Update

It has been a while since I made a post. I have finished up the project to elevate the rear section of the layout a 1/2 inch.

The Amfleet cars now clear the tunnel portals on both tracks; however the inner track has too small of a radius for them to run with the HHP-8. I converted the remaining rapido couplers on the HHP-8 to Microtrains and also moved the existing Microtrains coupler in slightly so it look better. This might have cause the problem, but I haven't gotten around to experimenting with it to see if it can be fixed.

I also did a little work with my father to set up the Azatrax train detector for the hidden staging siding in the rear. I still need to get LEDs to hook it up to the control panel but it was neat to see the circuit board light up when a trail crossed the beam.

Amfleet is Here!

I got my order of Kato Amfleet cars and lighting kit today. The lighting kit was funny, it said several times in the instructions "Not for U.S. or European models"; but it still worked fine on the cars.

I put them on the track and the looked very nice. Too bad half of the layout is ripped up to add some elevation right now. I did get plaster of paris gauze strips to fill in around the Woodland Scenics inclines and risers. I went with the strips because I didn't have that large an area to do and I hope the strips will be easier than mixing up my own plaster of paris and then dipping strips of newspaper in it.

Amfleet Part 1

I received a Kato Amfleet II Coach for Christmas this year. The only problem was that it was too long and had too big an overhang to fit through one of my four tunnel portals. I had gotten a little bit sloppy with the track center spacing on this turn, but at the time it did not matter since all my existing stock ran without a problem. The passenger car could still run it on the inner track of my layout but not the outer track, which is the one that goes to the hidden staging area.


Re-laying the outer track with the correct track center spacing through the tunnel portal was required so that the passenger car would fit. I also decided this would be a good a time as any to take on another project I had in the back of my head. Even though my layout had hills and tunnels, all the track was on the same level. I wanted to have a slight change in elevation so that the track on the far side of the river was slightly higher than the track on the near side. My hope this change would help visually separate both sides of the river and give the layout a better sense of 3d space.

I decided to use the Woodland Scenics Subterrain foam riser and incline sets to achieve this. This worked pretty well for the right hand side of the layout where I had to re-lay both the inner and outer tracks, to add an incline and adjust the track center line respectively. I was able to lay glue the incline in place and then trim off the extra once it had dried.

On the left side of the layout I only needed to re-lay the inner track so I numbered each section of the incline and trimmed it to individual pieces before gluing it down.

Some of the roadbed has been relaid already. I also ordered the Kato expansion set with coach and cafe car to build a complete train. I am waiting for their arrival so I can test the clearances between the two tracks before finalizing the right of way and securing the tracks.

Digitrax FX3

Yesterday I spent a few hours trying to figure out how to use the FX3 features of my Digitrax decoder. My goal was to have the head and tail light of my switcher flash alternately in an attempt to indicate the strobe light that I have seen on the cab of many passenger engines as they pull a string of coaches past the platform. It took a through look through the Digitrax mobile decoder manual and some experimentation but I got it to work.

I started off setting setting CV49 which controls the front light to 036/0x24: single pulse strobe as a non direction effect phase A. The control for the back light, CV50, was set to 052/0x34: single pulse strobe as non direction effect phase B. The manual listed the options out as hexidecimal digits, I had to combine them to find the hexadecimal value that should be set, and then convert that into a decimal value to program it through the Zephyr command station. Luckily there was a hexadecimal conversion table at the back of the manual; however; it would have been easier if they provided two decimal numbers and just had me add them.

After I got the CVs set I moved the locomotive to the powered track to see if it worked. It worked halfway; only one light worked at a time. The front light flashed and the rear light was off when the locomotive was moving forward. When in reverse the rear light worked and the front light was dark. The solution was with CV33 and CV34. The manual describes these as "Function(s) controlled by F0F" and "Function(s) controlled by F0R". They were set to 001/x01 and 002/0x02 respectively. I didn't see anything in the manual about the settings for these but my suspicion was that they were a bitmask which mapped the function inputs from controller to to the FX3 functions. Eg. CV33 (F0F) was set to activate the first FX3 function (white front light) defined in CV49. I set both CV33 and CV34 to 003/0x03 so that F0F and F0R would activate both the white front light and yellow rear light (the color being the standard DCC decoder wire color, not the color of the light). This produced the desired result. The head and tail light would flash alternately as the switcher moved down the track.

Overall I was impressed that I could configure the lights to operate like this, however I wished that the documentation gave a better overview instead of just the detailed example on what values to use for ditch lights.

Model Train Day

I spent most of the day doing train stuff.

I gave a little grease to my MP15-DC switcher and got it working pretty smoothly on DC control. It is still flaky on DCC, so I have concluded that I did fry the circuit board a year or so ago.

The sides of the large grey building that was at the center of my layout had started to warp. I added in some reinforcement to straighten the walls out. It still needs to have the doors put in.

RIP MP15-DC?

So I ordered a new motor for my MP-15 DC switcher loco on Monday from Atlas. It got here today (Wednesday). The one of the leads had broken off the old one and I didn't have the soldering skills to reattach it. I was excited and put in the new motor only to find it didn't work.

After an hour or so of playing around with it I determined that my decoder is probably the issue. I recall some shorting last time when I was last trying to get it to work with my poorly connected motor lead. At first the decoder was very flakey, I couldn't even read back the address, the motor would run at full speed even when the throttle was off. I ended up resetting the decoder to the manufacturer's defaults on the programming track and it behaved a little better. I was able to read the default address back and got a value on a CV read once out of maybe every 10 tries. After putting it on the track, turning up the throttle, nothing happening and putting it back on the programming track, a few times I finally got it to go forward; however it doesn't work in reverse. I replaced the decoder with the DC circuit board and everything works fine.

Now I am trying to decide if I want to try and buy a new decoder, or a whole new loco, or if I want to put another few hours into playing with it and hope that reverse starts working as magically as forward did.

And Then There Were Mountians

A few more sheets of pink insulation foam and a month later I now have mountains on my layout. I think the one on the left might be a wee bit to high and I will have to work on rounding off the top.