Gate car seating and sub-regional NMRA meeting (Studio Pickett (Soph)) by gmpicket

I added the remaining seats. They still need the back cushions and then they will be painted. They also have end trim pieces. They all came out a little different on the shaping of the seat cushion - sort of as if they had been in real use (and abuse) by real NYC'ers! I think the seats give the car a little sense of scale. They appear to fit nicely. This Saturday is the sub-regional NMRA train show. I will be taking the gravel car and the cement silo car for judging. I will also be giving a clinic. So I have been busy getting paperwork done for the cars, and finishing prepping for my lecture. I've almost got everything ready, just a few more items to do. I'm excited to be giving a clinic, but at the same time, it's a little stressful. I will be talking about my painting techniques. Posted in: 1273 - brooklyn union 'gate car' , nmra

The Monahan Award for Best in Show (Studio Pickett (Soph)) by gmpicket

This is the trophy that my boxcar (the little purple thing in the photo!!!!) won last April at the sub-regional NMRA meet. My name is engraved on it, along with previous winners of the award. I get to keep it until April, at which time I have to return it (unless I win it again!). Posted in: awards , nmra

Merit Awards (Studio Pickett (Soph)) by gmpicket

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The two merit awards that I received back in April - the paperwork and RIBBONS!!!! - showed up in my mailbox today. I love the ribbons!!! They are bigger than the train cars! HOm scale ribbons to hang from the cars’ front railings would be adorable…

Posted in: awards , nmra , rhb

More NMRA awards!!!! (Studio Pickett (Soph)) by gmpicket

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Wheee! I took the boxcar and the logcar that I did this past winter/spring to be judged at the sub-region NMRA meet just before I left on my trip to Switzerland. My boxcar received 110 points, and my logcar received 107 points. Both are good enough for merit awards. Also, the boxcar won 1st place in the freight car model contest and the logcar won 2nd place. There were a number of items entered total, and they all scored very well. It was stiff competition. And I won “Best in Show”! Total shock to win that! I’m tickled pink that my models did so well.

I still need to get merit awards for two more model cars. After I get this gravel car complete, I plan to build another cement silo car, which I will take for judging in November. And then, I will need to make a passenger car…. I have plans to model the RhB’s three Pullman cars - one baggage car and two lounge cars.

Posted in: awards , nmra

Continuing with the boxcar undercarriage (Studio Pickett (Soph)) by gmpicket

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Again, the undercarriage is photographed belly-up. I filed the wood pieces at the ends/sides to be sloped. The previous undercarriages only had the side sloped, whereas this one, I have done both angles of slopes. They turned out nicely, except that when viewed straight on from the side, the ends of the gearboxes (of the couplers) are visible. Oh well. It’s a nice detail.

I’ve also added the couplers here, and I have painted the gearboxes of them. I generally don’t like to paint couplers at all because the paint invariably gets where it shouldn’t and the couplers refuse to work properly forever after. I painted the couplers once a long time ago, and vowed to never do it again. But the NMRA judges want the coupler gearboxes to be painted, so I painted them - very carefully! One came out ok, but the other one has a bit of stickiness, though not too bad, and should be ok in general.

I got the undercarriage pieced together, and neatly sanded, and began to drill the holes for the couplers to be screwed on, when I realized that I had left off two important pieces of wood. So, I had to go back, glue them on, re-sand the ends, and re-paint the ends. It turned out ok, not perfect, but ok.

I painted the undercarriage with a brush initially. Then I went back and repainted the sides and ends, applying the paint with a paint knife. I think this gives a look of metal with many coats of paint. Whereas the brush just looks like paint on wood.

The model is supposed to be 105mm in length from end of coupler to end of coupler [Länge über Puffer]. This was the first time that I actually measured the couplers and tried to locate them to be the right length and distance from the end of the car to the end of the coupler. It didn’t quite come out right, but it is close, and it measures to 107mm.

Since this model is going to be judged by the NMRA, and they didn’t appreciate the coins on the underside showing, I will put all the coins inside the boxcar where they are hidden from sight when the model is complete. I like the coins on the underside for two reasons - firstly, they add a surprise when you look at the bottom - it is a model after all. And secondly, the make the weight of the car have a lower center of gravity. I am totally paranoid about my cars falling over when the derail on the track - I can just see my model train rolling over a narrow viaduct and derailing, falling onto its side, and going *oopsie* over the edge and falling a meter plus to the floor.

My craftsmanship is still improving, and this is the neatest woodworking that I’ve done.

Posted in: basswood , güterwagen , nmra , paint

Sneak previews for the next boxcar (Studio Pickett (Soph)) by gmpicket

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My first goals for this year are to a build new, improved boxcar and logcar to be judged for NMRA awards.

From looking at lots of photos of the boxcars [güterwagen] online, it becomes quickly apparent that the RhB has used many colors of paint over the years. The colors seem to run the gamut from pink (faded red) to all shades of red, purple, and brown, and the rare yellow and blue.

I like the purples better than the browns and reds, so I have drifted towards purple, and want to continue in that color vein. I’d like the boxcars to be similar in color, but not quite matching. The pink is tempting, but I think seriously, I will go with another purple so as to be not too far in color from the last boxcar.

The last boxcar was darker than it should have been. It’s color was my first attempt at mixing paint colors, and I just couldn’t quite get the color light enough. I spent the past few days mixing paint colors in a pedantic way, and came up with these test strips. The pink is for amusement. The purple car in the top photo is most likely the car I will model.

The test paint strips in the top photo - the three on the right are Studio Lascaux acrylic paint, a mix of carmine red and cerulean blue - with the amount of red versus blue being adjusted to see the range of purple. On the left, the three strips are the same colors, but with white mixed in to lighten them. The middle purple on the left seems to me the best match, but I hesitate to go with a color that is so purple! I should be brave and bold and do it….

The previous boxcar’s color was a mix of Studio Lascaux - bordeaux red, cerulean blue, and yellow ochre - so it was a little brown-ish rather than just purple. The paint colors for this next boxcar are close, but braver and more accurate (pending that one can call matching color form a photograph in any way accurate). Since it is all I have and all the NMRA judges will have, too, I will go with it.

I think I will paint on the dirt using the other two color on the left side rather than using black chalk. I also think that I will layout the wood strips for the siding and paint them as a group rather than my previous technique of painting them individually and them putting them together. The wood strips will have to be space apart for painting because otherwise the paint obscures the shape of the wood and makes it look like one solid piece, which is not what I want.

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Posted in: freight cars , güterwagen , nmra , paint

Weight and coins (Studio Pickett (Soph)) by gmpicket

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Model train cars are supposed to be weighted, this additional weight helps them not derail at every little bump; but they should not be weighted too much as that adds to the weight that the locomotive is pulling. And there are standards for calculating how a car should weigh. Both NMRA and MOROP have standards for car weight, and I have decided to use MOROP’s standard because is addresses HOm specifically whereas NMRA only addresses HO - though NMRA does address small-size HO cars.

MOROP provides a chart that takes the length of the car and multiplies it against a magic number based on the scale. For HOm, the magic number is 0.4g. Thus I take the length (scale length in millimeters) of the train car that I want to weight, and I multiply it by 0.4g. I’ve never determined if the length is supposed to include the couplers or not, so I’ve decided to not include the couplers. The cement silo car [zementsilowagen] is 78mm long (ignoring the couplers), thus the weight should be 31.2g.

I’ve been weighting cars using coins for awhile now, though I have considered other things. Many people have told me to use fishing lead weights, but the ones I found at the store were much too big. Other people suggested using washers, which is a good idea, except that washers big enough and weighty enough aren’t so cheap. After some research and thought, I decided to use coins.

Living in NYC has resulted in my having coins from various countries besides just the USA. My roomie when I lived in Manhattan was from Israel and when she moved out, she left behind a lot of coins - American and Israeli. Plus I have received foreign coins as change when I’ve bought things. I’ve got coins from Korea, England, Canada, Bahamas, and Cuba. And I’ve found foreign coins on the sidewalk - my first euro-cent was acquired this way.

Coins like washers, vary significantly in diameter, thickness, and weight. Some coins weigh very little for their size, while others weigh a lot. Some of the larger Israeli coins weighed in around 9g each. And all of them have now been used inside boxcars! The heftiest of the American coins is, the quarter - at 5.7g. The nickel is nearly as weighty at 5g, though it is smaller.

The boxcars [güterwagen] are large enough inside to put in nearly all coins - a few have been too large a diameter to fit. But the smaller cars - logcars and cement silo cars - have neither space inside, nor much space for coins to added. It turns out that the euro-cent is the perfect size to fit on the bottom of the undercarriage design that I am using. And it weighs quite a bit as well. The little euro-cent weighs 2.3g and has a diameter of 16.23mm and is 1.67mm thick. Compare that with the American penny - it weighs 2.5g and has a diameter of 19mm and a thickness of 1mm. (Interesting tidbit: the old “wheat” pennies weigh 3g.) The penny is too big to fit on the bottom of the undercarriage, but the euro-cent does fit and is almost as weighty, which makes is a nice solution, except that these little coins are not easy to find in NYC. A couple of friends were kind enough to solve this problem by mailing me euro-cents.

One of the reasons that I like sticking the euro-cents on the bottom of the undercarriage, is that this adds weight while keeping the center of gravity low. On curved track in real-life, railroads bank the tracks, and I plan to do this a little on my scale railroad. The pizza-bahn that is under-construction does not have banked tracks, though in places the bottom warped and the tracks are accidentally banked. I’d like my train cars to not overturn on banked trackage, though I have no idea how much banking versus speed will cause a train car to fall on its side.

The photo shows the undercarriage for the cement silo car - I put two euro-cents on it. The total weight for the undercarriage is now 11.3g. I need 19.9g more. I plan to put nickels in the silo to make the weight. The logcars still have no solution for adding enough weight since I can only stick euro-cents to the underside of the undercarriage.

Posted in: coins , morop , nmra , weight

Wheel journals (Studio Pickett (Soph)) by gmpicket

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I took a serious crack at adding the wheel journals to my basic undercarriage - the gray one on the left side of the picture. They really add a lot of realism to the undercarriage’s wheels - wowies! - I didn’t expect them to make that much difference. I had attempted wheel journals twice before, half-heartedly, without succeeding. So I am pleased. I still need to work harder to make better ones - these feel too big - and too wooden. But, I can get some practice by adding them to the older train cars. Adding the wheels journals was one of the comments from the NMRA judging, and the judges were right - these are critically important to the model.

Posted in: freight cars , nmra , wheels

NMRA awards (Studio Pickett (Soph)) by gmpicket

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The certificates of my winning first and second places in the “New Modeler - Freight Cars” classification arrived today. Pretty cool to see it on paper. Gonna build new cars with improvements and try again next year for the merit awards.

Posted in: freight cars , nmra

NMRA convention - the judging of my train cars (Studio Pickett (Soph)) by gmpicket

I took two of my scratch-built train cars for judging. The boxcar scored 85 points (out of 125 possible). And the logcar scored 77. The NMRA merit awards for the MMR require 87.5 points, so neither was quite good enough. I had thought the boxcar to be borderline good and that was the case. The scores are broken down into various categories and the judges (2) each wrote comments. So, I now have an idea of how they judge, how my stuff ranks, and what to do to improve.

My models did receive awards - 1st and 2nd places in the “New Modeller” contest - I think I was the only new modeller.

Posted in: freight cars , mmr , nmra

NMRA - Sunrise Trail Division Convention (Studio Pickett (Soph)) by gmpicket

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Overall, it was a good, fun day.

There were four layouts. One was trolleys - looked like O-scale which is twice the size that I model at. The trolleys were running off of catenaries. The pantographs kept slipping off the catenaries resulting in the trolleys stopping unexpectedly. The operators kept putting them back on, and the trolleys would lurch forward again. The layout had signals at one end, which actually worked. That was neat. The layout was modular (all of them were), and the track joints at the meeting points modules weren’t fixed and they would come apart, derailing the trolleys, but this group was undeterred - they just kept putting the trolleys back on the tracks.

There was an N scale layout. Nice little layout - N scale just looks cute because it is small. I find it too small, personally. They had a two-track loop layout with tunnels at each end. They ran two trains, one on each track.

There was a small T-scale layout running passenger trains. They seemed to also be having trouble with the connections between their modules, and they eventually gave up.

And the there was a big HO scale layout which ran pretty smoothly. They had a mix of passenger trains and freight trains. All American. HO is what scale I model in, but my European train is narrow gauge (hence it being HOm) and it is shorter and smaller than American trains. So the HO looked huge to me. It was fun to watch.

The convention also had clinics. These were one hour lectures on various topics led by club members. They turned out to be quite interesting. I attended three of these. One was about American passenger train service - the guy talked about how train equipment was handled. The various American railroads ran each others train cars in some of their consists, which resulted in the cars running all across the continent even if the railroad itself didn’t have track there. That was interesting to learn. I had no idea that in the old days you might have seen a Pennsylvania passenger car in Florida!

Another clinic was about scenery for layout - well, more about the details that you put into your scenery - those tiny details - like signs and Canadian geese. Yup, dude modelled HO scale Canadian geese. This was enlightening to me. I hadn’t thought about much more than moutains, trees, and a barn for my pizza-bahn. Hmmmm…

The last clinic I went to was a slide show of layouts done by other club members - some from other regions - all American modellers and all American trains. The layouts were very good. The best one, I thought, was the coal one from upstate NY (I think was NY, maybe Pennsylvania). Anyway. It was excellent. The guy had gotten real coal (apparently locally available in the ground)and used it in his hoppers and to create his scenery’s hillsides.

The day ended with a dinner and a movie. The dinner was a hot buffet and quit tasty. I got to chat with other members of the club - even a few who knew something about European trains, which was really exciting. The movie was stuff shot back int he 1950’s in Brooklyn of the old trolleys. Excellent footage. It was interesting to see the trolleys as they are long gone into the pages of history, and I had never gotten to see them.

I got some loot, too! As pictured with this post. I wasn’t expecting anything. But I came home with two HO scale locomotives - one of them is an old European one (totally awesome) and the other is a Pennsy loco. I also got a Pennsy hopper in HO. And some stuff for making scenery on a layout - this should be useful on my pizza-bahn. And the club had badges and a pin with the club name on it.

Whew! It was a long day, but a good day. It is nice to talk with folks that are interested in trains. Seeing and hearing about what other people are doing, sort of airs one’s brain out. Refreshing.

Posted in: nmra

NMRA (Studio Pickett (Soph)) by gmpicket

NMRA - National Model Railroad Association - tomorrow is the regional convention.  Just one day, in a little town out on Long Island.  I joined the NMRA back in February.  They have a program called “Master Model Railroader” (MMR for short).  To achieve this title, they have an “Achievement Program” (AP for short) which provides opportunities to get merit awards for your work.  The merit awards are divided into 11 categories and you have to get merit awards in 7 categories.  The conference will have judging for both merit awards and competition, and I am entering two of my model train cars tomorrow.  And in case it is not obvious from my lack of flow in my writing, I’m feeling a bit nervous about this.

I’m working on getting merit awards for “Master Builder - Cars”.  Even if both cars are good enough tomorrow, this is only part of what I need to complete this category.  The requirement is four significantly different train cars (and one of those has to be a passenger car) have to get merit awards, plus four more cars to complete the category.

I’ve got the paperwork for the two cars filled out and I’ve touched up the paint on their wheels - acrylic paint sticks to metal fairly well, but sometimes chips when the cars roll along the rails.  I’ve dusted off the roof of the boxcar as it was looking fuzzy with dust bunnies, and I’ve gotten out the box and bubble wrap for toting them to the convention.  So, I guess I’m ready.  Hopefully, it will be a good day.

Posted in: mmr , nmra