Love the look of the prototypes...I'll be watching as a fellow HOn30 guy
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Show posts MenuQuote from: Mark Dalrymple on January 20, 2025, 11:15:50 PMHi guys.Fantastic...I have found that having a "story" helps quite a bit in achieving realism and simulating a "functional" model railroad...even though I have no interest in operating, a plausible model is a good-looking model empire.
So one of the indoor things I have been working on is plotting my fictional journey on a geographical map of south Westland. This journey joins together the towns of Jacksons bay (Tellynott) to Jamestown. Of course, to fit the track plan along with the vertical discrepancy required to give me scope to create the mountain scenery I want along with towering rail bridges and deep gorges, my track doubles back on itself and crosses over itself several times. To help me consider the various stops without the spaghetti getting in the way, I have been looking at them in isolation. I also worked out a scale and plotted distances from Tellynott to Jamestown, and between water vats. Here are three examples.
Photo 1 shows the Station at Ellery.
Photo 2 shows the station of Malcolm.
Photo 3 shows the water vat tucked in beside the bridge by the Gorge river.
This process gives some advantages. It is much easier to mentally map the actual journey, ignoring tracks that shouldn't really be in the scene, but need to be there to make the model work. It is much easier to locate and plot various scenic features on the model. Some of these can even be thought of as two different scenic locations (when tracks at different heights pass the same geographical feature, but are actually a number of scale miles apart). It is easy to draw in different possibilities without messing up my old school entire layout plan.
I used John Allen's scale miles (Smiles), and found these worked pretty well for both the geographical terrain navigated and for the distance between water vats. This works out to 5 actual feet = 1 scale mile (Smile). The distance from Tellynott to Jamestown is 62.5 smiles, and the distance from the start of the Tellynott yard to where the return cutoff rejoins the main line is 68 smiles. I also intend to us 12:1 scale time.
More soon, cheers, Mark.
Quote from: Larry C on January 08, 2025, 10:21:26 AMJim and John thank you both so much. I was actually pleasantly surprised just how well the kit finished off. Between the very detailed instruction booklet and the detail parts it was a really fun build.Yes...opening a box of sticks was pretty daunting, but the instructions are great.
Quote from: ReadingBob on November 29, 2024, 09:01:42 AMMorning all,I get it Doug. I feel your pain.
In his recent YouTube video update of his layout Doug Foscale said he's going to take it down and explained what he's going to try and salvage and what he was unhappy about with it. He'll be building two new layouts, one in HO and on in On30 (at least that's what I think I heard). Both should be interesting.
I'm off to JoAnn's Fabric later this afternoon to pick up a new Ott Light for my workbench. It's too hard to see the tiny stuff clearly without that extra light.
Have a great one!