A Quick Update

I haven't been blogging much in the past week or so, but I have been attacking several projects on the layout in a haphazard, random fashion. Here's a bit of what has been going on.

4-4-0 Shapeways Conversion

After some time waiting for various parts to arrive in the mail, I started in on my HOn30 conversion of the Model Power N-Scale 4-4-0. This is to be my very first HOn30 kitbash "opus," especially since it will involve DCC and SOUND, and I'm spending a lot of time trying to get all the details of this loco perfect. Step one is to analyze and dry-fit the components, and make decisions on how I'd like the finished product to go together.

As you can see in the photos, I've been experimenting with different stacks and pilots. Both the brass diamond stack and the brass cowcatcher are a bit oversized, and this led me to try my very first stab at creating new parts of a more appropriate size in 3D. I'm currently awaiting test prints from Shapeways.

I also decided this loco would be sound equipped; perhaps it's because I'm a musician, but having sound-equipped locos has been high on my list for a long time. Sound is a huge part of the "visceral" experience of railroading. Having worked for most of my modeling life in N scale, and now in similarly-sized HOn30, the prospect of jamming in sound decoders in limited spaces has been daunting, but I've decided to tackle it head on with this loco. I test installed a Digitrax 16-bit sound decoder to test out functionality and the overall effect.

I have since revived a new, improved speaker that should beef up the sound quotient. More on that later.

Land, Ho!

I've also started building up the landforms on my little layout. I guess I've been putting this off because, as I've mentioned in the past, I tend to have a not-so-great eye for sculpting natural looking landforms. That said, I'm applying the techniques I used on my test module and things are going OK so far.

Using horizontally stacked cross-sections of hill contours seems to help a lot; it also reduces the amount of tedious, messy sanding and scraping I need to do to arrive at the final land contours I desire.

I'm trying to stay productive, while at the same time really optimize my time to work on the projects that strike me as most interesting at the moment. I think the next big layout milestone will be when I can finally not have a giant pink wasteland surrounding my right-of-way...