The Beginnings of Something Small

Or how to avoid getting accused of stealing Luke Towan's railroad name.

This is going to be a blog of my musings and adventures with building a small shelf layout of a similar name to that of the awesome Luke Towan. To explain the name I must explain he was the reason I avoided using Boulder Creek Railroad despite the fact I live in Boulder Creek. A simple google of the name to see if it was in use landed me on his Youtube which ended up being a gold mine of how to's. If you have not visited it yet I suggest you do, it is very much worth your time, if you learn a thing or two join his Patreon.  This naming issue of Yard may cause some issues in the future when I build a proper layout but maybe I will pivot to Boulder Creek Lines.

Anyways the idea behind my small layout was to get back into a hobby I had been absent from for nearly two decades. The original plan was a large dog bone shaped layout in my basement but upon joining the local club Silicon Valley Lines I decided to scale things back a lot to a roughly 12x2 shelf layout of a industrial siding and originally a yard. My wife was happy about this. The yard idea has since died off in favor of more scenery but the name stuck. Basically this is a learning layout, to do the stuff I wanted to learn as a kid but was unable to due to lack of skill and money. Time is still a problem as I have over 30 years until I retire but with no kids I don't have the common young to middle aged adult issue of caring for them, for better or worse.

Some goals and plans for this layout include:

1.  Learning the functions of a DCC system running JMRI
2. Operating LCC
3. Advancing scenery skills
4. Learning track layouts(already messed this one up but oh well)
5. Integrating automation with Arduino

I will go into more depth on this later but the railroad is running on a PiSprog which is basically a Raspberry Pi based DCC system that runs JMRI natively. This is presenting some challenges but the system appears to be super flexible and I as far as I know I am doing some stuff with this system that no one else is. If they are they are not really talking about it from what I have seen. I hope that this is what this blog will mainly center around, what you can do with JMRI and PiSprog without having to invest in something like NCE or Digitrax. I have nothing against NCE, if I ever need a traditional DCC system it will be between them and the new ESU CabControl system. 

Anyways this is all I have time for at the moment but I hope that this blog doesn't just peter off like my others in the past.