Saturday Brings Testing of 2 new Locos, Vision Big Boy, Legacy F7

Mark,

 

  Wow, to me that is the definition of " A Christmas Layout". The Big Boy looks and sounds awesome. Good luck with the F units, Lionel really has a great service repair center. They take care of their Legacy products.

 

JohnB

One of the few Christmas layouts that can accommodate this beast of an engine. Thanks for the videos, I really enjoyed watching both.

Very nice Christmas layout, and the trains ain't to shabby either

 

Now that Christmas is over, where will you run your trains? Does that layout come down, stay up, remove the Christmas stuff, or do you just run at Christmas time?

Awesome. If you have a moment maybe you can tell us what setting you used for these videos - they play wonderfully well on my iPad.

Thanks for posting. Beautiful Christmas layout. I love the sound of the soft deep whistle on the BigBoy for your layout. Full sound might have overwhelmed the scene.

Great work!

JohnJr

Much of what is on that layout belongs to me.  It all gets packed into storage bins (other than locomotives and freight cars that have original boxes) and stored at my house during the off season.  I usually go through everything when I get it home and clean and repair as needed.  Mark brings pieces of his own collection to run during events he is present at which is always fun.

We built this layout with running big engines in mind.  O-60 is the minimum curve of the main running loops with an o-72 loop on the outer edge.  We also have three o-36 loops for small stuff and the trolley.  All but the trolley line is hooked into my ZW-C with the main loops having their own power brick and the small loops sharing one.  Each of the main loops also has 11 power drops all the way around the layout at various points.

Sorry it took so long for me to get a reply typed out, I have been crazy busy with work and family life.

 

to answer a few questions.

 

As jake said this layout is mostly his stuff I help with track, odds and ends, and bring big toys to play with when i attend shows.  When neither Jake or myself are there it is primarily non scale Post War or MPC era trains running.  But like jake said, we design the layout to be able to run Legacy and scale sized locomotives.

 

The layout is powered by a ZW-C with 3 180w Power Bricks (180w for the O72 and O60 main lines, 90w split between the dog bone O36 loop and upper level O36 loop), a CW-80 for the Trolly Line, and a CW-80 for some layout lights and pieces that require accy power.  We installed a #990 Legacy Command system with the power brick plugged into a outlet with a power switch... when we are not present, we set the throttles as they should be and the layout is a simple on/off from the lighting/sound control booth.  When we are present we flip on the legacy base, and have full command control of 4 of the 5 tracks (trolly does not need command control)

 

When not running on this layout I am in the process of building a 20x11 basement layout, as well as i belong to the Glancy Modular Trains group who has a FastTrack Modular layout with a maximum size of about 48x48.

 

The videos I post on my YouTube Channel are taken with either a iPhone 6 Plus or Samsung Galaxy Note 4. These recent big boy videos were taken on the Note 4 and uploaded to YouTube in 1080p HD.  The real train videos were taken with my iPhone... I still debate every time which camera is better... the world may never know!