Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Back to the Sandy River and Rangely Lakes On2

Over Christmas break I had the chance to return to Al's On2 Sandy River and Rangely Lakes layout. He kindly invited dad and I over to operate the layout. Al uses NCE for control, which I also use, so I thought it would be a cinch.  However, he uses active braking on TCS WOW decoders, which I have tried but it had been a while..after pushing a few wrong buttons, I was ready to go! Al put a switchlist together on the fly for me and I grabbed number 15 in Farmington and off to make up the train.

I quickly goofed by pushing #8 instead of #7 on the controller for braking and  somehow cancelled the manual braking on the system. With the momentum on the loco and the lack of braking, I quickly called for help. Within seconds, Al had me off and running again with engine #19.
After making up the train, we headed North towards Strong. 
Stopped along the way for some some switching.

Pulled into Strong for some more switching. A couple of difficult moves, a few drop offs and a few pick ups and we were off again!



Switching the International Mill just south of Philips
Made it into Philips, more complicated moves. Hard to believe that Philips only had a two track run around given the traffic that passes through. While the line heads north, we were out of time. Had to head home. What a great opportunity!

A few observations:

This was by far the largest and most complete O scale layout that I have ever had the chance to operate. It was a BLAST! Took me about 3 hours, with talking, etc. to get from Farmington to Philips with a 10 car train, more or less. The ability to run longer trains and  rod engines was really fun.

I also liked using the momentum and braking functions. I think using these would be very difficult for new operators (I made a few wrong button pushes) but really adds to operation. I think I might set my WW&F up this way for a while and see how it goes.

Larger/Less better?
While switching in Farmington, a thought that I've had before re-occurred to me.  When you don't have enough room to model the whole, maybe a small part fully, could be more? For example, my layout space is only 21 feet long and 9-1/2 feet wide. No way to model the WW&F in O scale in its entirety. However, one could just model one yard, close to full scale or maybe two?  Al's Farmington really demonstrated how this could work. The yard is not all of 30 feet in length but close. Switching the train to get ready to pull out towards Strong was quite fun and took quite a while. I'd never had the opportunity to see this concept in action. It really worked well. Of course the passing sidings are closer to actual length rather than compressed for space, really fun just making up a train. Just an idea...........




2 comments:

  1. when I first starting using Wow decoders with the brake feature I really liked it, you really have to slow down and think about things, like when to close off the throttle and coast and when you will start your brake application. then I added the Sergent couplers that require having the knuckles set and the couplers aligned and operating got even slower, so much so that just having a couple simple pickup / set out was all it would take for a good amount of operation. I would find myself braking just before the couple, setting the couplers, then opening up enough throttle to let the engine creep to the couple so when I hit the brake button it would stop on impact, very fun but really slow. with holding car cards or paper work, a throttle, and an uncoupling stick it got frustrating, however with two man crews I believe it would be really good, the engineer could just focus on running the engine and the conductor could handle the paper work and the uncoupler wand. When I redesigned my current layout it was with all this in mind to make those procedures fun, which means no blind couples and everything had to be in reach. less is for sure more operating this way. I am sure the Loksound decoders could be set up to operate the same why however I am not sure they would have the five steps of braking like the Wow, and the Wow decoders wont work with the coreless motors.

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  2. Yeah, it was definitely fun to try braking. I could see where it would drive new operators crazy. And yes, every decoder mfr uses a different way to brake, if they even have the feature.

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