Have a Cigar: Pink Pages

In the world of motion pictures, "pink pages" refers to script revisions made during production. Well, what would a modeling project of mine be without some pink pages? Pretty rare, I'd say!

Two things have been revised on my little cigar box layout. The first change was owing to a miscalculation. I got the total headroom inside the box wrong: it was one layer of foam board less than I thought. This meant the tunnel for the upper loop had to be "daylighted."

I was a bit disappointed by this turn of events, as I was counting on both tunnels to reduce the perfectly circular nature of the track plan (futile though this may seem). It also created a bit of a technical challenge, as it meant reducing access to the lower hidden track—a fact that weighted heavily on me as I began filling in the openings above it, millimeter by millimeter, so that the upper loop could be ballasted:



By contrast, the second change was a willful one. The more I thought about including the working crossing flasher on this layout, the more I liked it. However, that meant changing the power supply from 3 volts (two cells) to 4.5 volts (three cells), and adding another on-off switch.

No matter; the piece of layout on which the battery pack was already mounted would be gone shortly anyway, because I was struggling with where and how to mount the on-off switch for track power. After considering all sorts of variations with the switch mounted next to the battery pack, it finally dawned on me to locate it where it can be operated without having to remove the top of the hill to get to it. The felt feet I added to the bottom of the box created sufficient clearance for some miniature slide switches, which I had on hand in abundance.



Subsequent to the decision to include the flashers, I decided that I might have a yen to add other lighting effects—streetlights, for instance, or interior lighting for a structure—and in order to anticipate this need, I installed two more on-off switches. I also changed the battery pack from being mounted on the layout base to the cigar box bottom to simplify wiring.



After installing the switches in the box bottom and mounting the battery pack between them, I included a miniature terminal strip so that the layout could be removed from the box if necessary (blue object, above). Then I gouged out the space where the battery pack used to be on the layout, so that it dropped over top of the electronics (below).



Incidentally, I'm not including any sort of throttle for this layout. The train will receive a steady 3 volts (I added a tap to the middle of the battery pack to supply this voltage, instead of the full 4.5), and any reduction needed for a good steady speed will be handled with diodes. Stay tuned to see if there are any more pink pages for the cigar box layout. Knowing me, there surely will.