Boulder Creek Rail Yard

  CSX 1776, the Pride in Service unit is spotted in Boulder Creek after being an emergency lease to Union Pacific. A rare west coast sighting. The model is the ScaleTrains ES44AH CSX 1776 that I bought at The Train Shop in Santa Clara. Check www.ScaleTrains.com or your local train store for retail pricing.

In this update I go over planning of my diorama for the build off. I thought I had it pretty well locked down going into the video but after bouncing the design off my viewers I have changed everything.   

 So I have started a Youtube channel to accompany the website. Right now it is going to mainly focus on the Walthers National Model Railroad Build Off for 2021. It eventually will evolve into covering my small layout and model reviews. For now here is the first video covering the NMRBO and my Coal Country diorama. Leave some comments about what you may like to see. 

Update: these instructions are out of date, see the more recent cross post about UV4L The SVL CabCam Project – Silicon Valley Lines  The above link is a project I started with my club to allow us to do some remote ops. So far the project isn't finished and our write up needs a few more stages done.  As they are done I will post them here. 

Sometimes early mistakes make you work twice as hard later. When I set to build this layout I was considering a NCE DCC system with JMRI but eventually I landed on a PiSprog. This presented challenges as its a open book but not well documented on how to input sensors and such. I knew when I started that I wanted to go with switch machines but did not want external decoders and switch machines like the venerable Tortoise and the SMAILs were not well tested. I went with Walthers Switch Machines but they presented a challenge.  They have a form of DCC decoder in them won't report to the DCC system when you do a local trigger of a route change. Fortunately Walthers was smart enough to put limit switches on the side which can be used to trigger a Arduino sensor shield for reporting. I will cover this in a later post. The shield also comes with a added benefit of Caboose Ground Throws can be used to report the status of their routing to JMRI. The easiest way to do this is to ...

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 de...