Locos - Rolling stock (general)
Good things come to those who wait.
Welp, my old house is finally on the market and I can take a moment or two to relax and collect myself before I roll up my sleeves and get to work prepping my new layout room. It's taken longer than anticipated to get to this point, but I'm glad I am here now!
Do I need metal axles if I'm going to install a 'proto' signal system?
A MRRing colleague told me that I need all of my wheelsets to have metal wheels and axles if I want them to activate/trip the signal system on my layout. This seems logical to me as a basic proposition of how electricity is conducted and how the proto signal systems work, but I wanted to confirm that here.
Thanks!
Chuck G.
Speedwitch Media Staley Tank Car Build
Having built several resin car kits now, and wanting a challenge, I have started a Speedwitch Media A. E. Staley Tank Car kit.
Project Logs/Locomotive Data Sheets
Being rather fond of organization, I started assembling Project Logs for my locomotives.
Nick Brodar
AAR General Rules Governing the Loading of Commodities on Open Top Cars, Effective February 1, 1960.
I found this while looking for information on Piles for Demiorgos. Very useful.
Bachmann HO Amtrak ACS-64
I recently purchased the new Bachmann HO ACS-64 electric. The model itself is beautiful. Its running qualities on DC are terrible. My RR is DC and it will stay that way. I phoned Bachmann to see if they had any suggestions to improve the performance on DC. I even questioned hardwiring the motor directly to the trucks and by-pass the decoder. I have no interest in DCC or sound. I was told there was nothing that could be done! I wasn't going to "buy" this. I disconnected the motor leads from the PCB and soldered them directly to the truck leads. It runs beautifully.
Old Stuff, suggestions on what to do with it?
I've been out of HO now for almost 15 years and model exclusively in large scale, but I'm wondering what do I do with all my old HO scale stuff from when I was a kid? Also in this collection is some stuff from my grandpa's collection from the 60's. 90% of the stuff is old Blue Box kits, weathered by a 10 year old kid, and some old Walthers building kits again, assembled by a 10 year old...
Cars/engine weight distribution
At the Randall Museum in SF we run an automated train on a back-and-forth route. You can see a video here of that in action. My friend who help me setup this recommended to use a push-pull engine configuration for two reasons: a/ to avoid "shoving back" the lighter coach cars, and b/ to match the prototype. The drawback is that I have 2 DCC engines and I spent more time than I want to admit carefully speed matching them, to avoid putting too much tension on the coach cars in between. It's especially tricky during acceleration or deceleration phases.
I always want to experiment to try alternatives. So my question is whether that push-pull configuration is really needed, and by that I mean do we need two actual DCC engines?
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