Bernhards Random Ramblings BACKUP

For the first time in months, I was able to participate in an ops session at Silicon Valley Lines in person again. This was a nice opportunity to catch up with other club members and enjoy the atmosphere of being in the layout room. I ran Bayshore Yard, which was a very relaxed assignment with plenty of opportunities to railfan trains run by remote operators.

  Dave Falkenburg and I gave a talk about remote operations at Silicon Valley Lines as part of the NMRAx clinic virtual convention program. The edited version of the talk has now been uploaded to Youtube. I'm very happy with what we at Silicon Valley Lines have managed to build here, and how the concept of remote operations is gaining traction, likely to stay with us as part of the "new normal" post-COVID.

CabCams tested and ready to go With Santa Clara County back in Red Tier we started to plan for an end of the month remote ops session. This week the county upgraded to Orange Tier and California announced availability of vaccinations for everyone in April, so things are definitely improving with regard to the pandemic. This month's Ops was for club members, and became sort of a shake-down session. The layout hadn't run since the November Open House , and we wanted to try out using Zello Personal instead of FRS radios to facilitate remote operator communications with Dispatch and Yards, including the ability to have multiple sub-channels for focused communication. Extra 200 is staged in Dodge Siding for a trip to Tracy Somewhat to my surprise, we had a lot of problems with Zello. The app is very slick, and easy to use. It does project the feeling of being on a radio link, which I think adds to the realism of communication. However, multiple participants reported problems with a ...

Part Two of the article series Jeff and I wrote for Roundhouse, the magazine of the NMRA British Region, was been published recently, and today our printed copy arrived. Part Two focuses on the practical aspects of setting up and running the November 2020 Virtual Open House at Silicon Valley Lines. The technical setup, practical considerations for tools and software, as well as ensuring a positive visitor experience. Hopefully, we'll be able to offer a similar event to a global audience very soon.

I spent most of the day today at Silicon Valley Lines tending to deferred computer maintenance. I upgraded the computer running DecoderPro at the programming track, and the layout computer to Catalina which is the latest version of MacOS X that will run on these somewhat old machines. Downloading OS versions, installing them, and applying point updates took a loooong time. Once the OS was updated, I double-checked the JMRI installation. I needed updated drivers for the USB to serial converters built into the NCE USB interface and the LCCBuffer USB, but that was easily accomplished, once I figured out which exact drivers I needed. I upgraded JMRI to version 4.22 on both computers through a couple intermediate steps at 4.12, 4.18, and 4.20 as recommended in the release notes. The upgrade process itself -- while boring -- went off mostly without problems.  JMRI changed behavior in the JSON interface with regards to notifications around version 4.15, which breaks the integration of the...

My two RSD-5 lettered for Silicon Valley Lines numbers 1665 and 1667 moved to the layout tonight. After unpacking I couldn't resist taking them for a short trip from Hallelujah to Bayshore and back. Here's the pair rounding the curve at the Bayshore shops. As I was running the train I noticed that I forgot to clean the wheels after weathering, so power pickup was ... variable.  On the way back to Hallelujah I caught the train at the bridge in Escape. The first batch of decaled and weathered two-bay hoppers looks very nice as the wheels are pounding the bridge decks.

I'm done with the first batch of the 2-bay hoppers I'm preparing for servicing the Ashgrove quarry in Jacksonville on the Silicon Valley Lines. After painting and basic weathering the cars over the last couple weeks , today all cars got their matte varnish coat while I was watching the tsg multimedia Layout Design Panel Discussion . Here are all 9 cars staged on the Welztalbahn. While it was a lot of fun giving a bunch of very similar cars a unique personality each, and I still have another 9 cars to work on, I'm now going to pivot back to the Untergröningen module . A couple orders have arrived, so I can continue working on kitbashing the locomotive shed and scratch-building the station building.

The editor of Roundhouse, the NMRA magazine for the British Region, contacted us after the November Virtual Open House  asking whether we'd be interested in writing an article about how Silicon Valley Lines does remote operations, as well as provide background on how we planned and executed the Virtual Open House in the middle of a pandemic. Part 1 of the article I co-wrote with Jeff Rose covering remote operations is in the January/February issue. Part 2 covering the Virtual Open House will be in the next issue. This is my second in-print article . I hope that in a couple months the pandemic situation will have improved enough that we would be able to hold remote operating sessions again. Maybe another Virtual Open House as a lead-in to the virtual NMRA 2021 conference this summer.

Two hoppers with basic weathering in the front. Several more unfinished in the background. For the last few days, I've been working on a bunch of 2-bay hopper cars preparing and weathering them for gravel service at Silicon Valley Lines. Most cars are getting new numbers. Since I don't want to completely redo the numbers on more than a dozen cars, I'm just replacing the last couple digits with new decals.  That doesn't go without some surprises. The digits for the replacement 25 are from Microscale 87-694, a decal set for Golden West Service box cars. Not a perfect match, but the decal color is very close to the existing print on the car. However, the decals are partially transparent. The yellow of the decal and the blue of the car body conspire to create the greenish tint visible in the photo. I'm going to try and tone down the difference with gravel dust during weathering. Today I finished painting wheels and trucks. When doing multiple cars, it really helps to se...

[ RSD5 posts ] The two Atlas RSD5 in Silicon Valley Lines livery are now ready and will move to the club for final testing when the county Stay-At-Home health orders have been lifted. After applying the SVL decals last September the locomotives sat on my workbench and didn't get any attention until early December. I started with making the units a bit dirty and applied a wash of rail tie brown. It dried much lighter than I had expected. Urrgh. I attempted to fix the ugliness with various applications of PanPastels. I really like the versatility of PanPastels. Once I was happy with the effect, I sprayed the locomotives with Dullcote and all the weathering turned into barely visible dark shades of green and yellow. Ah right I remembered: Dullcote needs to be at room temperature, applied from more than a foot away, and only in short bursts. The idea is to not get the PanPastels wet, and the Dullcote drops land on the pastels almost dry. For me the locomotive was dripping wet. The ne...

  The December 2020 issue of the NMRA Magazine features an article about Silicon Valley Lines which is my first published print article. Dan Munson shot fantastic photos of the layout last August. Creating this 9-page feature was a lot of work, made easier with the help from a lot of people. It's really a milestone for the club to be represented in print and I'm proud of what we have accomplished. A big thank you to all that made this feature possible.

I purchased this Accurail kit several years ago on another business trip that included a stop a Eastside Trains in Kirkland, WA. There were several versions of this wood reefer on the shelf, decorated mostly for PFE, MDT, and other well-known carriers. I didn't want to renumber the car, so I got one I knew wasn't on the club layout.  Here's the car body straight out of the box. I started with the underframe and applied washes of rust, dirt, and railroad tie brown. I generally just dip the brush into the color, and thin the color in a drop or two of water. That's enough for one pass. While the blotches of color and brush marks look quite terrible at first, after several applications, the blotches combine to translucent layers and create a very nice and natural color effect. At the very end, I apply a thin dusting of Pan Pastels Raw Umber Shade to pull everything together. For the metal roof I started with a wash of light rust, focused on the ribs and crevices. When that ...

RBWX 79248 painted and weathered, but I skipped all further detailing I've never built an Accurail car before. Why would I want to build a car if there are many finely detailed ready-to-run cars available? And why build one that won't even run on my railroad? I picked up this kit on a business trip  last year -- in the olden days before the pandemic -- along with the Bowser cars I wrote about before . The club requires metal wheel sets, so I ordered Intermountain wheel sets to replace the plastic wheel sets that came with the kit, and I should replace the plastic couplers with the respective Kadee couplers (looks like #148 is the right one).  The car body is preformed, and the plug door needs to be installed. I wanted to the body to be closed, because otherwise I'd need to find a solution for hiding the weight that runs the length of the car. I popped off the roof walk when I toyed around with the kit in February and haven't touched the kit since. It bothered me that th...

Remotely controlled train 4837 entering Kaos Jct on a green signal The Silicon Valley Lines Fall Open House is in the box. I had a lot of fun, but as such events go, it was also stressful. The video-enabled Webthrottle worked well for remote visitors, once we got over a major mistake I made when sending the throttle URLs to the first visitor group. After that I got more into a rhythm: Send emails with personalized throttle links to confirmed visitors, have them join on the video conference, give introduction talk, hand off to train master, and while the session is running work on the next batch of emails. At the Audio/Video control stand preparing email notifications for the next session (Photo Credit : Josh) We had planned for running a round-trip session every 20 minutes. That was a bit too aggressive, since it takes a train about 15 minutes to drive the Open House loop. We had pre-staged trains around the layout, so 3 visitors could start with running their train right away. However...

Back in September, as we were gearing up for another full-blown socially-distanced ops session at Silicon Valley Lines, I quickly needed to build another camera car. I had already built a supplementary power supply for James' Dash9 dummy locomotive using a well car and a 10,000 mAh USB power bank. I wanted a self-contained camera car, so I decided to build a cradle for the second power bank I had, and mount the camera on the side of the power bank. That setup became Cam3. This worked, and we used the car in ops sessions since. However, over time it became obvious that for some reason this car had worse wifi reception than Cam4, my original camera design. That's very curious since it's basically the same hardware ... with two exceptions: Cam4 is powered with a JuiceBoxZero connected to a Li-Ion battery, and Cam3 hugs a big hunk of metal. Side by side comparisons showed that Cam3 performed clearly worse than Cam4, even after reducing the network data requirements of the video...