Bernhards Random Ramblings BACKUP

[ Hallelujah Paper posts ] Turned more ABS pipe into future tanks . Photos of the completed installation at Silicon Valley Lines are here .

[ Hallelujah Paper posts ] After working on the rotary dumper and ballasting the tracks in the wood yard, I worked on the remaining paper mill yard tracks. Since SVL is operating on Friday I decided to avoid the turnout ladder. That should leave me enough time to clean tracks tomorrow, and have everything functional to bring the paper mill back online for the ops session. There are various imperfections around the track ballast and ground cover, and I so want to fix them. However, it's simply a bad idea to mess with wet ballast. Don't touch! Better let it try and fix up whatever needs fixing tomorrow.

[ Hallelujah Paper posts ]  The Rotary Dumper is installed in the wood yard. It looks quite nice in its little corner. During operation sessions wood chip cars will be spotted on the lead in front of the rotary dumper. We assume they get emptied "between sessions".

[ Hallelujah Paper posts ] Rolling stock and deco items moved to the ballasted part of the paper mill yard The plan for today was to paint the paper mill tracks and continue ballasting the paper mill yard. When I got to the club, I remembered that I still needed to get more brown ballast, so that part of the plan went out of the window. After moving buildings out of the way and covering up what I couldn't move, I painted tracks until I ran out of spray paint. Oh well, at least I have only a few feet of yard tracks left. I'll finish that up tomorrow. I turned my attention to the old pulp wood yard and the wood chip dumper. Before adding ground cover here, the rotary dumper needs to be positioned, which required cutting into the baseboard. I ended up modifying the cross-member that is barely visible inside the hole below. After some fiddling the rotary dumper fits into place. This dumper is purely a static show piece. We're not going to make this operational. The gears and m...

Yes, downtown San Jose can be really pretty. Sadly, this block on 3rd Street just south of 280 is not exactly in a desirable neighborhood, and the photo doesn't show the car repair shop and small industrial businesses down the block on the other side of the street.

I'm in the process of making a new set of car cards for the Welztalbahn. It's fascinating to read up on cars I have on the layout, as well as realizing how many of them are from the wrong time or woefully fantasy. As I go through this process I'm thinning the herd, put some cars into active rotation and take others out to reduce the overcrowding the Welztalbahn is currently suffering from.

It's the first Sunday of Advent. Time for our traditional family get-together. Lebkuchen, Plaetzchen, Stollen, and other goodies are ready, and the Christmas Village is lit.

Walking the dog in the rain.

[ Hallelujah Paper posts ] I took the chemical unloading with the tanks to Silicon Valley Lines tonight, to check sizing and look. The additional two large tanks represented by pieces of ABS pipe in the photos are definitely needed to give the facility a bit more heft. In combination with the tanks next to the paper machine, this will be a nice complex when it is completed eventually ... Kit-bashing catwalks and adding pipes around the tanks with barely any right angles is a great exercise to test one's patience. Since I have only a limited supply of catwalks from the Kibri kit I raided for this build, I scratch-built more from styrene sheet, U-channel, and railing.

[ Hallelujah Paper posts ] The chemicals unloading area at Hallelujah Paper so far was "represented" by some ABS pipe and an oil loading/unloading platform . With the parts recovered yesterday , I started toying around with various tank arrangements. I closed one end of the pipes with sheet styrene and filed the edges round. After spray-painting the tanks with Scalecoat II "UP Hopper Car Gray", I remembered why I haven't used this paint for a while. It dries very, very slowly. Once the paint was finally dry the next morning, I played with various arrangements in the space I have available. This is the winning arrangement, with spare space for two more large tanks. The unloading track will run along the front edge. The paint doesn't take weathering powders well and reacts with matte spray for a very pretty brittle effect, but not what I was after for the tanks. After some swearing and application of Pan Pastels the tanks have varying degrees of weathering an...

[ Hallelujah Paper posts ] I started this Kibri kit more than 25 years ago and never finished it. For many years it collected dust at my parent's house, and was one of the last model railroad pieces that made the trip in a suitcase across the Atlantic, narrowly escaping the trash bin. It sat half-finished in a box in the layout room for several more years. Yesterday, I started to take it apart and collect the salvageable pieces. I have started with a new project for the Hallelujah Paper Mill where these pieces come in handy. Stay tuned.

[ Hallelujah Paper posts ] Today I started the work to ballast tracks and add basic scenery to the Papermill area in South Hallelujah at Silicon Valley Lines . The paper yard tracks are due for reballasting, but that hasn't happened yet, so there's some old ballast and plenty of greenery around the tracks. The yard track on the left doesn't get much use, so it's a bit more overgrown than the other tracks. I need to add a bit more sand and ground cover between the tracks on the right. They are currently too green. The ballast on the main line on the far left will be very neat and well maintained, which should create a nice contrast with the yard tracks. I used pretty much the standard approach here: Spray paint the track (Leather works well, but I used Cinnamon today). Add brown ballast on the tracks, some fine sand between the tracks, and a mix of Woodland Scenic Burnt Grass and Yellow Grass fine flock as basic ground cover. I worked in sections of 2-3 square feet at a...

I don't always post beer car Monday photos, but when I do I use the same beer car in a row.

In December of 1996 my Dad invited me to join him on a steam special steam train from Stuttgart Hbf to Vaihingen and back. The train was led by 01 1066 owned by Ulmer Eisenbahnfreunde (UEF). I think this was my first trip with a fast passenger train, full-size steam locomotive. Can you tell I'm excited? Even though I mostly remember 01 1066, I think this train was actually double-headed with 01 1100. There are photos of this event with the train on the reverse trip , and I do remember the fantastic sound of the locomotives climbing the Gaeubahn ramp from Stuttgart-Nordbahnhof to Vaihingen. Historic cars made up the train Different trips were offered that day, including a large loop from Stuttgart Hbf to Untertuerkheim via the Neckarviaduct to Kornwestheim and back to Stuttgart. Maybe I remember 01 1066 so vividly because only a few days later I learned that it had a major accident at the turntable in Kornwestheim. 01 1066 was out of commission for a couple years afterwards.

 [ Welztalbahn posts ] Car card prototypes: Front on the left, rear on the right. So far I have been using the well-known MicroMark Car Card and Waybill system. They are functional, simplistic, ... and the English labels bothered me, too. Redesigning the car routing system for the Welztalbahn has been on my to-do list for a while. European freight cars have one distinct disadvantage over American cars in that the car numbers are stenciled in rather small print on the cars, which makes them hard to read at a distance or at an angle. Therefore, one feature I certainly want to include was to have a picture of the car on the card. Over the last few months I've drawn inspiration from Tony Thompson's Waybill series on his blog , as well as from how the FREMO operates cars and loads  at meets. I like Tony's use of baseball collector card sleeves to both protect the car card and act as a pocket for the waybill with the basic car information printed on a sticker applied to the outs...

It's cold enough to make firing up the wood stove worth the effort. Also a good opportunity to combine activities. Yummy.

The next installment in the Cake series. Definitely looks interesting. Can't wait for it to cool down, so we can try it.

[ Hallelujah Paper posts ] The old warehouse is back at Silicon Valley Lines. Yes, there's not much beyond the buildings and track yet, but that will change with time. I put a coal train on the mine track near the backdrop. Above is what a normal operator or visitor sees, the train passes behind the warehouse building. Below is what happens in reality. I needed the windows from the rear wall, and it's not visible from the aisle anyways, so I replaced it with a piece of foam core board.

[ Murrbahn posts  ] The folds are a bit sloppy, but I did manage to fold the Backnang track plan from 1965 in the proper civil-engineering way for storage in a three ring binder. The proper way to fold plans to German standards is described in DIN 824. The Internet Archive has a link to a nice overview how to do fold the plan correctly.

[ Hallelujah Paper posts ] I'm installing windows and the freight doors. When the warehouse is located on the layout, the roof partially obscures the continous running track along the back drop. The black carton acts as a view block, so that visitors can't see a train behind the windows. This building is done for now. I'm quite pleased with how the freight doors came out.