#model railroads

[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.

[kingthomasfan121]

Last month’s submission for the #AwdryDioramaChallenge!

[athoughtfullyautomaticcollection]

A Model City

I’ve given up on real cities. In the model railroad city of Passamygaskeag, the trains run on time. The kittens go looking for tasty little people in the streets. And all is well…if you are a cat.“Come out, come out, from wherever you are!”

[alyssa-ai]

It's time to go home, I love the journey on this little regional train that crosses the countryside 😊

[adventurelandia]

Model for Disneyland's Big Thunder Mountain Railroad

[welldigger62]

From East Lansing Michigan-

Went with a friend to a model railroad show in East Lansing. No, I don’t have a model set but my son in law is building one.

The whole venue was as large as a football field and there were so many people there that you could hardly move.

It’s amazing the amount of detail that goes into these. The sets in the bottom two pictures are made so they can be taken down after the show.

I had no idea that there was that much interest in model railroads any more. A good day. 😃

Happy Sunday folks 😊

[aboutoriginality]

[woodsmanwife]

My beautiful Florida wife is modeling on the railroad tracks. Right behind me, cars were slowing down to watch as she took her dress off. It was the middle of the day, probably a few drivers on their lunch breaks. I hope they enjoyed the show.

The tracks are such a cool spot to take photos.

[ai-satin-chic]

"Yeah, its.. uh.. great, but it's not quite the railing I meant".

[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.

[trainsinanime]

Over the past few weeks, I built a new model railroad module.

It's a tiny trestle bridge, based on plans from the Great Northern Railway. I'm calling it the Nicholson Creek Bridge, because I had hours and hours of old Jenny Nicholson videos on in the background while I was working on this.

(Actually, now that I think about this, I hope this doesn't get read as an insult, because the river here is literally not that deep.)

Anyway, some tech specs: N scale, follows the T-Trak module standard but slightly modified (58 mm distance front to edge of track bed, instead of 38 mm normally), and this time single-track. There are power connections hidden underneath.

The main point is the bridge, of course, a classic american staple. We don't have these kind of wooden bridges in Europe. Although, maybe we should?

The bridge is the main thing here. The main sections ("bents") are constructed out of 2x2 mm balsa wood. The long line on top is 3x3 mm pine, and the reinforcements between the bents are 1x1 mm linden. The track is flex-track from Fleischmann (former Roco) mostly because I could remember their order number the most easily when I went to my local model railroad store (it's 22200). The wood is mostly Amazon, except for the small 1x1 mm profiles, which I got from a local architecture supply store. Next time I'm doing that for all the wood pieces, though I still have plenty of supply left.

I'm really happy with the result, so trust me when I say that I see lots of things I could have done better, I mean this not in a self-deprecating way, but in a "I should build another one of these!" ways.

The most obvious changes would probably be that the 2.0 version of the bridge would be longer, go either through desert or over an actual river (I haven't decided yet, either sounds good), have different track with much wider ties, more reinforcements between the pilers for a more regular look, and I'd color it. But those are all just theoretical concerns at the moment.

(By the way, carrying strength of the bridge is not an issue at all, it's rock-solid with anything I've put on it. I think the 3x3 mm pine stringers would be sufficient already without any of the structure underneath, partly because of the small size and cube square law concerns, partly because I have one long beam under each rail instead of short sections from bent to bent.)

And to close things out, some construction pictures:

Building the structure:

Building the frames:

Building the frames and placing them to test the landscape:

Let me know if you have any questions!

[thunderbirdxart]

From the Lower Decks mobile game.

[athoughtfullyautomaticcollection]

Timorous - 54 words

Timorous? No! Cautious, a bit conservative – with a sister like Sabrina, if you are late to supper, you are too late.I am described as serious, studied, and even wise for my age. But Timorous?I stalk my father’s model railroad like Catzilla – scattering all before me. Run!Timorous, no, not me!

[nostalgicfun]

Grand Champions Micro Minis 💙

[sharknoseshenanigans1951]

STEAM POWER RAHHHH

I LOVE NEW YORK CENTRAL 4-6-4 HUDSON STEAM LOCOMOTIVES

HERES A COOL VIDEO

AND GIFS

[infinitybal1233]

Everyone, meet Runt. She’s the cutest menace on the island >:3