First Operations Session Completed

Open the doors and they will come.

Today was the day I invited a number of good friends over to give the D&H a good workout. I had called it the Golden Spike ceremony, however, as all the track is now laid, and I did not have a golden spike on hand, things quickly developed into a operations session.

Per my previous post, I had completed a fair bit of planing for the occasion, with train cards, full train schedule, fast clock etc. So all was sitting in readiness just waiting for the big wheels to roll on the D&H.

At the prescribed time, my good friends, Rod Warren, Bill Black, John Colliver, Graeme Meyer, Peter Sutton, Noel Purdey, Ron McFarlane and Chris Elliot had arrived with throttles in hand and eager to put the D&H through its paces.

After a quick inspection and a bit of discussion the run button was pressed on the JMRI fast clock and trains started to move.

The newly installed, and as yet untested, dispatcher phone system was soon humming with dispatcher to engineer instructions.

The time table was set up for a 6:1 fast clock and 18 hours of fast clock time. It soon became apparent the the fast clock was too fast and I reduced it to 5:1. This seemed to suit the planned schedule just nicely.

Here are a few pictures from the event.

Bill and Rod working the North Creek turn.

 

Peter and Graeme working in Ft Edward.

Ron and John managing the main yard at Whitehall.

 

Chris working the local at Ft Edward

Noel working a train at Saratoga Springs

 

Rod and Bill in the hole at Saratoga Springs waiting for a meet.

Chris returning to Whitehall with the Saratoga Springs local

John switching the yard.

Here is the Whitehall yard work sheet. This enables the yard operators to know what is up next and what trains need to be built.

 

Here is one of the hand sets used on the Dispatcher to engineer phone system.

Here I am manning the dispatchers desk with the 19 hour long train schedule spread across the desk.

 Here is the dispatchers desk with JMRI running with a very basic panel, the crew call sheet and the train cards.

In terms of the flow of the day, two trains in the middle of the schedule did not run due to the lack of engineers. While the room had 9 people in it, it did not feel full and there is room for more..

There is room for improvement in terms of the schedule and next time I hope to have the card cards in operation for the layout.

All in all, the layout ran incredibly well for a first session and I'm very proud of how things went today. Bring on the next session..

Now back to getting the fascia installed.

Till next time.

First basic Ops session on the D&H

Its all in the preparation!.

This coming weekend I have scheduled a ops session on the D&H.
The session is going to be a basic session with a full train time table but no car cards.

I have the car cards for each car in my fleet, however, I dont have the time needed to plan the flow of traffic. So, instead I have set up a time table and as each train moves around the railroad, they will have drop off and pick up towns pre defined and the engineers can randomly pick up and drop off cars up to the max 20 car limit for each given train.

I have created small cards for each industry in each town so that engineers can figure out what type of car may be required for each industry.

There will be a number of through freights plus a pair of passenger trains as well as the North and South local plus the North creek branch local. The locals will do most of the work in each of the 5 remote towns.

In terms of time table and supporting documentation, I have created a crew call sheet so each engineer knows when they are needed, a Whitehall main yard work sheet as well as train cards for each train to provide instructions to the engineers as to what they are to do.

Here are a few examples:

Crew call sheet

 

The graph showing the movement of each train and where they cross is 10 pages wide

Train cards

Whitehall main yard instruction sheet

Well, thats all the planing done.. How let see how things go on Saturday.

Track painting - Completed

Track work now nice and grotty!

Aver the last few weeks I undertook the large task of painting all the track that is on the layout including the staging and staging approach tracks.

Well, today I can confirm that all the painting for the track is now done.
I used Olive drab to paint the track and it looks great. I did all the track in the one colour with the plan to go back to the little used sidings and give them a more rusty look later on.

This gives the track work a more uniform look and it covers up all the raw timber ties under the hand built turnouts and also where they were added at the track joins.

Here are a few random location pictures to show the progress efforts to date.

Track painting

Time to start covering up all those timber ties and hand laid turnouts.

After I completed the track work at Corinth, it was time to remove all rolling stock from the layout (some 400+ pieces plus 70 off loco's) in readiness for the train painting to begin. It took me 2 or 3 days  (in 1 or 2 hour sessions) to get all the rolling stock off the layout and back into their draws.

I arranged for a good friend Jason Miller to come over and help out with the first session of track painting.

Jason brought with him some new paint from Metro Hobbies that is ready to go straight into the airbrush. We decided to try 3 colours. Olive Drab, Camouflage medium brown and camouflage light brown.

For the main line I decided that I liked the look of the Olive drab, so we set to work.

I think the light brown and the medium brown will be good for the spur tracks and the little used tracks in the yards of the layout so will start with Olive drab and then lighten things up with the light brown later.

See below for a collection of pictures showing the final finish of the olive drab colour. In some photo's you can see the difference between the unpainted Atlas flex track compared to the painted. I think the painted looks great and take away the shine on the side of the rail and also hides all the copper and wooden ties that make up the hand laid turnouts.

Note the difference in the unpainted compared to the painted track?

Well, thats the update.
I have completed all of North and South staging, south staging approach, Ft Edward, Willsboro to the entrance to staging at Plattsburgh.
Now to complete the rest of the North staging approach and the other towns..

Stay tuned for the next update.

Corinth Paper Mill track work complete

Track gangs have been hard at it again in Corinth.

A week or so, the track gang arrived in Corinth to complete the paper mill track work.
After installing 4 additional turnouts and a bunch of flex track, the track feeders were then installed and tortoise machines that make up the Paper Mill complex.

All went according to plan and there is now plenty of room to switch the paper mill with a chemical siding, a box car loading / unloading space as well as a switch back that is needed for the pulp wood to be brought into the factory.

One challenge that presented itself was the install of the tortoise machine for the pulp switch back. As the track that heads down to staging was directly below it, I need to make an bracket and extension to hold the tortoise machine and throw bar.

Here is a picture of the piece of timber with the throw bar extension and tortoise machine installed.

Here is a picture of the assembly installed..

Here is a picture of the location that needed the special arrangement.

Now that the track work is completed at the Mill. This basically completes all track work on the layout.

A golden spike celebration is to be held on the 8th of November 2014. (in a few weeks time).

The progress on the build has been going at a steady pace since September 2013. So, just on 12 months all the timber construction is complete, including all track work and electronics installs for block detection and turnout control including panels for each town.

Before the Golden spike celebration I plan to have all the track painted ready for ballast.

Stay tuned..

Dispatchers Phone System - A solution

Dispatchers Phone system.

Over the last 12 months I have been looking into various dispatchers phone systems.

There are many types that people have used over the years including old phone systems or intercom systems.

About 4 or 5 months ago I purchased a bunch of hand sets that are used for mobile phones that are the black retro hand set type. I then found a way to interface them with a Laptop Computer audio port and effectively have a party line but I was concerned about the load on the audio port.

Recently a few friends (Rod Warren and Greg Johnstone) came up with the idea of cheap 2 way radio's and head sets (small in ear type) for their dispatcher systems.

These radios are available at very cheap prices on ebay so we dipped our toe in to see if they would work.

Yep they work nicely.. However, I was still keen to use the 8 hand sets that I had already purchased.

I managed to find a way to add a push to talk button to the hand sets and change plus so that they interface with the radios.. The hand sets have a 3.5mm 4 pin audio plug and the radios need a 3 pin 2.5mm audio plug.. So after some quick mod's I was able to test the theory and they work a treat.

The radio's also have a DC in socket on the top, so instead of running batteries in them all, I wired up a 9v DC bus around the layout to power the radio's. So now when the layout it turned on, then the radio's are also powered up also.

My last outstanding task is to find / make a mount for the hand sets. The radios will be mounted under the layout so there is no issue there. I have found a few mounts on ebay but they are cost prohibitive. So back to the drawing board on that one.

Here are a few pictures of the radio's and the hand set.

In order to make the hand set work in conjunction with the radio's I needed to add the push to talk button.
Here is the circuit diagram that I made up from disecting the head sets that come with the radio's. This is after I changed the plug from a 4 contact to a 3 contact 2.5mm audio plug.

Im looking forward to testing them out when I next have a open day..

More Electrical work - Turnout Panel revisions

Panels and more panels.

After my initial open shed and layout shake down, I had my version 1.0 panels installed on the layout but found that the buttons were too close together.

I set up each town to have one turnout panel and have now revised that to be 2 panels per town. I have now made up new panels and have made two per town. This enables the engineer to use a panel that is local to the turnouts that are located at each end of the town.

By making new panels, this has enabled the buttons to be spread out more and this then makes it easier to find the right button.

The panels are temporarily mounted on the front of the layout. Once the fascia is installed they will be mounted in the fascia and set back slightly so that the buttons can not be accidentally pushed when a person walks past the location. So the panels will not be so close to the main deck of the layout.
I have also separated the staging panels so that the button for each staging track. This enables a engineer to just line up the turnouts to exit the staging with out effective the return loop end.

Here are a few pictures of the new panels.

In my next update, I will provide info on the new dispatcher phone system.