kootenaydivision

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More 1970s FM footage!

Since my last post, another video has been posted. What a time to be online! This one features H24-66 “Trainmasters” working in the Trail smelter, with a wig-wag crossing signal, a business car on a freight train, and lots of CLC! Video by Peter Layland, edited by Nolan Layland

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1970s footage from Nelson

Freshly uploaded from the Nelson museum is a series of videos by Al Peterson. Highlights: 2-8-0 3716 with the BC museum train at Castlegar (3716 is still running on the KVSR at Summerland) Junked out lease power including PNC GP7s and a BLE F unit A full variety of CP CLC and GMD power Taghum during highway bridge construction I was so thoroughly stoked to see this.

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Layout update/tour, January 2023

Video update this time!

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How to model an avalanche path

How to model an avalanche path

If you google “how to model an avalanche”, you’re likely to turn up almost entirely results about computer modeling of avalanches. Not helpful! I went into this one mostly on my own. In the end I’ll have 2 avalanche paths on the KD – The McRae canyon/Paulson Gap slops with snowshed, and one at mile 93.6 of the Nelson sub along Kootenay Lake with a slide fence and perhaps signals. The latter is a…

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Order 21 to Passenger Extra 4063 West

Order 21 to Passenger Extra 4063 West

That’s right – The Canadian has arrived, detoured from Dunmore, AB, to Hope, BC. A perfect showcase to my main work this year – scenery between Farron and Fife. Here she is, the Grande Dame of Canadian rail, at the newly forested area east of Fife. The Canadian drifts downgrade at track speed across the Sutherland Creek fill In a roundabout way, the introduction of Rapido’s HO scale Canadian…

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Video – Time Table and Train Order operations on the N Scale Kootenay Division So this is what I spent the week making. You can see a bunch of stuff in there that I'll post about later - promise!

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General update (2019)

Now, where did I leave off? Redesign of the back end, some op sessions? Right.

2019 has been pretty busy for me. I bought my first house! (the basement is a couple hundred feet too small to hold the KD, so it’s not coming with.) That alone took much of my time and, of course, money. My parents remodeled their kitchen, and I helped – a lot. I also got the most devilishly lovely cat who, as it…

[kootenaydivision]

Northern Rails op session and leadup

Northern Rails op session and leadup

I didn’t forget about my blog! It’s just hard to make interesting posts sometimes.

After the redesign, I had an op session. It went well. I went back to doing some scenery – I might do a post on that later. That’s not what this one is about.

With Cranbrook in, I took another look at Nelson sub. operations. I decided to keep the 2 Cranbrook-Nelson freights each way, but get Creston in the mix. I…

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Layout redesign - Cranbrook to Creston

Layout redesign – Cranbrook to Creston

An operator at a session last year unintentionally unleashed a demon on my layout.

“When are you going to put in Creston?”

When…when am I….well, first I have to figure out the track plan and proper operations, which have an impact on Nelson and Cranbrook. Looking into those, I realized I had a problem – the east siding switch of Creston was only about 400 feet from the west siding switch of…

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LED Layout Lighting - Blindingly Bright!

LED Layout Lighting – Blindingly Bright!

One of my projects recently was to light my layout properly. I did this in August, and I’m only blogging about it now. Yikes! They were visible in my last 2 posts, so you’ve probably been wondering how I did it.

Power limitations are something I’ve run into time and time again in building this layout – without a panel replacement and a new service from the local transformer, I was limited to a…

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ESU Loksound DCC Sound installation in a Life-Like C-Liner

ESU Loksound DCC Sound installation in a Life-Like C-Liner

It’s the Kootenay Division, ca. 1970 – that means a lot of Fairbanks-Morse/Canadian Locomotive Company power. I’ll be covering the H16-44s in another post, but this is about my C-Liners. C-Liners were only produced in N scale by Life-Like in a DCC incompatible format. There’s a good review on Spookshow.net detailing them – they’re great runners, powerful pullers, and you can’t drop a decoder into…

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Dust off your switchers - September op session

Dust off your switchers – September op session

Remember my last post? My last op session? Seems like forever ago. I’ve been extraordinarily busy since, well, February. In that time I’ve done a few things: -Added a valence -Carved some sweet rocks -Commissioned 8 more H16-44s I’ll blog about those later. I spent the better part of last week cleaning up – not much has changed operationally, but I’ll go into the changes at the end. This was an…

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A Tale of 3 Op Sessions

A Tale of 3 Op Sessions

It’s been fairly quiet on this site recently. Don’t worry, I’ve been doing a LOT of photography, which is great for the ol’ train budget. In April, I hosted 3 op sessions in 4 weeks, plus another in May. (The first session is chronicled in this post)  They were all markedly different! Op Session the First The first run was with non-train friends – two couples. It went very well, all the trains…

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April Ops and winter changes!

April Ops and winter changes!

This is going to be a busy month for ops. I’ve got 3 sessions scheduled with 3 different groups of people. The first one was last weekend. What’s changed since my last post? I’ve been tweaking the crap out of JMRI. I changed the tracks in Nelson so that 5-7 were each assigned to a particular train (5 is 81 west and 90 east, 6 is 87 west and 92 east, etc) I changed the plan for Nelson yard –…

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Changes to Nelson Yard, Part 1

Changes to Nelson Yard, Part 1

Two things led me to make some fairly major changes to Nelson, the largest yard on the layout, and one that has its own assigned switch crew (and possibly 2 in the future) The first was a comment from the yard crew, mixed in with others from my last op session, that it would be nice if Nelson had a yard lead so the switch job wouldn’t need to clear the main. No problem! I decided to pull out 2 of…

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Annual Ops Session?

Annual? Maybe, sure seems like it! I made one major operational change before the session. I felt the Hotshot to Trail wasn’t working in its current configuration. I had to lose too many cars off it to give it the room in its consist to pick up random cars from Nelson and Castlegar and still fit into the shortish (1700′) staging track at Trail, so I made a new train that simply runs from Nelson…

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So I tried something new...

So I tried something new…

I ran an operating session solely with people who know little to nothing about trains. Believe it or not, I’m planning to do it again, but first, why it all fell apart! Here’s the premise – make up a guide that covers everything to do with my operation, have people read it over, and all will be well. Was it? Well…considering said guide was 11 pages long, I don’t think people remembered it. This…