Bay Area SIG Meet: Feb 2-4, 2023. Mark your calendar

Save the Date!

The next Layout Design & Operations Weekend Meet will be Friday February 2 - Sunday February 4, 2024 at the Finley Community Center in Santa Rosa, CA. Join us for a weekend focused on model railroad layout design and operations.

A virtual event will also be offered!

The final details are still in the works. In the meantime, follow the event page on Facebook for updates or visit the website at www.bayldops.com for all the details as they develop and the registration link once that goes live. Open to all modelers. You don't need to be a member of any group to attend.

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Comments

Adventures in T-Trak: Laying track

Laying track on my new T-Trak module was not a complicated job. Still, the process hit a minor snag, providing a learning experience. My friend, Steven Cox is the owner of precisionmodelrailroad.com/ . His new firm builds laser-cut model railroad benchwork parts. The company offers helix parts, straight benchwork sections and T-Trak modules. The T-Trak modules are an early product used to test the concept. T-Trak is a modular system that uses Kato N-scale Unitrack. The idea is that if you have limited space its possible to get modeling and participate in the hobby. The T-Trak concept is young, born in 2000. It has international interest. In part, that’s due to the partnership between the T-Trak standards group and Kato. Steven sent me a pre-production T-Trak kit. It assembled into a 12-inch by 12-inch box. I’m not going to post a blog about building that kit because the current kit design is different. It took me a couple of hours to build the module. Most of the time was waiting for

Adventures in T-trak: Planning scenery for an urban module - Draft 1

Tokyo. That's the scenic subject of my T-trak module supplied by https://www.precisionmodelrailroad.com/ . It will be a representation, not a prototypical recreation. The scene needs to cover a 12-inch by 12-inch space. Actually, the street scene needs to fit into a smaller space. The tracks consume a three-inches by 12-inches. That leaves 108 square inches. Is this enough space for a plausible street scene? Of course. People are doing far more in less space. My idea wa s to build a city street and buildings parallel the tracks. A cross street would dead end into the main road. At the intersection, we’d see an entrance to the Tokyo Metro. The intersection would have a traffic light. Initially I thought the cross street could meet at a 90-degree angle to the main street. The concern is giving the viewer a straight view to the backdrop. That could decrease the scene's plausibility. An alternative is that the cross street connects at a diagonal. Another possibility, the cross str

Catching up -- I may not have been very social. I have been busy, though.

I'll catch you up, since my last post. I've been buried with a variety of issues. I'm back from Japan. Most of those posts (and there are more to come) were published on an after-the-fact basis. In December 2023 (just before Christmas), I developed a left inguinal hernia. Surgery fixed that on March 22, 2024. Just when it seemed that my health life should calm down, last week, I caught Covid. I'm still recovering from both. This spring, I sent myself back to college. I'm taking an architectural rendering class (using computers) and a Japanese tools and woodworking class. The architecture class is teaching me how to use Sketchup. I'll use the skills from the rendering class to start designing custom structures for the B&OCT layout and Takadanobaba in Alameda. I have historical pictures of four interlocking towers I want to represent on the B&OCT layout (Western Ave., Ash St. Jct., 49th St. and 75th St.) Pictures of 75th St and Ash St. (If you zoom i

Takadanobaba Station in Alameda

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