In Part 1 I described the last scene we worked on, the little railroad town of Coaldale. Seemed fitting to share the last thing first, but now I'd like to go back to the beginning and share how things evolved. In this part I'll describe how it all got started, and the very first sound Kermit and I created together along The LP&T.
The Beginnings...
In hindsight I suppose I had my suspicions right from the beginning. I first heard about Kermit and The Lone Pine & Tonopah Railroad from a mutual friend who described Kermit as a very private person, and his layout as ‘Disneyland North’.
That friend was building a privately owned modular N scale layout for display debut at the 2000 San Jose NMRA. I was doing the sound for it when Kermit came on board to do animation, lighting FX, and signaling. My impression of Kermit was of a quietly intelligent gentleman who at moments could become animated himself, but I still hadn’t really realized the significance of that. I enjoyed working with him but didn’t ask about his layout. The actual ‘AH HA! moment, came some time later.
It was early 2001 when Kermit came up after a clinic I was giving on Layout Sound and asked me if I would build sound for his layout. Sure Kermit!
It’s important you know The LP&T had sound long before I ever came along. Kermit had four cassette players working on the layout, illustrated below is one of the RCA bookshelf head units he employed.
Another player had day and nighttime birds and critters distributed around the 25’x45’ basement layout room, another one played WWII big band music 'on the jukebox' through a speaker hidden in the Tonopah USO. To be honest, I forget what the other players did (we never used them). Although the RCA units had CD players in them, everything was cassette tape. The first thing I wanted to do was switch to CD players, and we decided the first new soundtracks would be distributed day and night.
I knew the LP&T had regular monthly operating sessions with a dispatcher and several operators, and had witnessed Kermit’s smooth layout lighting transitions between day and night. The transition was subtle, slow, and almost imperceptible... you didn't realize it was happening at first, at some point you'd realize it was dusk. I also knew that the LP&T ran VERY prototypically complete with car forwarding, a full scale ex-WP dispatcher board with prototype relay controlled signaling, and facia mounted phone handsets along the mainline to call and get local control for switching operations. The LP&T was a serious operational railroad... at least the train operations were serious.
The Imp in the Engineer
Seemed simple enough, I wanted to create day and nighttime soundtracks the right lengths for typical day and night ops sessions. So I asked Kermit how day and night worked during a typical operating session. Was there a fast clock? Was the session split evenly? How long was a typical day on The LP&T?
I swear I saw a gleam in Kermit’s eye when he answered, “I like to let them get out there and get caught up in switching operations... and then plunge them into darkness!”.
That’s when any suspicions I’d had became full scale realization! I had seen the imp in this impeccably conservative world class hydro electric engineer, and I knew what we were about to do. We were going to have fun!
Its as Different as Day and Night
Kermit had hidden the two bookshelf speakers under the benchwork at opposite ends of the forty plus long basement train room... we trashed them immediately. I scratch built a 'distributed system' for the RCA player which would now use the CD capability. Each of the eight speaker systems to be distributed around the room were two-way. There was a 'tank', a beefy 3" cone mounted in a PVC pipe cap, and a Motorola KSN 1020A Piezo tweeter (PZT). Tanks were mounted under the benchwork, the companion PZT was mounted in the scenery as close to ear level as possible. The speakers were distributed in left/right pair so that you were standing in between a L/R pair pretty much anywhere you stood... the idea was to create little open-air walk-in headphones, and while it was never perfect, it was always fun. Because of the two-way design it was almost impossible to determine where a speaker was located.
The 8 ohm cone drivers were loaded onto the RCA's amps in a series/parallel configuration (two series legs, connected in parallel to each amp) to present an 8 ohm load. A pair of 14 ga. zip cord busses ran under table completely around the basement, each of the four speaker systems was tapped off its buss to accomplish the series/parallel loading. The PZT's are connected in parallel to their companion cones. The system was simple enough, but awkward in that Kermit had to go over to the CD player and push a couple of buttons to change from day to night, and he had to wait for a quiet moment (between bird calls or cricket chirps to stop the currently playing soundtrack. The day and nighttime soundtracks were approximately 30 minutes long, and were manually set to loop continuously until stopped. It was cumbersome and crude, but it sounded good!
A few years later (2005) the RCA player was retired and a PRICOM Design Dream player installed in its place. This was ever so much better as we could control the Dream Player's trigger inputs from external cues. The Day/Night soundtrack, and several other scenes were all on a common trigger cue buss, and could be group-toggled between day and night at will. These players were set up to fade out over ten seconds when asked to switch back and fourth. The soundtracks were much longer, and began quietly, so there was no audible 'tell' when the transition was triggered.
A nifty side note about the new trigger set up is that it was NOT connected electrically to anything else. This was Kermit's genius. For reasons that I won't bore you with it would have been difficult to try to connect the trigger input busses to the lighting control, and after a minute or two of head scratching Kermit got 'that grin' on his face again. He ran upstairs to his shop and in just a few minutes he had cobbled together a ridiculously simple little circuit that used a photodetector... this was mounted in the layout directly below one of the lighting fixtures over by the roundhouse. When the sun went down, the circuit triggered the nighttime players, and triggered the daytime soundtracks when it saw enough light... the connection was light.
Over the next two decades we went about pioneering in the other image, the aural image... Layout Sound. We conspired to push new dirt in every aspect of sound in miniature, integrating the visual and aural images in design, engineering, and in integration with prototype operations. And no matter how outrageous or outlandish what we imagined we might want, we always looked for the easiest and most affordable way to do it... a way that the average reasonably serious model railroader might be able to grasp and duplicate. And of course, to share whatever we stumbled into together... with the Hobby. More next time, Jim
