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!.

CTC Panel and Signalling system
At the outset, one of my main givens was a fully automated signalling system. I wanted to represent, as accurately as possible, the CTC block signalling system used by the D&H in the late '60's to late '70's. I was lucky enough to find a original D&H rule book for the 1940's that contains all signalling aspects that the D&H used that I could replicate on my own railway.
One of my requirements was that the signalling system did not control the trains, it simply displayed each signal aspect of a given block that they are protecting like the railway wood.
As the D&H signals all have 3 search lights per track that they are protecting the number of possibilities for different aspects was large. In developing the CTC panel I simplified these somewhat and reduced the number of combinations down.. This was primarily due to the number of blocks I have between towns was much less than the real railroad. The D&H also uses the signal aspects to display speed requirements as well as occupancy.
In order to be able to have the CTC panel I needed input from the layout in terms of block occupancy and also outputs in the form of signals.
As I had decided on Digitrax as my DCC system, I then started to look at the various products that are on the market that provide both block occupancy as well as signal drivers and the signal masts themselves.

Block Occupancy:
There are a number of block occupancy products on the market that range from the BDL168 that uses a bridge rectifier arrangement to detect trains to current sensing through coil arrangements.
In my earlier layout that I used to test some of these products I dabbled in a system that uses coils to detect current draw on the power for the track. This worked well but then needed to be connected to other boards that then provided the info on the Digitrax Loconet. In my testing I used the DS54 to bridge this gap and it worked ok.. But not as good and reliably as the BDL168.
All work very well, but the BDL168 came to the top of my list due to the cost per block was more effective than others. The BDL168 also has another feature that I utilise to drive other outputs that is not widely known (more on that later..) so the BDL168 was the occupancy detector of choice.

Signal heads:
As I model the D&H, signal masts and heads that represent what the D&H use are not easy to come by, in fact they are next to impossible. So the only option I have is to scratch build them. Luckily I have a very good friend that is a master in design and brass etching. I was able to adapt his target signal head and ladders that are used for his west coast layouts into what I needed for the single mast 3 head signal units that I needed for the D&H. The D&H also use their own design in terms of tripple head dual mast designs (2 major variances) that I would also need to make. Over the last few years Vic and I have been working on a design that matches that of the D&H and am in the final stages of assembling the test etchings that I hope will work for my layout..

Signal Head Drivers:
TC-64..
As I wanted to represent the signalling rules of the D&H, off the shelf signal driver boards such as the Digitrax SE8C does not do what I needed to do. I then decided that if I wanted to represent D&H proto typical aspects I would need to fully develop those rules in a bunch of programming tasks within JMRI Panel Pro. Once I got my head around how JMRI works the rest took a bunch of trial and error and testing. Over time I managed to get JMRI Panel Pro to do what I wanted.
The other critical factor in driving signals is the hardware that interprets the info on the Loconet that panel pro is sending into a large number of outputs to drive the signal aspects.
I did a heap of research in this area as well and found that common cathode LED's was the most efficent way to driving low current draw outputs as all the hardware needed to do was current sinking and not current sourcing. This was a critical decision in the cost effectiveness of driving my signals. I found that a product called a TC64 from RR-Cirkits matched what I needed and it also can current sink its 5 v outputs with out any additional hardware or circuitry. I was then able to find a 2mm LED with a square back that matched my requirements being common cathode, 3 colour (Red, Green, Yellow) and 3 pin devices on the internet from a LED supplier. This would work perfectly for what I would need.

On the output of the TC64 I have also made a small board that is near the signal that holds the drop down resistors on it. This enables me to drive the Red and the Green at different voltages to obtain the colour I want.

BDL168:
Who would have thought that a BDL168 could be used for both block detection AND a signal driver. The BDL168 is primarily designed for block detection, it also has a LED output that can be used to check or monitor the occupancy of each block.. Upon further investigation of the BDL168 manual I found that the LED outputs can be decoupled from the Block detection part of the board and be used as individual outputs that can be controled directly from the loconet and therefore use Switch numbers to control them. I decided to give it a test with the tester board that comes with the BDL168. This worked a treat.. Given the output is really only designed to drive LED's at 1.5v and I wanted to be able to drive my signal LED's at differnt voltage / currents to get the right colour Yellow (from combining the Red and Green) I developed an additional circuit board that has 4 sets of 4 Optocoupler chips on it.

What is a opto coupler I hear you say..? It simply has a LED inside the device and a transistor that is turned on when the LED is turned on. As the LED and transistor are not electrically connected (See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opto-isolator ) then the transistor can be run at any voltage while protecting the BDL168

This board has connector wires that come direct from the LED outputs of the BDL168 and then via the opto coupler a transisitor is used to drive the individual colour on the LED. I also use 330ohm at 5v for the green LED and 660ohm at 5v for the red LED. I found that if I use these resistance values I get a nice yellow when both LED colours are run at the same time.

Here is an example of the board I made.

The 40 pin cable that runs between the BDL168 and the board is disconnected to to make it easy to see the board.



After I had constructed the majority of the layout using older BDL162's (that I thought were BDL168's) I found that when more than 1 loco is run within the control of 1 BDL162 set of 16 outputs it can cause the BDL162 to give false readings on the other ports on the BDL162 when the supersonic motor control is enabled. This is a well known fault of the older BDL162 and while Digitrax did offer a upgrade program to the BDL168 at the time, by the time I had found the problem it was too late for the upgrade program. As I was committed to the Digitrax block detector I replaced the 4 x BDL162's with BDL168's. I was then faced with the dilema of what to do with the BDL162's that I could no longer use for block detection. However, because of my earlier investiations I knew that I could use them to drive my signals. So I kept theseemingly redundant BDL162's and made boards for them and also monitored the internnet for other people wanting to sell of get rid of their older BDL162's.. I now have a stock of them and will continue to use them to drive my signals.

Signals and output drivers needed. (oh the numbers.)

As all my D&H style signals have at least 3 LED's on them and up to 6, I knew that I was going to need a bunch of driver boards for my signals. When calculating out the number of outputs needed for the layout per my signal design, I found that as each LED would need 2 outputs (1 for the green and 1 for the red) from driver boards that would mean that each signal mast would need a total of 6 outputs for each set of 3. So for the places I needed the dual mast signal installments that the D&H used I would need a total of 12 outputs for each mast. If we then further calculate this out that would me that each interlocking that is a simple turn out into a loop this would mean that I would need 18 outputs. While not a big issue in terms of programming, the cost was a factor.. At this point I reviewed my signal aspect design and found that in 98% of cases the bottom signal aspect did not need to change from red if I elimiated some of the signaling rules that I did not really need. I then updated my plan and this would reduce the number of outputs needed to drive a single mast from 6 to 4 and from 12 to 8 for a double mast installment. This then mean that for each interlocking I would need only 12 outputs. While this does not seem a large difference, when you multiply them out and as I have at least 28 signal masts this would end up being at least 336 outputs needed to just drive the signals let alone the LED's on display panels etc. I think the decission to hard wire the bottom LED to be RED all the time was a wise move..

CTC Panel Version 1.

My first version of my JMRI CTC panel worked out well, although upon testing and a running session with my local crew of friends we found that seeing the track occupancy was a bit of a challenge..

So in order to fix this I changed from Panel Pro Panel editor to the Panel Pro layout editor..

This then enabled me to change the colour of the block of track that the train was occupying and thus enabled reading it to be much easier..

While this does not follow strict CTC panel protocol I thought it was a wise compromise.

Here is the first Panel.

Here is the current panel. This panel not only shows block occupancy but also shows the current aspect of each signal to make it easier for the CTC operator to see what is happening.

As you can see there are drawings for the signal leavers below the turnout leavers on the top and bottom sections. I have yet to program those so they are blank at present. So strictly speaking the panel and layout run the signals in ABS mode rather than true CTC. I plan on programing it in the future to be both..

 

Next time...

The prototype.. Why the D&H.