Yesterday I asked students to first estimate, then calculate, the speed in miles per hour that this train was traveling with respect to the HO scale figure walking along the tracks (this "scene" runs along the whiteboard on the north wall of the classroom):

Jeff Allen

Part #3 looking at setting up blocks.... looking over wireing ideas and what rail would be the best choice for detection.

Pink-foam era.

More photos follow ...

Time to get back to the basement and back to this blog - only been a few years since my last post. 

Decided it was time to rip out the old and start fresh with a new layout, bigger, better, and DCC. 

images are imbedded from my Flickr Album:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/fkd54/albums/72157699943587121

The container includes an auto reverser USB interface and a sound decoder that I just set to match my locomotive I am running at the time works really well and keeps everything contained in one place.

Some of the photos might not show up, you can read it here and here.

My son and his girlfriend took my wife and me to the railway museum while visiting him in Honolulu. 

He is a goof (like his dad?) and we had a great time. The 1944 30’ flat cars were converted to observation cars after being donated to the museum from the Navy. I also got a new Hawaiian shirt to support the cause ;-)

I have decided to shift from JMRI to Train Brain from CTI Electronics.

The many things I was grappling with JMRI (JMRI has steep learning curve) seem possible with CTI electronics

- Ability to control locomotives programmatically - NCE PowerCab is supported

- Ability to play sound, even if the loco is not equipped with DCC sound, and the ability to invoke sound programmatically for multiple locos

- DCC block occupancy sensors

- Ability to identify a train with RFID sensors, sensors available for N scale