Yay, inner loop was finally affixed, track was cleaned and I was running two trains at once the other day. Also, MTH RK y6b arrived. Damned what a neat machine. Here's a pic from last week, lots more detail work to do, (need to permanently affix telephone poles in their new holes, shave the plastic base off of the people and affix them, wire the switches and lights for the buildings, doo-dads (telephone booths, benches, mailboxes etc) but its getting there, plus at this point at least everything is purchased, now its just doing and placement P.S. the blur in the background is an MPC era Silver Spike Amtrak set. http://home.comcast.net/~b-sinn/layout2.jpg
Very nice work! DO you have more pics? What size layout is 'average' in O scale? whats yours run at? Take care.
Thanks for the kudos, there isnt a heck of a lot in the O scale forums, so I wanted to post something to perk them up a bit. Actually, I pulled a huge thumb out of my kiester today and got busy on a little something on the long wall in the background. My layout is approximately 15-16' by 4'. Here is another shot with some of todays handiwork evident, it's amazing what a little bit of paint, white glue/water mix and some fan blown ground foam will do for a background Picasso I'm not, but it still makes a world of difference looking at it. http://home.comcast.net/~b-sinn/layout3.jpg Sorry for the fuzziness, I keep taking these pictures at night and my digital just isn't up to the low light task.
Bill I like the pics too. keep em coming. Get a cheap clamp lamp or two for more light you'll be amazed at the difference. As for scenery. It looks good to me. I find that generally O scalers aren't as savvy with scenery as the other scales. i think part of it is that O scalers want to keep a little bit of the toy train quality to their layouts. Atleast thats why I like three rail.
Traingeekboy, At the moment I have 3 clamp lights, 1 of them is a 150 watt halogen, the other 2 are 60 watt soft white lights. I am going to be switching one of the others over to a 150 watt halogen shortly. I have a 650 watt high 8 movie light bolted in above the layout, but bugs catch on fire when they hit it so smoke pours out of it and I keep watching burning bug carcasses careen on to the layout from above. I like smoking accesories but thats taking it a bit far. . Aside from that the only trouble I have noticed with the lighting is that I really have no place to hang them aside from the end of the garage door track I'd really like to move the table and install some nice track lights, still considering the idea. As for the scenery, I really just wanted something with enough detail that it was obvious what things were supposed to be. I have seen a lot of the full on scalers get bogged down with projects because of the required time frame when you are talking about full on 'scale' work. Hence the ongoing layout that never gets past trackwork. I'm definately not knocking the scalers though, some of the stuff I have seen on these boards just makes me drool with envy but I myself am working fulltime, have returned to school fulltime and have a family that takes up a lot of time. Most of the projects I do have to be squeezed into a relatively short 5 or 6 hour time period at max, and I'm sorta anal about completing projects once I start them. I have a hard time putting something down and then finishing it the next day or following week. All I really wanted when I started this project was someplace where I could run semi-scale trains in a semi-scale location, but not in a 'green carpet with grossly out-of-scale tinplate accessories' kind of way. Again, not knocking those who like that type of thing, its just that its not *my* kind of thing. My family doesn't really 'get' my obsession with this, but I think they are surprised whats coming out of that unused space in the garage I requested a few months back. I think they are pretty impressed at what you can do with 'Toy Trains'. I'm going to take a few more pictures later tonight and I'll post them if they turn out half decent, but my z-750 transformer with IR remote just arrived, *YAY* I can finally program my UP turbine. Gotta run and play with toys... P.S. geek I love your signature.....
OK a few more pictures.... http://home.comcast.net/~b-sinn/layout4.jpg http://home.comcast.net/~b-sinn/layout5.jpg http://home.comcast.net/~b-sinn/layout6.jpg http://home.comcast.net/~b-sinn/layout7.jpg http://home.comcast.net/~b-sinn/layoutstitch.jpg I like the z750, neat stuff, but the bell and whistle are marked backwards well at least for the Y6B, I didn't get a chance to try it with the turbine yet.
Wow great shots! I really like it. I especially like the sky shot that shows the track layout. Very nice!
Thanks, luckily for me my photoshops skills make up a little bit for what I lack in photographic skills. This 'skyview' turned out much better than the last one. Still kinda hard to stitch stuff like that by hand though :|
hmmm stitch... this sounds like the verbage of a pro. I'm taking a photoshop class right now i'm learning skillz I had no idea existed.
Bill S After a long summer I too am getting back to working on the layout. I'm new here but not new to O gauge. Does this site ahve a dominating scale H O S N ????
Hello Fisher welcome to the boards, I can't really say which is more dominating, HO or N, definately not O though (as you can probably tell from number of posts) I think most of the 3 railers hang out over on the CTT boards, but I like the fact that a lot of the guys here read posts out of the 'normal' gauge if the topic looks promising, and the fact that a lot of these guys are big time rail fans and if I have a stupid question like 'Did the UP ever use turbines to pull a passenger consist?' I'll have an answer to my question in a few hours time.
Bill, I am considering purchasing a Rail King Allegheny. Can you/anyone, comment on its performance? Is it 2 or 3 rail?? What are the CTT boards? Denis
Sorry I haven't gotten back to you on that one, I recently reformatted and forgot my original login name for a week or two. I have not yet seen the allegheny in action. I am actually having a little bit of trouble with the mallet I purchased recently, seems as though once the locomotive has been running a short period of time, it starts to jump and act erratically until the trailing power truck finally jumps the track and shorts it into stopping. :-(. Oh well, I'm going to have to rip into it shortly and check it out. If you do find anything out about the 2-6-6-6 do let us know .
