#Model Train

[sibmakesart]

day 4 of the ✨ONE PIECE ADVENT CALENDAR✨

[thunderstruck9]

Andrzej Jackowski (British, 1947), Standing Train II, 1997. Oil on canvas, 141.7 x 162.5 cm. National Museum Cardiff

[ghostowlattic]

Model Train Garden

[whirligig-girl]

Eaurp Guz's roughly 1:30 scale live-steam model of Slaibsgloth Coal Railroad No.32, a ~1.6 meter gauge 2-8-8-2 garratt steam locomotive built on planet Mellanus in (earth-)year 2346 and retired in 2379 (two years ago) for service bringing coal carriages from the coal pits up to the interchange at the Glooiw & North Eastern. It is unusual for a coal burning steam engine to remain in revenue service--the majority that remained in use after the development of Diesel-Hydraulics were decommissioned with nuclear-powered railway electrification in the 2360s, and the ones that remained were mostly converted to oil burning. The Slaibsgloth steam engines meanwhile persisted right up until the closure of the coal mine. Glooiw & North Eastern has acquired the 40 locomotives. Their fates are uncertain but railway preservation groups remain optimistic.

When Guz first came aboard the Cerritos she was overworking herself constantly, which lead to her being so tired that she was leaving residues on the consoles and generally doing sloppier work. It turned out that Guz had been working double shifts, and when Billups found out he put a stop to that. That's when Guz turned to a hobby she'd done a lot of before joining starfleet--model rocketry. Armed with far more advanced tools than she'd had on Mellanus, she made accurate working model replicas of real historical prewarp spacecraft from a variety of planets and would fly them in real space whenever possible.

Eventually, she also found a new appreciation for her childhood love of trains, and her model-making skills and tools translated well to model railroading as well. She has a little shelf layout in storage that she occasionally tinkers with, and she runs large scale model trains on the holodeck. She could run full-scale holographic trains on the holodeck too of course, but it wouldn't be nearly as satisfying. And then there's the 1:5600 scale BM-gauge railroad she's building on a microscope slide! (Bµ gauge is "Byte micrometer" gauge or a track spacing of 256 µm)

Guz eventually wants to build a roughly 1:80 scale modular layout of the Slaibsgloth Coal Mine, with smaller scale electric-powered models of the Slaibsgloth coal-burning steam engines and enough track to wrap around a room and give them a good run, but unless she can rally support for a Cerritos chapter of the Starfleet Rail Transport Modelling Club or she can get her own crew quarters, it's a pipe dream--or maybe something for her retirement.

Replicators and advanced computer aided design tools reduce the amount of time it takes to get modelling projects done by whatever factor is desired. Technically Guz could probably replicate fully assembled working models as long as they fit in the replicator bed, but where's the fun in that? But she's still only got so much time in an off-shift, and doing it 'properly,' scratch-built using machine tools like 'real' modellers on Mellanus, or manually defining all of the geometry in a CAD program like modellers on Earth, would take too much time.

see also: alt versions of the locomotive.

[higherentity]

[missedmilemarkers]

[oliviackaotix-blog]

Made @dogsamadoodles ‘s Slick Oil, she has rotatable wheels so she can move like an actual toy train. Unfortunately there are a lot of errors and inaccuracies, didn’t have enough yellow clay to make her body bigger, I realized after it was baked that four wheels on each side would not fit so I had to break off the extra axels/legs, and the wheels are a bit wonky (note to self: add a stopper on the inner axels as well next time) but I made this for the funsies so it’s not too big of a deal, am still proud of this for being my first clay model to have moving parts.

[trainsinanime]

Today was a successful day! I've been dreaming of getting the Olympian Hiawatha from Katy for literally years (I think I first thought of it 2016 or 2017?), but it was always hard to justify. It's cheap per car, but not cheap in total, and I already have several Kato american train packages (Super Chief and Broadway Limited), and at well over a meter long each, they're not actually all that practical. But they are cool. Anyway, one of the german importers for Kato had sets of this at basically every train show, and it seems they finally wanted to get rid of them, so they were now heavily discounted: 100€ for the full nine-car set with display tracks. Well, that was not a hard decision.

I don't have the right locomotives yet, they didn't have those there. My options right now are to buy the FP7s from Kato, or wait until someone makes the Bipolars or Little Joes in N scale, maybe, eventually, some day. I do know one store in Germany that still has a very limited number of the FP7s in stock unless their website is lying. If I go that route, do I need an A-B-A set or is A-B enough? …do I want an A-B-A set? Will I put Digitrax decoders in them or solder myself? The last one's actually easy, soldering in normal decoders is easy enough, cheaper, and in my experience it works better.

[kumatajdg]

Trojan Makes a Friend (and other stories)

[zoomar]

This one has bums

[spockvarietyhour]

Columbo breaks into your house and plays with your trains.

[blockygraphics]

PE02339_WMF, created August 11, 1997; clip art included with Microsoft Works 4.5.

[lomotunes2008]

We're now running substantially less colourful trains 🎉

[eopederson]

Farewell to the 2023-24 Holiday Season.

Epiphany (Three Kings Day) marks the traditional end of the holidays

This model train set was installed at the U.S. National Botanical Garden on the National Mall for the holidays and was a great draw for children and adults alike.

[whirligig-girl]

[pigswithwings]

"Your attention, please. Are there any Polar Express passengers in need of refreshment?"

Hot Chocolate! (The Polar Express)

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