboard color even when there is gravel all over the trough someday.
To fix the track I just put pieces of double-faced adhesive tape in the center of the track bed . That way, the track pieces would be hold in place, yet be easy to remove just in case that should be necessary or desired someday.

Now I started cutting apart the blue wavy cardboard in the same manner to make the girder construction. Unfortunately, that did not work out well because it was impossible to cut the stripes exactly enough, nor to roll them in to make round girders. Eventually, I abandoned this idea and promised myself to look out for something I could make a mast of and turn this a little boring trough bridge into a cable-stayed one. As I am planning to make the track bed removable by hand, the pillars will not be glued on it but the bed will just rest on them loosely. So, pillars are not part of this tutorial (yes, this is an indirect tutorial) yet but I might add something about them once I have completed them. The toilet paper rolls in the picture below are just for test purposes, for actual use they are too thick.

For now, I engaged in testing my new bridge:

The structural clearance looks okay even for the ICE, the trains crossing this bridge will be much smaller ones

Sophisticated thoughts

Maybe I will name this bridge, but so far I haven’t thought of a name yet. It isn’t even completed. This yellow piece will cross the viewer’s eye in front of the silhouette of the city (which is still unnamed itself) and add some color to the world.

Now of course, a plastic model by a known manufacturer would look much better and realistic. But these bridges rank between 30 and 80€, this one is completely for free, made out of garbage. The key word is ‘made’. I know it does not look very authentic or perfect, but it is made by myself which gives it a very special value. Furthermore, it is unique in the world and who knows, maybe some people will envy me for my bridge.

One man’s trash…

… is another man’s treasure. Driven by that idea thousands of Polish transporter vans roam German streets every day hunting for still good furniture left by the roadside to be picked up on “bulky trash day”. There were times when Germans weren’t too disgusted to drive around looking for bargains amidst the “trash” themselves but today, that is technically a Polish monopoly.

Now, I am not up for finding furniture and I do not want to rant about the corruption of the society in this once-great country, but I am a friend of this principle and so I am not too snobby to look for things I can use on my Project Model Railway 2kX+ anywhere. My latest idea was simple yet wonderful: the cardboard cores of toilet paper rolls would probably make for great support for an elevated track. The original idea was to support the elevated by styrofoam, which I would have had to buy in the hardware store. But toilet paper rolls promise an endless supply of cost-free material, since people will always continue pooping and – hopefully – wiping their butts afterwards. And so I have started collecting this garbage to turn it into a wonderful building element.

The cores of toilet paper rolls appear to be a perfect support for elevated track

For sure, I do not know if and how well it will work. But it is worth a try. Besides being free and an endless supply other pros of this way of building are light weight, easy setup and freedom of design as I could model the surface around them any way I want – styrofoam would have been needed to be cut, and cutting styrofoam can become nasty. So this gives me  much flexibility compared to  styrofoam plates. The rolls can easily be cut to any length up to 9.5cm (interesting bit of trivia, I had never cared for the width of toilet paper before) and their diameter matches well with the width of the track bed. Between two of them, I could even let a track pass without having to make compromises in stability. All the “solid ground” under the track would just be cladding made of paper mache. And I could hide cables inside them, while I would have had to pierce holes through centimeters of styrofoam – just like cutting this is not a really clever thing to do with styrofoam.

At their light weight toilet paper roll cores are incredibly resistant to pushing force like weight is. And model trains don’t weigh much anyway so this is not a problem at all.

The only thing I am concerned about is that the rolls may turn into sounding bodies amplifying the vibrations caused by a passing train. I am going to see if this is the case and if so, work out a way to minimize this. All in all I am confident that this will work well.

Visualization of the plan

Tonight I spent a couple of hours with my pencils, crayons and very limited artistic skills to draw a visualization of the main station in the still unnamed city in Project Model Railway 2kX+. Here’s the result, I hope it gives a little more insight in what is shaping in my brain:

A sketch of what the main station + surroundings will look like

Another help imagining might be my list of building models I am going to get. Maybe these can even function as a decision help for Santa:

Station building + platforms shopping list
Buildings shopping list

In addition, here is another treat. I printed the digital plan and made some hand-drawn additions, mostly the streets and parking spaces which I have as self adhesive foil.

In other news I finally got around to contacting my uncle, who is a craftsman and will help me build the wood panel basis on which the whole thing will be built. So I really hope that I can finally start up next week. I am sick of the ever-ongoing planning, I need to get something done practically now.

Preview – first time in full size

After bringing the last needed track elements into my possession I was finally able to set up the whole project in life size. I am still waiting for one switch track to arrive but that could easily be replaced. All in all, my layout could finally be laid out, without the incline, but that was tested before so it’s fine. This time, I just wanted to see how the trains would feel on the tracks, especially the wider turns which I had not been able to build earlier. The second purpose was to keep my step-cousin occupied during babysitting.

I did not set up the third electric circuit here, the “blue” track from the layout. I would need to build a bridge first, as well as make a separate electric circuit with separate controls. For now, the two main circuits were joined into one big circuit. Surprisingly, the many meters of track were sufficiently powered after making some minor temporary modifications with the switches – converting them into ‘thinking switches’ which leave only one of the outgoing tracks powered. Thus, the electric circuit would lose half of its length making the trains run without problems.

The (almost) complete layout finally set up

Four of the five planned tracks for my future station

Made the train as long as possible - and it looks really good on the long track

"Thinking switches" enable creative train movements and parking even with only one circuit

Elegant movement on the main track

Test Drive2: the station and incline

Earlier I tested the general track, mainly to see how big it would actually become in reality and how the trains look on it. Tonight I tested another crucial point: as mentioned in an earlier post my main station will lie on a level of 5cm above the base tracks, but there is only limited space to let the tracks climb that high.

Now, 5 centimeters, that’s not much, you think. True, it isn’t much. Given the scale of 1:87, 5 centimeters would only be 4.35 meters. But the recommended maximum incline for model railway tracks is 4%, which means that a 5cm climb requires 1.25 meters of track. On a 5.5 sqm model, this is an issue worth spending some time to plan it through. In the post in which I present my layout you see how I solved that problem. The median incline of the two tracks leading up to the station is 3.5%, which is already remarkably close to the recommended maximum. I don’t have the most powerful engines and they would have to pull into the station slowly, so I wanted to test it.

The experiment setup

I piled up some of my old comic books to make socket for my two test tracks. They even made six centimeters instead of five, but testing with a little space to spare is always a good idea. The ramp was a provisional setup mainly made of the boxes my track came out of. It served its purpose well. All track is exactly according to the plan, except for the length of the station tracks, but their length wouldn’t do much difference to the test result.

The testing

I was testing this track setup for a simple thing: would a train have trouble driving up and down that ramp into and out of the station? As we already know, I basically own two trains, an ICE high-speed train and a steam engine with both cargo and passenger cars.

A bigger deal than one might think

As always the honor of taking the first turn in driving on the track was granted my good old steam engine I named “Emma”. That old lady had no problems whatsoever going up and down the hill. So I quickly got the cargo cars she had been delivered with back in ’97 on the tracks and have Emma push them uphill. I chose pushing because in the future, the trains will have to back up into the station, they can’t pull in. There was only space for one access ramp and so I will have to turn the trains around – which means that the engines will push the rolling stock uphill. But I talked about this already, back to the action.
With the four pieces of rolling stock, there was still no problem getting into the station, there wasn’t even a noticeable loss of speed.

That little beast was still looking for a challenge, and so I got out all the rolling stock I had. With the passenger cars, an old baggage car and a tank car the train would more than double in length. Moreover, this gave me the opportunity to do a little shunting

But still, Emma would reliably push and pull the cars around like nothing. Well, not exactly like nothing. I could see she struggled a little but still – the train would get up there pretty quickly. At one point the train stopped and the engine’s wheels were spinning empty but this was due to a construction mistake. The book I put as a support under the tracks was too thick, apparently, and the tracks got a slight kink. I switched to a thinner book and everything was fine. Of course the original track on the ready plate will be much more smoothly. At least that is my goal, we’ll see for how much my inexperience will allow…

This train was already longer than the ones I will use on the road later, and I am planning to get more powerful engines so this test can be checked off as fully satisfactory.
Now it was time for my pride and joy to enter the stage. One of the two power cars of my ICE is fake so actually, that can count as a normal car and the other one as the engine. I placed them in a way that the “power” end would push the rest uphill, like with a conventional engine.  Spoiler alert: when I switched to pulling, there was no difference.

On Project Model Railway 2kX+, the ICE will be used for the sole purpose it was ever built for: S p e e d . On track, I want to see it perform at its utmost and I want to see it dart in and out of the station.  That is why I made a 7.44 meter track with the biggest possible turn radius and that is why I spent an extra 13 Euros to get a high-speed switch track instead of a normal switch. The high-speed switch is by one third longer (300mm) and it’s track is fully metal to give the trains power at any millimeter to avoid even the slightest speed loss. Sounds awesome, and they look awesome, too. Two reasons for Fleischmann to make the recommended retail price 34.25€ instead of 20.50€ for a “normal” 200mm switch. All for my ICE to get what it deserves. And now it should prove that it has deserved it. Sadly, the ICE will have to use the ramp track with the smaller radius but I think it still looks elegant even on 356mm radius tracks. It even masters this tight turn at full speed, with the track a little tilted this should be absolutely no problem at all.

The last part of the test was parallel operation. Basically, this will be possible in PMR 2kX+ and theoretically the track geometry allows for even the longest cars to pass each other smoothly in turns. But try-and-error has always proved to be the most reliable method of finding out and so I had both my trains have a beautiful parallel roll-out.
No I didn’t. Apparently, there is not enough electric power pumped into the tracks to let both trains go parallel here. (not a problem in PMR 2kX+ as they will be parts of two independent electric circuits ) But I parked them on the ramp to see that there is no problem, that the ICE and normal passenger cars can pass each other without any problem.
And one day, when they roll out to the track together for the first time, it will look somehow like this:

But until then it is still a while. For now I know that I will be able to build everything exactly the way I want to, this is already valuable knowledge. And just by the way, today I bought two more ICE cars for little money on Ebay.