Operations Road Show - Progress Report

Updated:  19-JAN-2008

---

This page is updated periodically to report on the progress we have made on the development and construction of the Operations Road Show layout in 2006 and 2007. The updates from years prior to 2006 have been moved to their own page.

Owing to the scope of this project, these reports do not necessarily contain everything which is going on or has been accomplished at a particular time.

January 19, 2008

We held one more operating session in October. The layout ran well, and we broke in a new crew in the Fiddle Yard-- Tim Young and David Pickell acquitted themselves well in that often-challenging duty, freeing up Al and Fritz to operate out on the road.

Scenery work continues at Buck Creek and Burrows. Al and John have been making great progress working westbound from Buck Creek. Things have been going much more slowly at Burrows.

Bob located a very nice network cable tester for us to use, and built a pair of inserts to allow us to use it with the RJ12 Loconet cable. The new tester, a Paladin 1579 Cable Check he bought at the Fry's Electronics in Downer's Grove, Illinois, can be used to test cables before they are installed. Using a remote piece, we can also test them after they have been hung underneath the layout. We went through the Loconet cabling beneath the layout and identified two connectors which had at least one pin that would go "open" intermittently, and two cables which were wired incorrectly. We repaired the cables and they test out correctly, now.

We've added more rolling stock that is appropriate for our 1964 era, and begun removing some of the less-detailed equipment and identifying more equipment to remove which we don't feel is really appropriate for our era and locale.

There are not a lot of operating sessions scheduled between now and the end of April, due to operating commitments at other layouts and, again, travel plans.

October 12, 2007

Operating sessions and scenery work resumed during September.

During one of our operating sessions during Great Lakes Express 2007, it was pointed out to us that guests less than about 5 feet tall could not always see one of the four LocoNet Fast Clocks we have located on top of the backdrops at the corners of the layout. Based on that observation, we acquired a large LocoNet Fast Clock and mounted it high on the west wall, where it is visible from nearly anywhere in our 30' by 60' layout room.

During September we held two operating sessions. Due to scheduling conflicts, we plan to hold only one more during October and November, with that session being held primarily for some guests from out of town.

Scenery work has resumed at Buck Creek and Burrows. Plans are in place to add the stretch of Indiana Highway 25 between Burrows and Rockfield. Highway 25 closely parallels much of the Logansport-Lafayette stretch of the Wabash.

Ongoing maintenance continues. During September we discovered our first cracked axle gear on an Atlas GP7. While we've encountered this before on Proto 2000 Geeps and Athearn Genesis F7s, this was the first time we'd seen it on an Atlas diesel.

August 6, 2007

Well, Great Lakes Express, the 2007 NMRA National Convention has been over for more than a week now, and we've begun to recover. Overall, we had a great time, and I think that the folks who came out to visit us did, too.

We hosted operating sessions Monday and Tuesday night for OpSIG members. Monday night we had a full house at a dozen participants, and Tuesday night only six. We could tell that things were going well by the amount of good-natured laughter we heard among the visiting crews.

Tuesday morning we bussed twelve people out for a hands-on clinic/training session in timetable and train order operation. Our afternoon session hosted six students.

Wednesday, the Ann Arbor Supertour brought about 40 people to see the layout. The planned afternoon bus tour was canceled.

The ORS layout was the host of the LDSIG layout tour picnic dinner Wednesday afternoon. We had at least 80 people visit, including some of the big names in model railroad operations. The weather held back long enough that nobody got too wet in the picnic tent.

During the LDSIG tour, we received inquiries about taking the ORS layout to give timetable & train order operation clinics at the NMRA National Convention in Hartford, Connecticut in 2009. We'll see how that develops- it's too early to say. We're hoping to take it to Milwaukee in 2010, and going out two years in a row might be a bit much, but we'll consider it. Grand Rapids in 2012 is a possibility, too, but it's still very early in the planning stages for that one...

July 22, 2007

Despite some uncertainty over the last few weeks, we now have enough people signed up for the OpSIG operating sessions on Monday and Tuesday night at the Great Lakes Express 2007 NMRA National Convention to be able to run them. As of Sunday morning, positions are still available- you can sign up at the OpSIG display in the SIGs Room (the Mackinac East ballroom).

Sign-up for the TT&TO clinics on Tuesday, while a little slower than we might have liked has been good, so we will have enough people to be able to hold both sessions. Some positions are still available.

 

May 22, 2007

We have installed a LocoNet Fast Clock in the crew room so that the off-duty crews can keep better track of when their call times are approaching.

We discovered that a track gauge issue on one of the turnouts in Peru was causing intermittent shorting when cars passed through, and corrected it.

Scenery work has been progressing more slowly than we'd like, but what we have in place is looking good.

Details are now available on the opportunities to come and operate on the Operations Road Show during the Great Lakes Express 2007 NMRA National Convention in Detroit.

 

February 3, 2007

We've begun engineering work on the signaling at Lafayette Junction. We're still investigating a number of ways of actually controlling it, and are working through exactly what signals are required.

Things are still not finalized for how operating session clinics on the ORS layout will be handled at the NMRA National Convention. We are hoping to manage it like a layout tour, but are waiting to hear back from the Convention Committee.

The freight house in Delphi has been relocated from the west end of town to adjacent to the passenger depot in the middle. This has allowed us to correct a track geometry problem through the old turnout that caused an unnecessarily tight bit of curvature on the mainline.

We've begun stockpiling trees for a foliating frenzy, to begin shortly.

 

November 3, 2006

Test-running some new passenger equipment has revealed a curve of sub-standard radius through the mainline leg of the turnout connecting the Delphi freight house siding to the mainline. We don't have any kind of estimate as to just how tight the curve gets, but have observed that it is too tight to permit the new passenger equipment we wish to use to pass through it. As a result, we are planning to remove that turnout, re-lay that half of the curve coming into the west end of Delphi to alleviate the tight spot, and relocate the freight house and its associated siding.

Scenery work continues. Al has kitbashed some buildings for Buck Creek and he is refining the ground forms to blend the buildings into place. The bridge John has been installing over the creek bed between Colburn and Delphi is in place, and he has put in the basic ground shapes. The mobile home diorama we bought at the NMRA Convention silent auction last year is being installed on the inside of the curve east of Logansport.

We have painted several packages of Faller corn field and are preparing to install it along the tracks. This material, injection-molded plastic strips of corn stalks, is pricey, but looks, really, really good.

 

September 7, 2006

We've started experimenting with speed-matching the locomotives using 28-point speed curves in their decoders. In theory, this should allow us to better match locomotives to ensure that they play nicely together when MU'ed. We have come to the conclusion that when using locomotives from four different product lines (Atlas, Athearn Genesis, Proto 2000 and Stewart) that the three-point speed matching we had been using isn't sufficiently robust to provide the performance we desire.

The three-point speed curve method (setting minimum, maximum and midpoint speeds for each individual locomotive) provides a significant improvement, but just doesn't accurately enough address the performance variation we were seeing at different points within the locomotives' speed ranges.

One other thing we have done to address speed matching has been to eliminate the last remaining low-end decoders from the fleet. Mixing locomotives with decoders which support sophisticated motor control features such as Back-EMF (BEMF) or torque compensation with others having not having these features tends to cause more jerking in the consist than we like, even on a layout such as ours which has no grades to speak of. We have adopted the Digitrax DH163-series and the NCE SR-series decoders as our baseline standard.

We are currently going forward with development of a couple of ways to better measuring locomotive speed than the speed trap we currently have. One requires far less space for track, while the other has the potential to completely automate the speed curve setting process.

August 10, 2006

Having removable sky boards makes it
easier to work on scenery.

John has completed installing the new bridge between Colburn and Delphi, with help from David Pickell and Jeff. Al continues to work west from Buck Creek, adding more contours to the scenery and preparing to install a section house.

On the rolling stock front, all of the couplers with the hated plastic knuckle springs have been systematically replaced with couplers with metal coil springs. We were surprised to see how many cars we had hurried into service without changing out these inferior couplers. This was accomplished as part of a general maintenance program that periodically examines the rolling stock fleet to seek out and eliminate defects.

The Digitrax UT2 throttle we had stationed at Danes/Keesport for the France Stone switcher crew to use has been replaced with a tethered UT4 for consistency among our throttles. Now, all crews will be using a UT4, a UT4R or a DT300R.

We will be holding operating sessions for attendees at this year's Wabash Railroad Historical Society annual meeting during the first weekend in October. Registered attendees are invited to come up on Friday night or Sunday afternoon and join us running trains on our modeled piece of the Wabash.

April 9, 2006

John and Al played EPA this week and repainted a number of the skyboards which had become scuffed from packing and shipping to the two conventions we have attended. The sky is much clearer now, except where Jeff has begun experimenting with painting clouds.

On the eighth, Jeff hosted a group of Boy Scouts at the layout to help with their earning their Railroading merit badge. On the ninth, we held an operating session which was well-attended and went extremely well. The way our schedules are working out, it looks like it'll be early June before we can get enough people together for another operating session.

March 29, 2006

March was another quiet month due to obligations elsewhere. We held one operating session and continued scenery work. It looks as if we will be able to fit just one operating session in during April, due to the Easter holiday and our involvement in Rails on Wheels taking its display layout to the train show in Port Huron on April 30.

Fritz has been working on a couple of prototypically-accurate Wabash passenger cars to replace some of the stock Rivarossi cars we have been using, and has been getting some Pennsy and Illinois Central passenger cars ready for the Purdue-Michigan football special we'll be running when the calendar next swings around to Saturday.

February 25, 2006

Over the past month, John has installed the skyboard on the new river crossing module, and we have begun other scenery projects. We're continuing to increase our car storage capacity and improve the sorting of the cars and waybills used in various types of service. This is significant when running the Fiddle Yard during an operating session.

Travel schedules and family obligations have interfered once again with our holding the operating sessions we would have liked to have held, but we're on track to resume sessions in March.

January 9, 2006

We kicked off 2006 with our first operating session on Sunday, January 8. The session ran extremely well and was well-attended.

This session saw the introduction of a number of new freight cars. The new cars reflect several recent releases as well as older cars purchased to correct shortfalls in our fleet. At this point our three significant gaps are ART-style steel reefers (coming from the Amarillo Railroad Museum/Intermountain), carbon black hoppers (coming soon from Railshop, Inc.) and a shortage of food-grade tank cars resulting from reclassifying our tank cars last month.

In addition to our regular operating sessions for this year, we are in discussions with the folks organizing the Southeast Michigan Prototype Operations Weekend this April, and have offered to hold an operating session for attendees at this year's Wabash Railroad Historical Society convention this October.

January 1, 2006

It is with sadness that we must report the passing of former OpSIG coordinator and editor Bill Jewett on January 1, 2006 Bill Jewett (rear) dispatching on the Operations Road Show layout at the 2003 NMRA National Convention in Toronto Bill passed away suddenly while on a New Year's Day nature hike at a State Park in North Carolina. Over the past ten years, Bill's gentle and visionary leadership dramatically revitalized, rebuilt and expanded the OpSIG into the dynamic and actively growing group that it has become. It was a conversation with Bill at an operating session on a mutual friend's layout in 1998 that led to the development of the Operations Road Show concept. Bill was an enthusiastic supporter of this project, and a champion for us in dealing with the convention committees for the two NMRA National Conventions at which we have held operating sessions. Bill was a genuinely nice guy who will be missed by all who knew him-- we know that we most certainly will. Our sympathies and prayers go out to Bill's wife Julia and the rest of the Jewett family.

 

News and progress reports for years prior to 2006 have been moved to their own page.

Do you have questions or comments regarding this Web site? E-mail to railsonwheels@yahoo.com
All original contents of this Web site are Copyright © 2008, John F. ("Fritz") Milhaupt on behalf of Rails on Wheels,, All Rights Reserved.