The weather was much nicer today, plenty of sunshine and a temperature somewhere around 70. Headed over towards Johnstown again thinking that I would walk around there some more and maybe take in a movie later in the afternoon. But it was too nice outside to sit indoors for any length of time so it was no surprise that I ended up in the town of Gloveville instead. Wandered around that town for several hours looking at more of the wonderful homes that seem to be everywhere back here. Took pictures of some, but mostly just enjoyed wandering around from one block to the next.

   Passed through the old downtown area as I headed back towards camp and found it to be intriguing in its own right. Seemed like it was a larger area than the town of Johnstown with many more 3-4 story brick buildings lining the streets. Lots of interesting shops and a few cute cafes and restaurants, this area, or maybe it's the whole state, seem to really like pizza, because there are lots of those kinds of places around.

   Tried to call a few friends while out where the phone had a few bars, but it's 2 hours earlier back in
Colorado, so it was easy to imagine them all out boating or biking or playing golf. My best friend called up a couple hours later, having seen that I had called, but the phone reception here at camp really sucks. Normally I would be bemoaning the fact that my phone carrier is 'Sprint' which, while okay if you are in a city, is just the pit's once you get a few miles outside the city limits. In this case though, even my 'Verizon' WiFi device is having a hard time dealing with all of these hills and lack of cell towers. Will just have to try calling everyone again the next time I get to the big city.

    Pretty quiet this evening. Started another new book this morning, 'The Elk-Dog Heritage' and it has kept me happy for a couple hours now. Pretty easy read though, so I'll be looking for something new before the end of the night. Took some time while in town to find a stronger signal and load up some pictures for tonight. These are the photo's of the train layout that were mentioned last night. So without further ado here are the photo's of my model railroading empire I talked about yesterday. Sorry for the delay.

I started this layout last year while camped out in Chattanooga. It snowed almost 8" one night and rather than get out on the road in the middle of it, I hung around a couple of days and got started on this. The layout is built on 2-layers of 2" thick rigid foam. Here you see it with all of the cork roadbed glued down and the area where the future harbor scene cut away.

I wanted a harbor area where I could have a wooden wharf with boats and old fishing shacks and such. Decided to model a cut stone retaining wall at the harbor edge so I formed up and poured some flat plaster blanks and then scribed some random stone detail onto them. Here they are being glued to the edge of the foam.

It's time to lay some track. Most of you, unless you are model train geeks, won't understand this, but I decided to use Peco brand code 70 track and turnouts. The layout is one that I designed based loosely on an old switching game layout. What you see here is actually only about half of the whole layout, but at two feet wide and five and a half feet long it seemed about as long as could be managed in the trailer. It may be that one of these days I can join this section to the other half and have a nice little switching layout. I am working in 'HO' gauge, the most popular gauge in the world. Many of you might be more familiar with the old 'Lionel' trains that use to run around the base of the tree at Christmas Time. This would of been what is known as 'O' gauge. HO is roughly 'half of O' and works out to a scale of 1:87.1

Nearly all of the track is positioned and glued down with silicone caulk. The turnouts are #6 and the minimum radius of any of the curves is 36". There is one more piece of track to lay at this point but it will be on top of a model of a wooden wharf that I'll be scratch building. Here you can see that the retaining walls have a first layer of stain.

Had to add a 1"x6" frame around the whole layout as the foam was getting beat up every time it needed to be moved. It's a lot heavier now, but actually easier to move around. Here you can see that the bottom of the harbor has been painted and another layer of stain added to the retaining walls. Eventually there will be some epoxy resin water poured, but first there needs to be a wharf and boats and pilings and other such details.

A closer look of the retaining wall after several layers of stain. Pilings will hide those areas where the different sections were joined together.

A few more weeks and there are now wooden pilings and the beginnings of the wooden wharf I've been working on. Once in awhile though you just have too run a few trains. There are only a few cars at this point but enough to push around and play with.

Here you see the wharf I've been working on. There is still a lot of details to add to it, but it was time to be installed, so the last piece of track could be put in place. In the foreground you see two wires coming out of the large piling. They will be used for a model of a navigation light that will get built and installed later. In order to run trains I needed to have an engine so I ended up buying this one last fall at Caboose Hobbies in Denver. This little engine is a model of a 44 ton diesel switcher. It comes complete with a DCC chip already installed which I will talk about later. My layout is going to be set in the last years of the 40's and the early 1950's. This would of been the transition period when most railroads were converting all of their steam locomotives to diesel. So I will end up having some of both.

More of an over view of the wharf. There will be  quite a few small buildings along the harbor area and even part of one on the wharf itself. There will also be several boat models that will vary from rowboat/canoe size on up to fishing boat, barge and tug boat size. Still lots of detail to add to it, but for the moment it is far enough along that you can run trains back and forth on all the track sections.

     A quick discussion on DCC technology. It use to be that if you wanted to run more than one train at a time on a layout you had to subdivide the track into many separate electrical blocks, each one isolated from all the others and each with it's own 'transformer', or control, for each train. It worked, but was a wiring nightmare and you would end up concentrating more on throwing the next electrical switch than you would running your trains.

    About 10-12 years ago something new came on the market. With the boom in computers and circuit board design someone came up with the idea of installing a small circuit board in each engine and allow that to control each locomotive. DCC, Direct Command Control, was born and it has been gaining ground ever since. Now instead of splitting your layout into many different zones you have, essentially, one set of wires to supply electricity to the track. (With a few minor exceptions). This current carries a separate signal to each different decoder installed in an engine, or other device, so that more than one engine can be on the same track at the same time. More importantly, each one, up to more than 100 separate engines, can run in any direction at any speed, or be completely stopped. It was a total revolution and now made running layouts a whole lot easier. At first only a few engines were sold with decoders already installed, and then only the larger sizes with more room to install them in. But as time has gone on the decoders have become smaller till now you can find them in the smallest HO gauge engines, like this little 44 tonner, and even in a number of N gauge engines.

   The next step has been to add a second decoder and a speaker to the engine thereby adding realistic sound to your engine. Now they have steam and diesel engines that have sound modules that sound exactly like the real engine they are representing, right down to the chuffs and blowdown noises of a steam engine to the revving rpm of a road diesel starting up.