The D&H Comes Home!

Well, As you may have guessed from the last blog update. The railway room is now ready and its time for the D&H layout to come home.

Very soon after finishing painting the room I arranged to loan a tandem trailer from my good friend Vic.
The trailer had previously been used to tansport Rod and Vic's Thompson River Canyon Layout to exhibitions a few years ago. Now the Thompson River is firmly installed in Barrie's railway room, the poor old trailer was sitting now redundant.

After a number of emails to Vic and John C, it soom became apparent that the D&H would fit in the trailer and the move was on. So on the 7th I trecked out to Ringwood to pick up the trailer and then over to Oakligh where the layout has been in storage for more than 18 months at my fathers factory.

To say that the layout fit perfectly would be an understatement. There was about 10mm to spare on one side. The lenght of the trailer was perfect and the layout slid right in. It fit so snugly that I did not need to tie it down.

I then set off and headed for Wantirna for a operating session at Rod's as we were conducting the first test of his signaling project on the SFRSD. With the D&H in tow via Wantrina and the session now complete at Rod's I headed home to Sunbury.

At the crack of dawn, (well 8am ish after a bit of a sleep in) I backed the trailer up to the shed and proceeded to unload the D&H.

Before long she was up on her lanky legs and in position.

Afer a hour or so of re adding the small sections of rail between modules and giving the track a damn good clean, it was time to run trains.

U30C #709 and 2 other sister engines had the honour of runnig the first 20 car train around the layout.

With only 1 minor loose wire on a turnout the layout and the Panel Pro Panel worked perfectly as if it had never been in storage.!

Thanks to all the help I have received over the last 18 months in building the shed and painting it. It certainly has been appreciated.

Now the D&H is back up and running, and looking very small in the large room. Now it is time to plan for bigger and better things.

In the mean time, I will complete the signals for the layout so that the layout can take a brief trip to the Melbourne N scale convention in March 2013.

Stay tuned for updates on the build of the signals.

Regards
Brendan

Fourth and final shed update

Well, time is certainly moving along.. This will be the last update for the shed as it is now ready for the layout to move back in.

But before that happens, lets step back a few weeks..

Since the last update the top parts of the walls were installed and the screw holes and gaps plastered up.

As you can see, I have the 6mm MDF on the bottom parts of the wall, 3mm mdf on the top parts of the wall and 9mm C/D ply on the ceiling.

Next, was the paint.
After closely surveying friends railway rooms recently in terms of paint colour for the blue sky and the dark lower parts of the wall, I settled on the colours Barry Davies has used. (Nice one Barry).

I settled on a blue called British Paints "Levent" in a low sheen and a colour bond colour called "Monument" in a semi gloss for the lower sections of the walls.

Over the weekend, we had previously planned for friends to come over from Ballarat and stay for the weekend. Little did they know, that a shed inspection meant hanging onto the end of a paint roller for the reainder of the day.. Thanks to Liz, Bill, Mary and Al for your help. Also to Sam and Lochie for getting in and helping with the shirting boards also. Michelle kept the food and drink coming..

The ceiling is also painted light blue. The long term plan is to expand the layout and create isles with valance's above the layout. The valance will be painted "monument" along with the ceiling along the walkways. This will then frame the layout nicely. The blue on the inside of the valance will help reflect the light down on the layout.

The walls and ceiling received 3 coats of undercoat in order to cover the MDF and the ply and then 3 coats of blue on the walls. Then 2 coats of the black on the lower sections.

Here is a shot where we are halfway through the painting.. Blue is done..

Once the black was completed, I installed the lights around the outside of the room.

Here is the final panorama shot of the room.

Now the layout can come out of storage and into the room..!

During the last week or so, there has been a huge range of outsiude temp's. We ranged from 18 to 40 degrees. Considering I installed R5 and R6 bats in the ceiling and R2.5 in the walls, the room only reached 25 degrees in the hottest part of the day.. Nery nice.. It was cooler than in the house..!

Stay tuned for the next update.

Third shed update

Just a quick update re the progress of the shed.

As mentioned last time the ceiling battens were up.

I have since installed the lower section of the walls (the 6mm MDF) with insulation between the MDF and and the exterior of the shed.

Today, Rod, John F and John C came to help raise the ceiling.
There were 15 sheets of 2400mm x 1200mm x 9mm play waiting for us.

Fortunately I was able to loan a friends plaster lifter. This made the job so much easier than lifting with brooms or climbing ladders.

Once we got stuck into it, the progress was swift.

The plaster lifter was working over time.
Along the way we installed the R6 and R5 insulation on top of the plywood.
The railway room should be nice and snug in the winter and cool in the summer.

Here is the finished result.

Nice work guys.. Thanks for the help.

Next for the top parts of the walls so the layout can come home.

Stay tunned for the next installment.

Second shed update

Just a quick update re the progress of the shed.

All timber for the walls and ceiling is now procured.
I plan on using 6mm MDF on the lower section of the walls and 3mm on the upper section.

The 3mm will be curved in each corner to stop the sharpe edge look.

I will be using 9mm CD ply on the ceiling.

I will also be adding insulation in the walls and ceiling as I go.

I have now installed the ceiling battens at 600mm centres over the entire roof space.
As there is a 3m gap between roof trusses I have also added extra support from the roof battens to the ceiling battens just for a bit of extra safety.

Here are a few pictures of the ceiling battens.

Now to find time to do the install.. 

Stay tunned for the next update.

Move in time getting closer

The work on preparing the shed is progressing well. The car port is now up and the 5m long roller door is now out of the shed.

I have now installed the dividing wall between the railway room and the workshop. Of the 10.5m long shed I kept 3m of the front of the shed for a workshop.

Here are a few pictures of the progress of the build on the dividing wall.

Then I lined the wall with 6mm mdf

Then I installed workshop shelving to store all the workshop stuff and other bits and pieces.

Then the workshop work bench was installed and put into service quickly for those other jobs..

As the roof on the shed is a truss roof, I plan to line the shed and put in a false ceiling in the railway room. I plan to use the open end above the workbench to store long items such as timber etc.

Now that the workshop is done, I can now start looking at lining the shed and start work planning the upgrade of the D&H......

Here is a preliminary floor plan for the 7.5m x 6m room..

Time for more Signals to be built.

The layout is still in storage while I prepare the shed for its home coming.
Other tasks like assembling the car port is needed to be completed in order to move the 5m long roller door from inside the shed before I can line the walls of the shed and clean it out.

I decided it was time to tackle the build of my D&H specific dual mast signals in preparation for the Melbourne N Scale Convention in 2013.

Here is what I aim to build.

I have been working with a good friend Vic Fitzpartick to develop the relevant brass parts in order to build the signals I need.

Fortunately the top part of each of the signals with the search lights on them uses the same part as the single mast units that I have already built for the layout with a few minor changes.

So this week I set out to built one of each of the signals to make sure that the test etchings we did a while ago have all the parts needed and go together as expected.

Here is the work bench.

I made myself a jig to hold each of the 3 search lights in position while I add the other parts such as the top and middle walk ways as well as solder the common leg of the LED to the mast etc.

Here is a pic of the work in progress of the cantilever signal that I have been working on.

The other signal (being the same as the black signal in the picture at the top of this post) I built but the size of the foot walk is not right, so a small change is needed in the drawings for the etching. So will get onto that next time.

In the mean time, I have been making the top sections with the search lights while I wait for more etchings.

I have completed 4 top sections so far. Only another 16 to go for the layout.

So thats the progress for now.

Stay tuned for the next update..

Why the D&H

Welcome back.
In todays update I will go over the reasons for choosing the D&H as a prototype to model.

First I need to go back some 25 years. As a child and a teen I was always into model railways and picked up the hobby from my father. I can always remeber we had trains in the house and or in dad's shed. Now back in those days my father modeled US prototype HO and most of his equipment was brass. I grew up running those nice brass loco's and when it was time to have my own, I decided that I liked N scale rather than HO so made the switch.

In the following years I collected anything that "looked nice" and had a number of the older Bachmann loco's along with Rivarossi E8's etc. After a while I found that the Japaneese models ran so much better than the US models so sold up all my US models and went Japaneese for a period. Then I decided I actually liked the US stuff better. So sold up again and moved back to the US based models.

Again, I was back to just buying what looked nice and ran well. Soon my collection was getting out of hand and I decided I had to concentrate on a road name. So I did some recearch and as I already had some D&H U30c's from Kato, and I wanted to keep a lid on spending, I found that the D&H only had a total of 16 different types of loco's. This sounded perfect, plus the scenery of up state New York (from books, pictures, Video's) looked to have enough different type that it would be a nice place to model.. So I settled for the D&H based on the fabulous D&H Grey and Blue lightning strike paint scheme.

As the D&H also was mainly a Alco and GE road I favoured these types of loco's over the EMD's.

The D&H had...
S2's and S4's
RS2's and RS3's
And this is all they had up until the early 60's and these 4 types replaced all steam on the D&H.

S2

RS3

Then the D&H expanded and purchased RS11's (high nose) and then low nose RS11's and RS36's, plus C628 and U30C's.

RS11

Later on the D&H again expanded with U23b, SD45's and U33C's.

U33C

This U33C has been made from a Kato U30C and a wide radiator grid added from a older Bachman U33B.



The D&H kept most of these loco's and retured the S2, S4 and RS2's by the late 60's.

As most know the D&H went thought a phase where 4 ex SantaFe PA1's were purchased along with 2 Baldwin RF16 sharks.

Then by the time the mid 70's came along and the failure of a number of Eastern roads and the creation of Conrail. At this time the D&H obtained a number of ex Lehigh Valley C420's, GP38-2's and GP39-2's and then later a number of C424m's.

GP38-2

GP38-2

With the purchase of the LV and Reading loco's in the mid 70's a number of colour scheme variations came about and added to the colour of the D&H and I have attempted to capture this with some of my loco's and rolling stock.

GP39-2

This GP39-2 I made from a early series GP38 as made by Atlas and changed the exhaust configuration on the roof of the loco so that it represents a GP39-2. The number of engine room doors may not be correct byt close enough for now.

C424m

As you can see there are a few of the colour scheme's and there are a few I have not pictured here.

In terms of my fleet, the only models I dont have examples of are an S4, RS11/RS36 low nose.
I am eagerly waiting for Altas or another manufacturer to make these.

All my loco's have been converted to DCC using DZ123's or DZ125's. One of my U30C's has a locsound sound decoder installed and it sounds great!.