The Plan

It's all finally come together. Meet the Reading and Northern: White Haven to Rockport. I'm pleased to say that everything more or less has a real-life counterpart. Naturally, quite a few liberties were taken in order to make things "work," but how often can one avoid taking liberties when designing a layout?



Shown above is the finished plan. Prior blog installments trace many of the initial ideas and interim revisions involved in reaching this point. For example, the switch is now officially "in," and it represents the tail end of the Hayes Creek Branch instead of a nameless siding. Although this branch is long gone, it split off the LV main just south of Lehigh Tannery (below)—which, as you can see on the plan, is now Tannery, the real town's original name, instead of the fictional Mud Run.



Crystallizing all of the vague, fluid notions I've had up to now into a final plan will allow me to forge ahead with scenery and structure construction.

More Revisions

I suppose you can call me fickle. After declaring the name of the layout to be White Haven Junction, I've started not liking it as much. Traditionally layouts are named for the railroad that's being modeled; in my case, it's the Reading, Blue Mountain and Northern, or simply Reading and Northern, as the real railroad often calls itself. So, that's now the layout's name. Further, the specific portion of a line represented—a division, subdivision, branch or locale—is often tacked on, which in my case may either be Lehigh Gorge or Rockport.



Some of these changes were inspired as I revised part of the layout plan itself: I've moved the (originally fictional) passenger station from the right end of the upper loop to inside the lower loop, which corresponds quite well to the setting for the Rockport station (above), surrounded as it is by spectacular rock cliffs, from which it gets its name. The layout will also include the road that descends along a small gorge down to the station.



With the station now gone from the upper loop, the model town, such as it is, can now more accurately represent Lehigh Tannery (above). And now I'm torn whether to name it Mud Run, the fictional name I'd previously chosen, or Lehigh Tannery, for the sake of accuracy. I'm likewise divided about the tunnel; initially it was to be the Rockport tunnel, representing both ends; but it would be geographically more accurate to make the lower portal Rockport (below), and the upper portal White Haven—that which started this whole naming game.



Meanwhile, I'm trying to decide what to do about the new switch I've just completed. Although I hadn't planned on it, I'm increasingly tempted to install it in the layout. This would require removing and replacing a fairly substantial chunk of track—that is, assuming I can decide where to put the switch. There are a couple of short sidings on the Reading and Northern line in the gorge (example below); I suspect they once served industries, now long gone, and appear to be used for temporary equipment storage.



If nothing else, finalizing these decisions will serve as a good distraction from a rather disastrous gearbox modification attempt.

Square One

I'm back to it. Having recently struck upon what seemed like a reasonable means of increasing the gear reduction, I launched into the modification project with high hopes. The concept: add another reduction gear by splicing two gearboxes together.

This turned out to be much more viable than nearly any other idea I'd entertained up to now, most all of which involved worm/worm gear sets. While I have some mighty small worms (from Mikroantriebe), none of them had the right pitch.



The gearbox expansion project got off to a reasonably good start; it appeared there was just enough play in the middle compound gear for another one to engage it, so I chopped up two gearboxes and shaved their sides by nearly microscopic amounts until the gears meshed.



I knew going in that there would be no way to simply glue the two gearboxes together: they're made from a type of engineering plastic to which nothing will bond. But I continued working, confident that an idea would pop up eventually.



Sure enough, an idea emerged, a kind of brute-force approach: using CA and splicing plates the full size of the gearbox sides to produce the largest bonding surface areas possible, in the hopes that it would compensate for an otherwise very weak bond. Attaching thin stainless steel strips cut to fit the gearbox with CA, I began to suspect that my crazy idea might actually work. It was strong enough to survive the stresses of replacing the gears, which required considerable flexing of the joints—the acid test.



After a bit of trimming, fiddling and fitting, I managed to get the gearbox working nicely. The next task was getting it to stay in place on the chassis without the shell, since that was going to be replaced anyway. I found that the direct approach worked quite well: I simply glued the gearbox right to the chassis; thus the gearbox itself served to splice the two chassis parts together. To ensure that I hadn't bungled the project, I applied power directly to the motor, and smiled with satisfaction (tinged with some relief) as the gears all spun merrily.



At this point I began learning some valuable lessons. My plan was to eliminate the contact springs, and hard-wire the truck electrical tabs right to the motor. But as I replaced the powered truck—which required some twisting forces to be applied—I discovered that the springs do more than conduct current... they also hold everything together and keep things properly positioned. Without the springs, the pickup parts inside the truck sides are free to pop out the top. Furthermore, the truck can slide side to side, instead of just rotate, and the springs keep it more or less centered.



And at this point I started becoming progressively more impressed with the designers of these "toys." A remarkable amount of very clever engineering went into their development. They solved a great many problems that I have no hope of addressing myself, even as I struggle to come up with entirely new drivetrain designs. So, I temporarily attached the original metal strips installed in the shell directly to the chassis so that I could make a test-run. And that's where things began to go south quickly.

First, the unit would run only in one direction; even though it tested fine on the workbench, something was binding when the throttle was reversed. Worse, the direction in which it did run was with the power truck facing forward, which resulted in some slippage. Plus there was a tremendous amount of vibration; the unit literally shook itself off the tracks a couple of times.

Hoping that I could spot the binding problem, I picked the unit up off the track and promptly dropped it on the floor, whereupon it shattered into several pieces (which is why there are no more photos). And that brought an end to this project. Quite a contrast to the wildly successful switch project!

Although the disappointing experience has not destroyed my plans to try again with a different approach, it certainly set me back. Convinced in advance that I'd aced the drivetrain modification problem, I became aware of the need to reign in my hubris. It also further deepened my admiration of the designers: they overcame a great many obstacles, and I was even more amazed that the things ran at all.

So, what's next? For the short term, I'll be looking to address performance issues with a pulse width modulation type throttle, which has been demonstrated to get the minimum speed down to a satisfactory rate.

Ultimately I'm thankful for what I'd sometimes felt was an unnecessarily large collection of T Gauge trains (three full sets); if I didn't have more than one set, I'd have nothing left that was functional, until another order was filled. At least I still have something to run!

A 3mm Switch

It's not a world's first. Functional T Gauge switches have already been exhibited at Japanese toy shows. But they don't look like this. Granted, it isn't the most realistic thing in the world, but it doesn't look like a tinplate toy, either.





It wasn't as hard to make as I thought it would be. One reason is the rail: code 40 steel alloy rail is durable and yet easy to work. I also made the switch using sectional track; thus it's very short, and short, stubby turnouts are easier to make than long, slender ones.

Alas, it would not serve as a manufacturing prototype. It has too many parts, many of which cannot easily be mass-produced. But it ought to serve as a focal point for discussion amongst fellow T-nuts. Here's how I made it:



First, I marked out the intersection point where a straight piece of roadbed track overlapped a curved section. This intersection point was sliced away from the side of the roadbed until the cutouts met the point where the rails intersected.



I cut the rails with a diamond cutter in a Dremel tool, and removed the excess rail by simply pulling on it with pliers. Then I continued to slice away the roadbed until the two parts fit together precisely.



I was tempted to bond the two parts right then and there, but thankfully I held off, because it was much easier removing the "spikes" and tie detail from the space where the points would move while the halves were separate. Once the point area was clear, I then bonded the parts, adding a reinforcing place on the underside.



After marking the stock rails where the points would meet, I slid them out and ground away relief areas for the points with the diamond wheel, then slid them back in place. (Sliding the rails in and out of the roadbed causes them to loosen a little, so once each rail was the right shape, I secured them with CA.)



Next, I marked the roadbed with the rail sections that were removed. Once I determined where the points would pivot, I drilled holes for short bits of thin-walled brass tubing. I ground a tiny flat in the end of a length of .030 steel wire, and soldered a piece of the leftover rail to the flat area with silver solder.



Once I'd cleaned away the excess solder and polished the parts with a wire brush in the Dremel tool, I dropped the assembly into the corresponding brass tubing and marked where the point need to be ground.



The points were shaped with the diamond wheel, very slowly and very carefully—the steel alloy is fairly soft, and grinds away quickly. I almost ground off too much every time. I was unusually lucky with this project, as I did not need to make any part twice.



Next up was the frog. I was tempted to make the point from styrene, but I wanted better durability, as well as better appearance, so I found a scrap of nickel sheet about .040 thick, and I tapered one corner to a sharp point with the diamond wheel. When I was satisfied with its shape, I clipped it off the sheet with a flush cutters, and proceeded to keep trimming away a few thousandths at a time until it was exactly the right size.



One problem with attaching this part to the frog was the fact that the styrene in the area was uneven, so I filled it in with some Squadron putty, and it sanded down to make a nice smooth platform. Then I bonded the ever-so-tiny frog part in place with thick CA. I'd contemplated soldering a wire to it to power it, but decided it wouldn't be enough to make or break performance.



From there it was a relatively simple matter of shaping the last two rail parts; to the base of each of these rails I soldered a piece of fine steel wire so that I could power them. In order to de-emphasize the gross size of the parts, I tapered the frog wing rails and guard rails, rather than flare them. I also made them all as short as possible. I fabricated all of these parts by eye, using no jigs or measuring tools. The latitude in tolerances is actually no finer for T than Z scale, because the wheel treads are so wide.



The very last step was deciding how to move the points. I'd pretty much dismissed any notion of making a conventional throwbar. I intuitively wanted to use the steel pins to move the points. I've not yet built a mechanism to throw the points either manually or by remove; this is just a "formality" after having finished the hardest part of building the switch.

Stay tuned for a video of trains running through the switch. It will probably take almost as long to set up the demo as it did to build the switch in the first place.

A Bridge to Somewhere

The White Haven Junction layout just got its first bridge. For a brief time I was tempted to make a prototypically-accurate rendition of a bridge just south of the real White Haven, but it would have meant reworking all of the surrounding terrain to simulate a former double-track main that was single-tracked. Plus, it's a deck girder bridge, and I didn't have enough clearance over the lower track.

So, it was back to Plan A: a long through plate girder trestle. Granted, a real railroad would have used a deck bridge for the portions not over the lower line; but I didn't have much choice given the roadbed-style track. To reinforce the call for a through bridge, I plan for a road to pass under the section opposite from the lower track.

The space called for 356 feet of bridge; the decision facing me was how many sections to make it. My knee-jerk reaction was to match the track sections, which would have been four. But this would have placed the bridge piers at awkward locations; three sections would be better, resulting in 120-foot girders—entirely within the realm of possibility.

According to a book on steel girder bridges, the plates of a 120-foot through girder bridge would be about ten feet deep; in T scale, that's a quarter-inch. I cut two strips of .030 sheet styrene 1/4-inch by 9.5 inches. I planned to make the spans from single pieces of styrene for greater strength; such a long span of unsupported roadbed track—modified, no less—is quite flimsy. Still, two quarter-inch strips of .030 styrene don't have much strength, either; ultimately, this bridge was going to rely on the piers for stability.



After cutting the two main bridge parts, I marked out the spacing for .010 x .020 ribs and bonded them across both girders; it was much easier to get them straight and trimmed to length this way (unfortunately I had to attach them flat, rather than on edge, as they'd otherwise make the plates too fat). After trimming the ribs, I capped the edges with .010 x .060 strip stock. And that finished the girders. Rivets? What rivets? One of the advantages of T scale is that there are no rivets to count.



Narrowing the roadbed track created depressions underneath each section—perfect for pieces of sheet styrene to hold the girders together. After slicing away the ribs where the girders met the filler parts, I bonded everything together. The bridge was then ready for a coat of flat black paint, several heavy applications of Rustall, and installation.



The final step was to make the abutments and piers, which I fabricated from chunks of thick sheet styrene. The piers were a bit disconcerting, being so very slender—I kept wanting to make them fatter. But, they were the right size. Such is life in T scale. I sanded the assembled piers in one direction to give them something of a board-formed texture, then applied the caps. After spraying them with Testors Light Aircraft Gray, I dipped them in India ink wash, dry-brushed on Rustall and powdered chalk, and then installed them on the layout with thick CA.



In retrospect, I can cite a number of lessons learned (read: mistakes) with this project. The most significant was my failure to double-check clearances. Because I eyeballed some of its dimensions, the bridge ended up too narrow. This would not have been an issue except that there is curved track at each end, which throws cars on an angle as they enter and exit the bridge. Eishindo's cars make it through fine, but I may have some trouble getting my (future) RDCs through; they will be longer and, with steps at each corner, effectively wider as well. It may require some unsightly gouges cut into the ends of the bridge; we'll see.



Another mistake—of an aesthetic nature—was not making the bridge skewed. The configuration of the features that the bridge spans all reinforce a call for a skewed bridge: the track, river and road all run at about the same acute angle. The piers especially would have looked better angled. But I hadn't thought of it until well into the project. It will need to remain a somewhat awkward-looking bridge.



One last major goof: not stripping the paint the off the rails before attaching the bridge. Boy, talk about a serious PITA cleaning the railheads when they're a fraction of an inch away from finished bridge girders! This stands as but one of many reasons I've realized what a really good idea it was to start with a "starter layout."

Research

After giving the layout a name and a setting, I started doing more research into the area I'm modeling so I can get a better idea of the terrain, and also pick up on features of the real railroad that have counterparts on the layout, so that I could name them. In particular, I was interested in finding bridges similar to those on the layout.

It didn't take long to find a perfect candidate for the foreground trestle. Just south of White Haven, the Reading and Northern—following the Lehigh Valley ROW—crosses over the roadbed of the long-abandoned CNJ, and then the Lehigh River; indeed, the two lines and the river all intertwine as they pass though the scenic Lehigh Gorge. They also frequently make sharp twists and turns, sometimes doubling back on themselves, so the layout's loops would not be all that far from reality.



After exploring the area with Live Search (perhaps one of the most useful railroad research tools ever), I decided the first bridge south of White Haven would do nicely; I'd simply have to pretend that, for the purposes of the layout, the CNJ ROW was still in use. That first bridge is really interesting: it appears to be a deck plate girder bridge that was once double-track and since converted to single-track. The aerial photos of it very nearly convinced me to model it as-is, instead of the through plate girder I'd planned.



For the other river crossing I'd wanted to build a stone arch bridge. Sniffing around, I found a little one just south of Lehigh Tannery. Although it was considerably smaller than what I needed, it would have to do. Many miles to the west, near a town called Dippel Manor, I found something much closer to what I'd wanted to build.



The bigger discovery was Lehigh Tannery itself; it was much closer to the kind of town-ish scene I'd wanted to model than White Haven, which was far too urban for my purposes. But Lehigh Tannery wasn't perfect either; it would have to aquire a fictional station.



The tunnel was a toss-up; there are a few along the line. I was initially drawn into the area by White Haven Tunnel, which is just north of town, burrowing under unremarkable countryside. Much closer to the visual quality of the layout's tunnel is Rockport Tunnel, which is several miles south of White Haven; it's a "shortcut" past a sharp bend in the river known as Switch Tail Curve, which the CNJ followed. The whole area is spectacularly scenic, and while I hadn't planned on modeling any truly "spectacular" scenery, the Rockport area is irresistible.



Shifting the entire layout's setting south to Rockport would be a break from the initial concept, but it would also offer an opportunity for a more cohesive set of features. However, Rockport isn't so much a town as a locale, dominated by farmland. I'd wanted to model a small bit of town-like area, so I'd have to do a massive amount of selective compression to pull Lehigh Tannery into the scene. But I didn't care much for the name Lehigh Tannery for the town; I preferred the rustic-sounding Mud Run, which according to the map is located on a mountain ridge near Rockport, where a road dead-ends under a high-tension line; population zero.

So, do I rename the layout? Ultimately, "artistic license" won out over the nascent prototype modeler in me, and I decided the layout will remain White Haven Junction, with the trestle being the Lehigh Valley crossing the CNJ south of town. But now the tunnel will be Rockport Tunnel, and the snippet of town shall be Mud Run. And it was good.

Revisions

In my first Starter Layout installment, I'd reached the point of tracklaying. Thankfully I'd not actually adhered the track to the subroadbed, because the layout was about to undergo a couple of last-minute revisions.

As I was putting the remainder of my track supply away, I was surprised to find that I still had enough of the large-radius sections left for a full loop. The inner loop on the original plan consisted of the smaller-radius track, and I suddenly had second thoughts: I really wanted to give the rolling stock every opportunity to run better (in trial runs I'd experienced more derailments on the smaller loop than the larger), so I revamped the plan, replacing the inner loop with the larger-radius track.

Although the revision to the plan was intended solely to provide broader curves for better performance, it coincidentally led to other improvements. It created a longer, more dramatic trestle in the foreground. It also eliminated the "squiggly" part of the inner loop—the effect of alternating straight and curved track sections—and thus did away with the need to resort to another tunnel to hide the unsightly bends. The revision of course necessitated new foam board subroadbed; not a big deal, as I have stacks of the stuff sitting around, and it only took about an hour or so to catch up again.



While I was busy cutting up new foam board, I decided that the solid "layer cake" base I'd originally designed would likely complicate certain stages of layout construction, such as wiring lighted buildings (that was a lesson learned from the first version of my Z scale James River Branch). So, I went with the more conventional approach of securing the subroadbed to riser-like supports made from strips of foam board, which I glued to the base with Titebond carpenter's glue, using T-pins to hold things in place until the glue set.



With the subroadbed in place, it was time once again to return to tracklaying. Initially I'd contemplated using Loktite Power Grab adhesive, but ultimately decided on double-sided foam tape instead for the sake of expediency as well as cleanliness.



The last thing to be done before the track went down was attach two pairs of electrical feeder wires, which I soldered to tabs on the bottoms of the rail joiners. After the track was bonded to the foam tape, I painted the track using the technique I'd previously described here in the blog. That was without doubt the most time-consuming and tedious task so far.



Stay tuned for the next installment, which will feature two T scale bridges and the beginnings of some scenery.

The Layout Gets a Name

Introducing the White Haven Junction in T scale. Specifically, it represents a slice of what was once the Lehigh and Susquehanna Division of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, from White Haven to Nesquehoning Junction. That's quite a mouthful. So, with the layout starting more or less at White Haven and incorporating various scenes along the scenic Lehigh River Valley and Gorge, including White Haven tunnel, I shortened the name of the layout to White Haven Junction. Although there is or was no such thing as White Haven Junction, it sounded a whole lot nicer than Nesquehoning Junction.

Given the presently limited modeling options for functional T scale rolling stock, I elected to build a pair of RDCs for the layout; with some help from friends, they would be relatively easy to model. This led to some research into who had what. Initially I'd wanted to model a stretch of CNJ in New Jersey (as a break from the Reading Railroad, fictionally represented by my Z scale James River Branch), but I also wanted to run RDC-3's, as they're more interesting than RDC-1s. But the CNJ had no 3s. The Reading had 3s, and this discovery led me to the Reading, Blue Mountain and Northern Railroad, which currently runs two RDCs, one of which is a former Reading RDC-3.

As I researched the Reading and Northern, I found that it now operates on some former Lehigh Valley trackage through the Lehigh River Valley area, which is CNJ territory, and I took that as a positive sign that I was on the right track. It also allowed me to place the temporal setting at any point along a broad swath of time, up to and including present-day. And so, despite its semi-fictional name, my T scale layout is probably more prototypically-based than any layout I've built previously, which strikes me as strange, for some unknown reason.

Maintaining Perspective

Although I have a nine-to-five job, I don't necessarily work nine to five. I work in spurts as long as I'm awake. I'll come up with a solution to a software problem while I'm in the shower, or shopping for groceries, or sitting in jury duty.

Likewise, I may have an idea on how to address a modeling issue at any random moment in a day. The downside is that, when this happens while I'm at work, I'm far removed from my models, and if I'm not able to see the actual size of a model, it becomes hard to determine if my idea has merit.

Usually this is not a big deal, but T scale presents a special case: it's so very, very small that there are only so many things that are feasible. So, to solve this problem, I brought a T scale car and a length of track to the office, and placed it right on my keyboard, in a little depression made to hold a pen, where it sits quite comfortably.

It not only helps me during the occasional fit of inspiration, but it also serves as a conversation-piece. Non-modelers simply cannot get over the size, and some refuse to believe it's functional—for them, I guess I'll need to bring in my layout one day, and do a little show-and-tell. That's easy enough to do, since it's about the size of a large brief case.

Starter Layout

OK, I've been procrastinating long enough. Time to start building a T scale layout.

Well, to be honest, a lack of real action has not been a consequence of procrastination; I've had some of the most intensely busy weeks at work lately, what with two major software releases happening concurrently, plus jury duty tossed into the pot for good time-wasting measure. And all the while I have been making some progress on my Z scale James River Branch.

But I need a break from 1:220 for a while, and there have been unopened boxes of T scale merchandise accumulating around here for the last few months, so it was high time I started modeling.

While I've had a couple designs on the drawing board practically since T scale was launched nearly a year ago, I elected instead to build a "starter layout." T scale is so very different from other scales—it's more than half as small as Z, which most people already regard as "tiny"—that I thought it might be worthwhile trying some fundamental stuff before I got into anything serious. It would also help me to get a better handle on performance-enhancing techniques, which I could then share with other T-nuts.

My starter layout will not have handlaid track. I still need to find a substantially less-labor-intensive way of fabricating the tie strips. Plus, handlaid track on a starter layout borders on overkill.



Breaking with routine, I developed a twice-around plan by manipulating track sections on a table, which in itself was like a trip in the Wayback machine to my pre-teen years, when I used to make a new N scale layout every couple of months in this manner, until I started on my first permanent layout, the Newport and Rock Falls.



When I got the plan worked out, the final size came out to 15 by 24 inches (compare to my current Z scale layout, which is 15 x 36 inches). I then carved up some Gatorboard to make the base and subroadbed, at which point I really began to notice the stark difference between T and any other scale: as I was working out grades and clearances for the upper track, it just seemed all wrong! Only 5/8 of an inch to clear the lower track? Am I on the right planet?



While I was fabricating the subroadbed, I was also working out the lay of the land, scribbling out the course of a river and surrounding slopes with a pencil. It was quite a "retro" experience completely abandoning my PC—which I've used for layout planning for the last two decades—and going back to old fashioned, shoot-from-the-hip, in situ planning.



Dispensing with any form of subroadbed risers or variations thereof, I simply carved up full slabs of foam board, and slotted them where the subroadbed needed to drop down. Only four layers were required to achieve the two levels; additional pieces will be added as the scenery is fleshed out and a planned tunnel is built.

Stay tuned for the further adventures of the retro-railroad in the making. Maybe by then I'll have a name for it.