• Custom Locomotive Storage Boxes

• Care and Feeding of your Air Eraser

• Arduinos and the ProtoThrottle: Updating the electronics in a 2.5" scale loco

• Putting Lights and Sound in a Genesis MP15AC

Modern packaging is well designed to protect your locomotive and all the fine details from damage.  But what do you do with used models that don't have a box?  Older Athearn Blue Boxes (and similar boxes) are fine until you start adding details like sunshades and plastic handrails. Then the box is too narrow and those details get crushed or bent.

At the beginning of the year, I picked up an Air Eraser to fix up a botched renumbering job after reading comments in another thread.  It worked great at removing the factory lettering on an Athearn Blue Box locomotive using baking soda, until it didn't...

I put it aside until recently when I wanted to remove the lettering from some Walthers Superliner cars.  It worked a bit, then it didn't.  I searched the forum and internet for any helpful tips, and got it to work great, and then it stopped working altogether.

This blog will document my ongoing efforts to update the electronics in my 2.5" scale locomotive.

Since I like several different prototypes, one of the desires of my Office Park Zone layout is to make it easy to change between different locales.  By changing just a few details, I can run trains from CN, CP, BN, a shortline, or anything else.

While digging through my toolbox recently, I came across some blue flags that I had made back in the early 90's.  Much like the the prototype, I made the original version to serve the very real need of not wanting my train to be "accidentally" run off the end of a staging yard!

This post will detail the history, construction, and use of these flags.

Craig

The Hill Country Outlaws 0n30 modular group participated in the New Braunfels Train Show this past weekend.  Overall, I think the show went quite well. The setup at this show consisted of our core display of an 8' x 24' loop with a wye at one corner. A 12' branch runs off the wye to a transfer table module and turntable.  The loop has a passing siding on each side to allow bi-directional running.

Like most folks, I've managed to collect a fair number of unfinished modeling projects over the last many years.  They often get put aside for any number of reasons - waiting for a back-ordered part, something newer shows up - and then forgotten.

I have managed to get quite a few little tasks done on the layout over the last few days. I painted all the ties, cut out and painted the paved areas for the Latex and Lumber Distributors, painted the road surface, and made some lumber loads.  More details and pictures in a following post.

Craig

When I started to build my Office Park Zone layout, I decided to replace my old Digitrax Zephyr with an NCE PowerCab. The Zephyr doesn't support functions above F9, and the PowerCab has nicer ergonomics for a small layout. While the PowerCab can handle DCC programming without a booster, it doesn't have a separate programming output, so the entire layout becomes a programming track.