First Run

I added a power bus, made of 14 gauge speaker wire, around the train table yesterday. Many of the track sections had already been wired with feeders, and I connected them to the bus through elegant crimped connections.

I had decided to get my layout started using a Bachmann EZ Command DCC controller borrowed from my son's HO train set. I used a spare wire that came with the commander. To my confusion, the wire, which looked suspiciously like a 3.5mm headphone jack and wire, contained three wires inside the sheath, not the two I was expecting to find. I don't know what the third wire is used for, if anything, but I quickly identified the correct pair of wires using my digital multimeter and connected those wires to the bus. My multimeter does not have RMS functionality, and looks like the straight AC voltage associated with DCC comes to about 19 volts, which for a sinusoidal wave should come to about the correct RMS voltage for DCC, around 14 volts.

Hands trembling, I put my only DCC-equipped loco, a Bachmann Spectrum GE 44-ton switcher, on the tracks in the part that had feeder wires connected, selected DCC channel 3 and - nothing. I tried on a Kato DC loco that I was yet to equip with a DCC decoder and put it on the tracks instead, using EZ Commander channel 10 which is used to control DC locos. I heard very loud buzzing with the loco standing still, but the loco did respond to the dial, jolted forward, but stopped abruptly after the first turnout.

I first thought something had gone wrong and that I had fried the loco, perhaps by feeding too much voltage to the tracks (perhaps that 19 volts was RMS after all?). After some investigation, consisting of probing the tracks with my multimeter, I realized that my Micro Engineering turnouts acted as isolators. As a result, I had to add feeder wires to a few places that were isolated by turnouts and that were not served by my existing feeders. What a relief!

I added a couple more feeders to the bus and tried again using my DCC equipped switcher. The results were erratic. The train run for a few inches or a foot, but then stopped. It seemed to help if I pushed it along, and it zipped to life again, only to halt again after a short run. After some testing I ruled out a problem with the loco, and discovered that the spots on the track where the train stopped were stained by glue residue from gluing the track to the trackbed. I tried to remove some of the glue with my fingernail and lo and behold, the train managed to get past those spots, although stuttering a little at slower speeds.

I also discovered that I had probably added too many feeder wires to the mainline. I got a steady 19+ volt reading on all parts of the track no matter how close the feeders were. No harm done, though, and a bit of redundancy cannot hurt in this department.

After celebrating by running my small loco back and forth on the finished track section a few times, I created a work plan for finishing the track. This consisted of a few items:

• Lay the rest of the track (I have a new shipment of flex-track coming later this week as I ran out)
• Add a few feeders to track sections that are currently isolated by turnouts. I need to dig a few tunnels through the base layer foam sheet to accomplish this in a couple of places, but no biggie
• Figure out a way to gently clean the existing tracks from glue, perhaps with some warm water or rubbing alcohol
• Try to avoid getting glue on the tracks going forward (not sure how I do this though!)

Laying Track

After the terrain was constructed with foam sheets it was time to lay track! I was quite excited and maybe just a tad nervous since this was all new to me. I had watched a video on YouTube where a veteran modeler laid nice straight code 55, and the process seemed a bit convoluted.

I glued cork trackbed using my trusty glue gun. What fun! The first turnout was a bit awkward but even that was not as difficult as I had thought. I decided to do a small track section first son I could practice all the steps on a short section, so I wouldn't have to tear out the entire track if I did something wrong in an early phase.
The first cork sections looked OK so I glued on my first turnout and a section of flextrack. Of course I got some Gorilla glue stuck below the points of the turnout and had to wash it off under runninh warm water... but apart from that everything looked good.
The toughest bit was soldering on the feeder wires. The photo above shows a second effort. Trust me, the first set of wires look awful! I also learned that solid core wire is the way to go, as the strands of a normal wire tend to stick in all kinds of unwanted directions, and the wire is hard to bend to align with the track. Needless to say, feeder wiring seems to require a bit more practice! Also, my puny 25 Watt electronics soldering iron takes forever to become hot enough to work the tracks, so I may get my 60 Watt big gun out for the next batch.

Terraforming

After the foam insulation layers had dried I moved on to sculpt the terrain. I used a Woodland Scenics glue gun to deposit layers of insulation foam sheets to create hills and ridges, based on my track plan. That turned out to be much more fun, and much faster, than I thought! In 2-3 hours I had completed all the major rough landscaping work.

I

even created a small canyon for a river, cutting into the top base layers (which is why I put in a three sheets thick base layer instead of just one). I left one sheet intact on the bottom layer so the door panel would not show, as I could not find a completely flat door surface.

I used Woodland Scenics 2% Incline Starters to create the inclines. I found it easier to use just the incline started pieces as opposed to the full incline kits, as my insulation sheets were 1/2 inch thick, which is exactly how far a single 24" Incline Starter strip elevates your track. These styrofoam strips, too, were glued into place using the glue gun. I just loved the glue gun which was super easy to use, there was no smell, and it dried almost instantly, giving you just about half a minute to work before the glue dried.

Laying The Foundation

On Christmas Day, I finally "broke
ground" on my railroad. I glued some foam insulation sheets to my HCD door using Liquid Nails for Projects and stacked some dictionaries on top overnight. Many model railroaders seem to prefer 2" foam sheets but here in warm Texas hardware stores don't carry sheets that thick so I had to layer half inch sheets on top of each other to get a couple of inches of terrain base.

Deciding On A Track Plan

Choosing the right track plan was way trickier than I thought. After couple of weeks of studying various Web pages and 101 Trackplans books, I settled on the classic Scenic & Relaxed plan from Atlas as the basis for my plan. I was inspired by this variation I found on the Net since it had some features that I liked, including an expanded yard along the bottom (reproduced below without permission, sorry!). I ended up making some further modifications to it in the end, including dropping the hidden tracks on the right hand side to make more room for the big curves.

I was also inspired by this video of a Scenic and Relaxed implementation:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Eio0IYdCA]

Here were my criteria for my track plan of choice:

• It needed to fit on my 36x80 inch HCD door
• Optimally, I wanted the plan to be expandable if I ever wanted to add another door to the layout (more on this idea later)
• I wanted to have a bridge so the track would go over itself at some point. I knew this would delight my junior engineer immensely
• I wanted a small yard for storing rolling stock and doing some switching
• I wanted three or so industries, since I anticipated having some switching action available would soon be needed once mere watching the trains go around loses its luster
• Optimally, the track should be able to support two or even three trains running simultaneously to provide fun for me and both of my sons at the same time
• The track needed to provide continuous operation without operating any turnouts. I thought this would have been too difficult for junior engineers operating the track on their own. Sadly, this criterion excluded a lot of fun track plans that had loops at the ends of the mainline, as coming back from the loop would have required to switch a turnout to avoid a train-stopping short circuit (which, as I learned studying train layouts, would happen if you run into a turnout the wrong way - I did not know that!).

I knew building grade would be a bit of a challenge for a first-time layout builder, but decided I wanted to give it a try. I decided to stick to 2% grade though. I feared having a completely flat layout would be a disappointment for Max, and would require me to soon start work on a new layout with hillier terrain. Besides, Woodland Scenics risers and inclines seemed to make laying track on a grade pretty effortless.

As for running multiple trains, I first entertained a track plan that was essentially a double oval, but decided I wanted a longer main line run, and would enable two trains by having some passing sidings instead. And I decided one of my trains would be a small switcher operating mainly on the yard, thus not clogging the main line.

The hardest thing was actually making up my mind and committing to a track plan. I had gone back and forth between several plans for days, and planned many of them out using AnyRail until I finally decided that I needed to freeze my plans and live with my choice. It did help that the plan I was looking at seemed to satisfy all my requirements.

As for the ability to expand the layout at a later time, I first thought that would be an absolute must. However, after reading the musings of more experienced railroaders, I decided that I would probably learn so much from my first layout that if I ever wanted a bigger layout, I would be better off starting from scratch. Also, it occurred to me that you would want to design a large, perhaps L-shaped plan quite differently from a 3x6' plan, and merely extending one would look in satisfying in the end. So no extending was planned.

Starting the Railroad

Here's how the Silver Mountain Railroad got started. I'm completely new to model railroading. Well, that is not exactly true as I did have a cheap Lima branded HO trainset when I was a kid. I always wanted a Marklin set, but we could not afford it so it was never to be. I had a lot of fun as a kid putting together and operating my single diesel engine and three or so passenger cars in our basement. But then I acquired other interests and never thought about railroads again.

That is, of course, before I became a father and got two wonderful sons, one of which is the biggest train fanatic I have ever known. I have a 6-year old and 4-year old, and ever since he could talk, my younger one has loved trains. He has train t-shirts, train books, train posters, wooden toy trains, the works. After seeing the All About Trains DVD about three years ago, which includes a section where model railroad hobbyists put together a train layout,  he has insisted that we should get a real train table, with scenery and real electric trains whizzing about. So it became destiny, and this Christmas I and my wife decided that he was old enough to graduate to "real" miniature trains.

I did what most fathers of little train fans do, and got an HO scale Bachmann train set from Amazon. I thought I would get some EZ track that Max could lay on the floor on his own and keep him busy while I worked on a more permanent train layout, also in HO scale, that he could then run his trains on. I studied trains online and from some books, and decided to get a DCC equipped set from the beginning so we could run multiple trains on the layout at the same time.

A moment of reckoning came when I was at Home Depot, with a 4x8 sheet of plywood in my cart. I realized there was no way I could find a place in our house to build and play with something that big. And 4x8, I had learned, was just about as small as HO layouts get, with 18" curves and perhaps a bit of a yard and some grades. So I put the plywood back on the rack, went to the door section and got a 36" wide HCD door for an N-scale layout instead. That was one of those moments when you know what you gotta do. I knew I had to invest in two sets of trains and rolling stock, but also knew that I had made a decision that allowed us to get a whole lot more enjoyment out of railroading by having a more compact, move-proof, and more varied train layout.

Christmas came and Santa brought Max a really nice HO set, with three engines (I had to get an extra steam engine since those are his favorites) and eight or so freight cars. In parallel, I had ordered some N-scale tracks, roadbed, and landscaping supplies for the real layout. But more on that in the next post.