Sunday, April 21, 2019

Far too busy . . .

to do much modeling.  Dr. visits, are the worst culprits, as it's ~30 miles each way.  So much for living in an idyllic small town.

The fan is mounted, but no pictures yet.  It's almost dry enough (after 2.75" rain the other night) to do some yard work and fence repairs.  Humbug. 

For some time now, I've been doodling a small switching layout that's spread across some small islands, The Trans Topics Rwy.  Or, as the natives call it, the "Taki-Tiki Rwy."  It is designed in Tomix Fine Track.  I do have a stock on hand. This leads into the rest of this blog:

Joshua Murrah, on the TTrak Facebook group, posted something about building a small yard on the rear part of a module for use by Bandai Shorty trains.  Well, since I do have some, one thing led to another.  after a couple preliminary drawings, I came up with one which seems very achievable.  Note that each of these is 930mm (~3') long and 350mm (~ 13 3/4") deep, just less than an Alt corner.


By using mostly C103 (mm, 4")  curves it turned into a small yard complex, and perhaps a town.  I did look at interleaving the yard tracks, but like them better this way.

To go with it, another was laid out.


It features the same basic loop and TTrak inner line interface as the first.  Here, I used a pair of crossing sidings and a possible view block.  By this time, I was beginning to see these as portable micro layouts.  Something for a quick and easy show for a 1/2 day at an elementary school.

The late Carl Arendt defined a micro layout as one with not more than 4 sq. ft. of area.  That's 576 sq. in.  These are ~505 sq.in.  Of course, he was thinking in larger scales, such as Gn15, but his definition does not restrict the scale of train used,  only that it's not a static scene.  It must DO something.  Check out carendt.com, his website that is still being maintained.  Very informative, it is.

After looking at this, I stuck the two together, and ...






This looked like a bit of fun, and since AnyRail does export to TrainPlayer, I did that.  A couple of fun evenings later, I left it like this:

Look closely. There is a train (steam, with caboose, of course) and a freight car on each siding.  Every freight car started out where the train sits, and was moves and switched into the resting location. 

Yeah, I already have far too many projects, but these have inserted themselves rather high in the "to-do" list.  Perhaps, the Taki-Tiki is coming to life?










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