Wednesday, December 16, 2009

flexi has arrived

Its taken a while, but I found a vast ammount of flexi on ebay for a very reasonable cost. All of it is in good condition with concrete style sleepers. This is not a n issue as all the flexi is for the behind the scenes layout.
In the meantime I have been thinking.. is my station area long enough? If I wanted to run the full 16car shinkansen, I would need a straight twice as long. This would be possible, but with a very different design. hmmmmm...

I need to start this very soon as our first child arrives at the end of January 2010. Theres one peice of advice that I am taking very seriously from friends; Get stuff done now, as you will have no time afterwards!! ;-)

Thursday, July 30, 2009

new batch of track arrived

a considerable amount of kato track has arrived. I found a very reliable kato track dealer on ebay (shop here). now i have enough to build the yamanote station area (4 platforms) and the associated corners. I just need to find secondhand flexi for the hidden fiddle yard so that I can create a loop.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

time to dig deep

Now that the base board is done.. I'm going to have to find some funds to buy lots of track. All the track on show will probably be kato unitrack as its easy to fit together and looks good. It also has the added benefit that it fits well with all kato scenery. The ares that will be hidden (ie the shuffleyards and turning sections), will be built using secondhand flexi track as the look.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Initial base board complete

Here is a pic of the inital baseboard. Both of the ends easily slide away form the middle, so that once this section is complete, i can easily insert another section and continue modelling.



I thought I would also upload some pics of 2 of my locos

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Arduino automation

A friend at work pointed me towards an Arduino board. If you're like me and a bit geeky and want propper automation then this is the way forward. It allows me to program my electronics with easy timers and random functions. It can then flick points using a %V controller circuit across an SPDT.
www.arduino.cc for more info.
You can pick up different size boards easily from ebay.

I have borrowed an arduino board from my friend so once I have something up and running I will post it here.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Automating the model railway..

Its been quite hard finding info on how to do this.. but I found quite a lot info at this site...
http://home.cogeco.ca/~rpaisley4/

This article interests me as it will be perfect for the yamanote station for the trains to run in and out of the platforms
http://home.cogeco.ca/~rpaisley4/AutoRevCheap.html

ideas for a layout

I'm still deciding what to do as a layout, but I think one section would be a yamanote line station with a shinkansen line above attached to it. The Shinkansen line would be the main line for the complete layout, while the yamanote line will be localised to this area.