I shot a bit of video while at the convention, but not as much as I thought I would. At these type of shows there is always so much going on that it is difficult to focus on shooting video. Much of what was shot was shot by others.
The video above shows the layout on display in the contest room at the convention center, as well as Tom Griffith’s award winning scratchbuilt Howe truss float bridge.
Some video of the Modeling with the Masters clinic that Clark Kooning and I hosted on Wednesday is included. 28 modelers built turnouts, which was lots of fun for all.
We moved the layout down to the train show on Thursday by lifting it onto some flatbed carts and rolling it into the massive car elevator in the convention center. The train show was 3 floors below the contest room, thank god for that elevator. That went smooth, there is some shots of us setting up the booth before the show.
While at the show Josh Shedaker from Tony’s Train Exchange was kind enough to offer to “tweak” the sound in QSI decoder in my CNJ Boxcab. While there I had Lew White rework the decoder installation and change the LED’s to white. He also swapped out the speaker to one of their new High Bass versions. The difference in the sound quality was amazing! That I did get some video of…
I am still working through the pictures taken at the show and in New York City, and hope to get them posted here shortly.
Enjoy!
-T.
About the Author:
I'm your host, Tim Warris, a product developer in Port Dover, Ontario. Since March of 2007 I have been documenting the construction of the former CNJ Bronx Terminal in HO scale. For my day job, I design track building tools for Fast Tracks, a small company I own and operate. Fast Tracks makes it fast and easy to hand lay your own trackwork. Stop by our website to learn more!
I was going to wait until the start of the Train Show on Friday to post some video of the layout operating but figured why wait. Today I will be dismantling the layout, packing it up and stuffing it into the van. We leave tomorrow morning. I suspect I would not get time to do it otherwise so I decided to post it now.
I shot this video last evening so it is very current. It is the boxcab switching the freight house and loading some cars onto the carfloat.
Youtube has a tendency of making model railroad videos look jerky when they play. The boxcab is a very smooth operating engine, any jerky motion is in the video. Youtube also has a tendency of making cars derail, but I got lucky on this video.
If you really want to see it running, stop by the Train Show next weekend! If it doesn’t fall out of the van, it will be set up and running there.
-T.
This is the most recent construction related post.
Check back soon for an update! In the meantime, the category links to the right are full of interesting content.
I'm your host, Tim Warris, a product developer in Port Dover, Ontario. Since March of 2007 I have been documenting the construction of the former CNJ Bronx Terminal in HO scale. For my day job, I design track building tools for Fast Tracks, a small company I own and operate. Fast Tracks makes it fast and easy to hand lay your own trackwork. Stop by our website to learn more!
Yesterday I painted all the trackwork on the layout. Well, almost all of it, I decided to leave one three way turnout and a length of track unpainted until after the train show so people can see the construction technique.
If you smelled Floquil paint in the air yesterday, it was from me, sorry about that….
It almost didn’t get done. I started early on it, hoping to finish the painting before noon. I noticed my airbrush needed cleaning, so I took it apart and soaked all the parts in lacquer thinner, which dissolves all the hardened paint deposits. When I reassembled it I had no air. A few minutes playing with it and I realized I should not have soaked the air valve in lacquer thinner as there is an O ring in it that swelled up to twice the size and cut off the air. I hunted up the part number on Badgers site (I have a 155 airbrush) and started phoning around for one. I managed to finally locate on in Dundas, about 35 minutes from here. So I made a trip out to get it, which killed 2 hours.
With that fixed up I started painting, as shown in the video. 2 hours into the job and we had a nasty thunderstorm that knocked out the power for 2 hours. I managed to finish up the painting at 10 pm.
Its all done now, and looks much better. It is only a base coat, I will be doing more to it later prior to ballasting, but for now it is an improvement over the bare copper ties, although that did create a neat effect…
All the track is painted with Floquil’s Railroad Tie Brown, unthinned, straight from the bottle. I used 3 jars for the job. Unfortunately two of the three were from a bad batch and the colour didn’t match the first one very well. It really won’t matter though.
After I paint a section of track, I immediately clean the the paint from the rails using small squares of wood. This makes quick work of cleaning up the rail, and also keeps me from accidentally disturbing the paint on the PC board ties. A few passes is all it takes to get 99% of the paint off the rails. If the paint dries a bit I simply dip the wood block into some lacquer thinner and give it a rub followed with a pass from a dry piece of wood. I cut up a bag of a few hundred of these blocks ahead of time so I have plenty on hand when painting. Once dry, I give everything a cleaning with a bright boy.
This week I also finished off my brass model of CNJ 1000, which there are some shots of in the video.
I'm your host, Tim Warris, a product developer in Port Dover, Ontario. Since March of 2007 I have been documenting the construction of the former CNJ Bronx Terminal in HO scale. For my day job, I design track building tools for Fast Tracks, a small company I own and operate. Fast Tracks makes it fast and easy to hand lay your own trackwork. Stop by our website to learn more!
