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!! ;-)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Kato fixed track

Kato has a snap and click type track for N scale called unitrack. Whil eI want to use flexitrack for my layout.. some peices (ie the double viaduct) may use the fixed track as it looks better. I found these images for mesaurements for extra scenery. platforms etc.
Looks like 33mm between each rack and if there is an island platform then 66mm.

makers of japanese model railway

Just a quick post to list the makers of japanese model railway...
Kato - (UK suplier - no sponsor, ebay)
Modemo - ebay
Tomix - ebay

first post

Hi
Ive decided to start a blog for my new model railway. I've always been a fan on N Gauge layouts and decided to do one myself. I'm also a big fan of anything Japanese and decided to model a fictious shinkansen station line. You might have guessed the name of this station from the title of the blog... Shin Kaizen.
Why Shin Kaizen? you may ask. Kaizen is the japanese philosophy of contiunuous improvement and thats what my layout is going to be. Rather than a fixed model railway, its going to be modulised and automated. Its more about building the railway rather than running a railway.

Through this blog, I'm going to try and find out as much as I can regarding modulaising model railways, Japanese train models and general chit chat.

So anyways.. now I've got to do quite a bit of research...

Rich