Friday, December 30, 2011

I see the light

Trying out some new lighting.  A double strip of florescent's.  The fixture itself will be covered by the 2nd deck.  It's pretty bright.  But it also makes the details pop out more.




Thursday, December 29, 2011

Ore Dock Development

It's been a while since I've been active on here as well as on the layout.  Too much real life to deal with...  : - (
But alas, I have started to work on the Ore dock.  I've never claimed to understand or even be good at track laying and when I first built the elevated track line that runs across part of the city and to the ore dock itself it  I've never put any track onto it.  I love the way ore docks look, but was disappointed to find that there isn't and hasn't been one made in N-scale.  (Like many things!)  I'm not adventurous enough to try the stick building process so I needed to come up with some sort cool looking support structure below it.  I suppose I could have bought more of the Imagine that elevated line kits and used those, but I already used 10 of those kits for the run up to the dock and they just don't have the structural dynamics I was looking for.  Then I looked at the Kato truss bridges, flipped one upside down and walla!  That's the type of trussing I was looking for.  Attach those to some gator foam core board and I just might be on to something here!

Looking down the existing elevated
line to the ore dock Note the lack
of track on it!  : - (

A look from the opposite
direction.  You can see the edge
of the gator board and 2 different
colored Kato bridges.

A view of the west side of the dock.
I'll need to fill the gaps between the
Kato bridges.  It will take 4 single truss
Bridges to complete the dock understructure.
A view from the east side of the dock.
Don't look too close at the dusty water,
with the cat footprints on it.  I haven't decided
if I'm going to make the dock dump from both
sides or only from one.  I'm not sure how realistic that
will or will not be. 


Here's one last view looking to the north. I will cover about
1/3 of the dock with corregated  sheets and then make some
ore dumping chutes.  I was also going to fashion some type
of a crank wheel that in theory would have been hooked onto the ore cars with a cable and as they got dumped they would
then get pulled onto the east side track so an empty load of
cars could get pulled away from the dock.