Progress!! We've finally made some further progress... TG has lost the cast, we have the shelf brackets up in the room, and we have some track laid... Here we are last week painting the base ground color Here's the shelf up on the wall. We chose 48" for the bracket height (plus 2 inches of foam) so that it's at a nice eye level for her if standing or kneeling on the bed. The bed is moving out away from the wall for other reasons, which works out nicely. Here she is installing the track. I soldered the rail feeders and laid the first turnout. She did the rest, with a little coaching. Here's the progress so far. We're going to tackle the flex-track segments on the next work session. (yes, that knife was picked up and put away a few moments after the picture was taken... as were the rest of the tools...) Could use some advice on some good-looking but beginner-level building kits. She wants a cupcake factory (bakery / mill), a button factory, and a farm... I'd like to squeeze in some sort of small tank facility like a fuel dealer or something, and a team track or general freight house.
Good for you two! Looks like you two will be having alot of fun. I cant wait till my son is ready for his first layout (9 weeks old today). This is what the hobby is all about. She is lucky to have someone knowledgable in her corner as she begins her layout. Also, fine job letting her pay for the loco with her own money. She will be learning more then model railroading on this layout.
As others have pointed out, it looks like this is shaping up to be an excellent father/daughter project, and, best of all, you guys are having fun doing it! I've been talking about building my next, private layout (for me!), which I want to be an O scale, two-rail traction layout. And it's starting to look like I may have to do a shelf layout in my bedroom, instead of a bigger layout in (what was) the "train room." So, I'm watching your guys' progress on this project with great interest to get ideas for my next one. Anyway... Great job thus far, and can't wait to see further progress. BTW, For industries, does she want old, brick-like buildings or more modern steel ones for the structures on the layout?
Thanks, Komachi! I don't think she really has a preference old vs. modern, though it will be a vaguely modern, semi-rural setting. We could probably go either way or even a mix. I'd like to generate some different ideas from amongst kits that would be build-able by her, and see what her preferences are. We started from "What should your cupcake factory look like?" ... "A giant cupcake" ... to settling on some sort of building with a cupcake billboard or marquee on top of it...
Well, maybe when her scratchbuilding skills get a little better, she can make a giant cupcake cafe, or something to that effect... but, yeah, right now, the billboard sounds like a better way to go. I would also go with a good mix of brick and modern, not only for variety, but just to give the town a sense of history. I would look at DPM's offerings for kits to get ideas, or look at both DPM and Walther's Cornerstone modular walls to custom build structures for the layout. Same with Pikestuff's offerings. Have her browse through the Walther's catalogue (or website), or the kits at your local hobby shop and see what catches her fancy. My only suggestion would be to measure the "real estate" you have available for each structures' footprint and build mock-ups for each to double/tripple check that you have enough room available for everything (which is what I'm doing with the RF&L, until I can get the kits built). Just my 20 yen (equivalent to .02 USD) on the subject.
Update: 3/27/11 We got a little work done tonight. We measured and cut two of the spur tracks, so I can add feeders and she can install them. We will need to get two more pieces of flex track to finish the tracklaying. I find that being used to N scale, I'm vastly underestimating the amount of track required! We also installed the three Caboose ground throws. On one of them I had to extend the throwbar with a bit of 1/32" wire to run it under one of the spurs. I dug a trench, bent the wire to shape, and looped the ends around the turnout throwbar and the switch machine arm. I'll slip a cover sheet of .020 styrene over the wire before installing the spur to protect it from ballast. We also temporarily hooked some wire to the ends of the rails and did a test run. It's a little jumpy, but the wire connections aren't good and the loco has only one wired truck for pickup. Here's a video.
Very slow progress... the attention span of a 10-year-old girl has something to do with that... Bessie scored a new stock car from the clearance rack for $3... We also barely got the wiring hooked up, and decided to toss some of my old rolling stock on the yard tracks. More importantly, the structure planning is stabilizing (again, quite a feat, given the age of the primary designer). The spot where the foam blocks are stacked up will be a dairy factory, making milk and ice cream products. There will also be a little ice cream shop in town. Along the front edge of the layout will be a small stockyard for offloading dairy cows only... no beef cattle on this railroad. Down at the far end will be the farm, along with maybe a small piece of a rural town street...
Sometimes the attention span of a 35 year-old can be the same... Way to go, "Bargain" Bessie!!! Lookin' good so far!!! Sounds like a good plan thus far. Can't wait to see how it turns out!!!
Toy store? toy store? You mentioned toy store. I built (actually just finished and detailed a kit) a toy store of sorts as a Christmas present for my late mother-in-law who built and clothed dolls. After my mother-in-law's passing, the store returned to me and I plan to place it in the amusement district of my Island Seaport layout under construction. My late mother-in-law's actual house from Hutchinson, Kansas will be nearby... A bakery should not be too difficult, if you can enough different sizes of beads to stack and decorate as wedding cakes for the front window. I used the same kit as the doll store for a gift for a model railroader friend whose wife raised little finches. The store became Birdy's Pets. The cages are bar patterns drawn in Photoshop, printed out and wrapped around ravious wood shapes. Similar print-out for the venetian blinds in Dollie's Dollys. A toy store MIGHT be a toy train store, and I have heard of models of model train stores, with at least a sign to identify them. This is not a toy trains STORE but it doesrelate to model trains... Anyway, you and Twingirl have fun with your layout...
LOL! Those are AWESOME, Kenneth! Thanks for sharing them! I'm not quite sure how we'll do the bakery and ice cream shop. The bakery at least used to specialize in cupcakes, so those might be a bit tricky, even in HO... maybe map pin heads or something. I love the shed with the model railroad layout. That's pretty cool.
Still don't have all the wiring done. But we did get some new motive power. This one actually works. Could use some suggestions on how to upgrade all these old freight cars to knuckle couplers. they're all horn-hook, and nearly all truck-mounted.
remove trucks. remove wheels take a dremel with a small sawblade, and lop off coupler boxes. (handsaws work too, less satisfying.) Note: be sure to not hit the trucks themselves. dispose of coupler boxes drill hole in the middle fo the end of the car for a 2-56 screw, slightly smaller than so the screw can tap it's own grooves mount new Kadee coupler box (black plastic thing comes with couplers) by gluing top three-sided plate to bottom of train car, with the holes lined up. insert coupler and brass centering "spring" (spring not mandatory) screw bottom plate onto car, with screw going through holes. Now, depending on manufacturers, some cars may sit higher or lower than others. You can lwer couplers by putting small Kadee washers into the coupler box, or raise the car by putting them on the truck bolster. (May require you to screw-mount trucks) If it's a siginificant difference, you may have to go with top or bottom mount coupler shanks.
Thanks for the step by step, Morgan. I presume that (seeing as Micro-Trains has 'em in N) I I poke about the Kadee site I'll find a kit that has the coupler boxes, screws, springs and couplers? And probably the matching size drill & tap set too?
Here are some ideas for ice cream and bakery shop. I have a 2 inch tall plastic ice cream cone, with one dip of vanilla, one dip of strawberry, and a cherry on top. I figure in HO scale, that would be a little3 over 11 and a half feet tall. Would that be something you would want to use as part of the sign and advertising above your ice cream shop. It has been sitting in my surplus junk box for 25 years. PM me if you would like me to send it to you. Actual scale cupcakes-- that's difficult. You might take the plastic insulation off a length of wire, cut the resulting tubing into length a millimeter or so high. You might want to paint the chunk of insulation before cutting with a pastry-colored color. The paint might well get chipped during the cutting prodcess, but you could set the pieces- I mean cupcakes- on double-stick tape to repaint them. Finally, dab each one with a dollop of thick artists acrylic paint for icing. Warning- for serious modelers over age 5 or 6 only. Toddlers might think they are actually to eat. Although they are so small, they wouldn't look like they were worth the effort, and if made with safe materials, eating them wouldn't do too much damage even to a bambino. Larger cupcakes for a sign- larger than scale cupcakes but smaller than real cupcakes? You might do to a craft store and look in the charm or jewerly making section. Now for an actual building shaped like a cupcake, the main body of the building will be up to you but I have an idea for icing. I used to be a TV producer-- for extremely low-budget local commercials. Actually usually no budget becasue ads were sold by TV time salesmen who got a commission ONLY for TV time sold, not for production costs. All production charges had to be approved by salesmen, and since they got no commission on production, they wanted to give it away. A furniture store was celebrating 50 years in business and they wanted to have an anniversary sale. I thought they might start or end the ad with the store owner and his family around a big birthday/ anniversary cake, with candles blazing. They thought that was a great idea. Were they going to have a cake? NO- but I ought to come up with one for the ad. And no budget for a cake. I used an old reel for holding 2 inch wide television broadcast videtape, wrapped cardboard around it to make a cake shape, and ICED it with a $1 tube of latex caulk. I spread the overall icing with a throwaway plastic picnic knife, and then made decorative swirls on the cake with beads of caulk squeezed from the caulk gun. When it set, I spray painted the overall cake with spray paint, and used acrylic paint and a brush to color the decoratiive icing stuff. Delicious looking. But the wondered why we didn't buy him a cake he could eat. You could use that technique to "ice" the roof of a cupcake-shaped building.
Wow... I can't believe it's been 14 months... I finally got something done on this layout. I picked up this little Bar Mills kit from the LHS a while back... finally got around to building it. It's the first actual structure to make it onto the layout. Next up will be a stockyard, which I hope to get an hour of TwinGirl's time to help with (she's busy with school and volleyball...). We thought and thought for a long while how to get the stockyard kit onto the angled siding, and finally decided to move it to behind the straight sidings. That should make bashing it much easier. Anywho, here's the passenger stop, along with some in-progress photos. I still have a couple of things to fix, and details to add, plus scenery around it. Passenger / Baggage Depot by BGTwinDad, on Flickr She's still interested in at least having the layout, and protests loudly any time I question her about it... just doesn't seem to have much time to work on it. Her friends all think it's "cool", which is nice...
