Sunday Scenic Showcase August 14, 2016

Steve,

The cars look good.

I am working on some grain silos but I do not have them far enough along for pictures, so I am posting something I previously constructed.

Alan Graziano

Try made  a some scenery work.

Nice work, everyone!  I recently purchased 5 Weaver undecorated  PS1 40' boxcar kits (with Weaver die-cast trucks & couplers!) on eBay.  I assembled them this week, and then prepped and primed them for final painting and lettering.

I've been sitting on some CDS dry-transfer lettering kits (my personal favorite to work with) for a while now, just waiting to find the right cars to use them on.  When finished, I will have two CNJ, two D&H and one Lackawanna boxcars to add to the fleet.  I may even "3-rail scale" them with kadee couplers...haven't decided yet.

Here are some progress photos...

Steve:

I like the flatbed

I also like the rock work. Are the rock faces cast from a mold or did you carve?

Joe

Joe the rocks were cast from a mold the standard ones readily available. A few members of our club each own a few so its easy to borrow

Steve

Finally finished the control board. There are SPDT momentary switches for the turnouts, SPST for power breaks (spurs) and  a bank of Atlas O SPST for AC and DC accessories. The bottom looks like spaghetti. Everything is terminated on the backside with european style terminals. I used wire ferrules on the ends of the wires with the terminals. They make a tight joint. 

Only mistake I made was to choose screw type toggle switches. Thought I could get away from soldering. With all the SPDT switches the wire lugs kept loosening up as I moved wires around to work so I ended up soldering all those terminals anyway. For some reason the SPST were holding tight - maybe different manufacturers???

For a do over I think the next time I will choose toggle switches with spade lugs on them. This is way more expensive than solder lugs but I assume much faster for disconnecting.

PS - I ended up taking all the faceplates off of the SPDT switches. I could never line them up properly and kept braking the small index tabs on them.

Joe

Without the switch controls, it almost looks like the dot candies from the old days! Nice work.

Don