Number 235

Seven of our group, visitor Rob Askew and me made up the crew for last Friday night’s operating session. Bruce called around early and we dis-cussed the ongoing project of the O scale NKP stock car. Unfortunately the HO prototype is no more, thanks to the subsequent drama of a neigh-bourhood Moggie inviting itself into Bruce and Ali’s house. As said ani-mal jumped around the house seeking an escape, with the owners in pursuit, it managed to knock the stock car on-to the floor and total same. However, all is not lost as Bruce went home af-

27 OCTOBER MEETING

1-5

ARTICLE THE FIFTY FIRST

6

A STOCK CAR TALE 7

DOWN SOUTH TRIP 8-12

OUT IN THE GARAGE A PLACE CALLED BEND LES LOVEJOY

13 13

WELSH NARROW GAUGE

14-15

Inside this issue:

KEL SHERSON HOSTS 27 OCTOBER MEETING

Volume 11 Issue 17

AMERICAN CENTRAL MODEL RAILROADERS GROUP

A NEWSLETTER OF THE

1 November 2017

Group contact and liaison person - Kel Sherson Phone 04 2348577 Newsletter Editor - Ray Mathewson Phone 06 3686560 Email audray@xtra.co.nz

FUTURE MEETINGS

Ray Mathewson 10 November 2017 Alan Duston 24 November 2017

Kel and Bruce discuss an item on the layout control panel.

ter the operating session with copies of five NKP stock car plan sheets. So we await future developments. Moggie had better watch out or it could end up in a said stock car (jammed in, of course). The early start also allowed Bruce, who of course is a ‘real Dispatcher’ for KiwiRail, to familiarize himself with the two Panel Pro screens in preparation for being the Dispatcher for our operating session. I haven’t as yet labeled the locations on the schematics. (continued on page 2)

Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 2

KEL SHERSON HOSTS 27 OCTOBER MEETING (continued)

No problem to Bruce, with a few yellow Post-Its locations were soon identified. That interim solu-tion, like another soon to be a mentioned one, worked fine. As was to be expected, trains were dispatched with the minimum of fuss. The layout owner got a chance to run trains and also noted there wasn’t the usual crapola thrown at the Dispatcher like at other times. Maybe the operating crew were just happy with their work, too busy, or too scared. But to the business of running trains. Karl took on the Yard masters job at Buffalo and Ken the same job at Bellevue. In preparation for this Session I’d run the full RailOp Switchlist lists for 76 trains (over the 24 hour operating period). I’d been saving the Yardmaster Switchlists for printing at the end of that work. But at about printing the Manifest for Train 72 my computer decided to run an update in the background. This really upset RailOp such that it blew away the Yardmaster lists. A couple of ses-sions operated previously without these proved their importance. So once I had all the Train Switchlists I constructed Excel spreadsheets from them for each of the Yardmasters, sorted in Train arrival sequence, for the pickups and drop-offs for each Train. The other interim solution was track schematics for those towns that now have their turnouts wired up to DS64s showing the main turnout Routes in each town. These will be replaced by panels in due course, but as an interim solution they worked. It also proved that a couple of said Routes might well need to be changed as they involved yard turnouts and main line turnouts. Occasionally firing a route involving a yard turnout misaligned a mainline route. On one of these occasions a mainline manifest train was entering the town. Of course a minor de-railment occurred as the turnout changed underneath the train. So a bit of tuning required. We ran trains for a bit longer than usual, for two rea-sons. One, we were enjoying doing just that and sec-ondly, well, supper wasn’t ready. The hired help, aka wife Ruth and daughter Ingrid, were busy watching the final of the Rugby which at fulltime was 40 all. So extra time ensued. This was punctuat-ed by Engineer Owen regularly abandoning his post to head up the stairs to get updates on the score as he heard the hired help getting excited about the game. Fortunately Wellington won and all the plan-ets were put back in alignment. Engineer Owen re-turned to his Mikado, which was expressing some

displeasure with being regularly abandoned. I think a trip to the maintenance bench might be in order, for the loco. The session proved I still haven’t got a few routes set quite right; but these will be easy to address with the new DS64 programming meth-od in DecoderPro 4.8. Before the next session I’ll sort these and hopefully install the board of DS64s for West End Staging under the peninsu-la. Like most of our layouts, there’s a fair bit of ‘stuff’ stored under the layout which needs to be moved and then replaced for that task to happen. Of course the usual banter occurred over another one of Ruth’s great supers. I did warn a couple of the guys who phoned to say they couldn’t turn up they’d miss out on the lolly cake slice (amongst other goodies). Just as well Ruth dou-bled the mixture. Talk about kids in a candy store; but great the effort was appreciated. Sev-eral of us noted our esteemed Editor making re-turn visits to the slice plate. Following the usual post-supper routine we watched a few videos of layouts and ‘real trains’ using YouTube. There is so much available to watch now that if something really doesn’t hold our attention it’s “Next”. So we did a fair bit of video clip surfing. It was around mid-night when the team headed for their respective homes. So thanks guys for another fun night and helping me ‘stress’ the layout and improve things all around. A special thanks to Bruce for being Dis-patcher.

One of the Yardmaster lists.

Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 3

KEL SHERSON HOSTS 27 OCTOBER MEETING (continued)

Top: Just part of Kel’s layout. Above left: Two growlers ready to roll. Above right: Why are we waiting? My train at Buffalo waiting for the switching crew to add and switch out cars of the trains consist.

CHRISTMAS IS COMING SOON.

Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 4

KEL SHERSON HOSTS 27 OCTOBER MEETING (continued)

Top: Part of the yards at Buffalo. Centre: A little bit of history and an unusual meeting of two historic cars placed on the same track at the same time by Kel’s computer gen-erated car dispatching sys-tem. Bottom: Part of the yards at Conneaut.

Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 5

KEL SHERSON HOSTS 27 OCTOBER MEETING (continued)

Top left: Part of the yards at Port Huron. Top right: Kel with another rack of DS 64’s ready to install under the layout. Centre left: A switching crew members view of part of the Port Huron industrial tracks. Left: Bruce reliving his real life occupation in model form.

Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 6

It’s been a wet 2017, so having a Loconet being flood-ed with messages was just symptomatic of the whole year. As readers of this esteemed e-Mag will know, I’ve been on a mission setting up JMRI PanelPro for my Dispatcher’s Station. This has led to a long overdue installation of DS64s and wiring up of turnouts. His-torically I programmed the first 10 or so DS64s on my layout with a throttle. For the next 10 or so I used Lo-conet Checker. Recently I added another 25 plus DS64s, programmed them with Loconet Checker and subsequently started to get spurious Loconet signals. So much so that at a recent operating session we mo-mentarily got the dreaded ‘Slots Full’ message and the Loconet appeared ‘slow’ with Engineers having issues controlling or selecting their locomotives. Initially I thought it may be a visitor’s throttle being ‘out of date’. That may have been contributing to the problem but I’ve since discovered and have jointly solved the real problem. The problem displayed itself, when monitored by JMRI DecoderPro Loconet Monitor and/or Loconet Checker, as a stream of LT2048 related messages; try-ing to set Turnout 2048 to Thrown. All well and good, except I don’t have a Turnout 2048 and I couldn’t see (in Loconet Checker or Loconet Monitor) what was calling that turnout to change. But it happened most times we set a Route, either by throttle or local panel. As there was no Turnout 2048 on my layout this flooded the Loconet with messages as it kept trying. With having another 20 plus DS64s to install I needed to sort this matter real quick. I posted this problem to the Digitrax Help Desk and also to the Yahoo Digitrax Users Group. While the Help Desk couldn’t give me any solid leads, a very helpful fellow with the User Name Billybob replied offline with a lot of suggestions to start the trouble-shooting. At the same time As Billybob was recom-mending things for me to try I realised that I was still running Decoder Pro Ver. 4.6 and in Ver. 4.8 was a new way to program DS64s, including programming routes. So I upgraded. Now by coincidence guess who had a lot to do with this new DS64 functionality, yes, Billybob. As we say in this part of the world, “Mate, Legend!”. Using Billybob’s new programme I was able to inves-tigate what was actually in the routes and it turns out that the last entry in a route line, (especially if the route had an odd number of turnouts) was the dreaded 2048. I couldn’t see these entries using Loconet

Checker or Loconet Monitor. I’m not sure how they got there, maybe it was something to do with a power glitch, maybe something to do with how Loconet Checker handles additions and changes to routes, maybe it was a full moon, but however they got there the new functionality in Ver 4.8 allows one to fix them. Billybob be-lieves it was how Loconet Checker handled Routes with setting turnouts to either thrown or closed, but Digitrax also uses a third state of ‘not used’. Loconet Checker didn’t seem to han-dle this state. So I systematically checked all the routes in each DS64 line by line and removed the 2048 references. I’ve tried ‘firing’ routes that I have repaired and the Loconet overload wasn’t pre-sent and the multiple messages re turning turn-out 2048 to T didn’t appear either. So I’m pret-ty confident that we’ve got a solution. Hence a recommendation for those of you pro-gramming DS64s, upgrade to Decoder Pro 4.8 and use the new functionality. So another big shout out of “Thanks” again to Billybob and al-so to all the other JMRI folk who give their hob-by time to provide solutions for the rest of us to have fun. I’ve also let the Digitrax Help Desk people know of this issue, possible cause, effect and solution as well for them to add to their Help Desk knowledge base. Their reply to me was “we’ve solved a squirrel of a problem”. As a footnote to this saga; after multiple ex-changes of emails Bob (from Michigan) and I found we share a liking for Berkshires. He has worked on the Pere Marquette 1225, which Ruth and I were fortunate enough to ride behind when the 1225 was double headed with NKP 765 back in 2009. Seems like yesterday. Model Railroading is indeed fun. Kel Disclaimer: the comments above are my personal thoughts and do not represent comment from any organisation I am associated with.

Article the Fifty-first – Flooding of a different sort. Text by Kel Sherson

Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 7

A Stock Car Tale There is always more than meets the eye in a picture. The Stock Car tale started some years ago when I was talking to Bruce and pondering on the lack of a suitable O scale NKP stock car model. At that time Bruce was ‘getting into’ 3-D printing and we chatted about 3-D printing a body for mounting on a commercially availa-ble donor frame. Of course straight away along came John Slater and Tom Gascoigne from Buffalo Creek Graphics and released their Weaver based 3-set NKP stock cars. In parallel though I’d dived for the NKPHTS NKP Freight Car diagram book and copied several NKP designs and given them to Bruce to show him the style of cars NKP made. Of course we’ve both had multiple railroad modelling projects since. Then out of the blue a couple of weeks back I got a call from Bruce. “Are you going to Tony’s tonight?”. Obvious answer. “Yes”. Reply, “Good, me too, I’ll call around on the way, I’ve got something to

show you”. And there it was; a very nice prototype model in HO of one of the NKP stock cars. It wasn’t 3-D printed, but laser-cut from 4mm ply. Very nice and of course being ‘wood’ it just looks and feels authentic. So, very easy to scale up to O scale and to tweak so it could fit on say an Atlas or Intermountain frame/ends/roof. That combo yet to be addressed. But another example of ‘new technology’ impacting on the hobby. Bruce said he did the ‘programming’ over an evening before and cut and assembled the sides, “just before I came over” to my place. Bruce says amending the design for bi-level and double-doors will be “real easy”. Well, you’d expect that from a fellow with his skills. I’m looking forward to seeing an O Scale version. I suspect other NKP O scalers might also express an interest. Model railroading is indeed fun. Kel

Top : Looking down on the inside of the car. Centre: HO version of the stock car in comparison with a 40’ container. Above: Side view of stock car.

Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 8

Well it all started with an invite, why don’t you guys come down to our yearly train show in Christchurch in October. A plan was hatched to fly down on the Friday night see everybody, go to the train show and fly back Sunday night. In the meantime our oldest son decided he and his wife needed a change of lifestyle, a bit of land with a house preferably and no close neighbours, the search was on ,then one day we had a visit from Chris saying we have found a place—Invercargill—What!!! They moved about the middle of the year and are happy down there. So what was going to be a weekend trip became a ferry trip and a long drive. Stewart still flew down for the weekend. With a ferry trip and a drive on the deviation road we arrived at Dave Smithey’s place on the Friday night. Our accommodation for the weekend. Christine fed us all with a lovely tea and about 7 o’clock Brendon, John and Graham arrived to run trains on Dave’s progressing lay-out. Storage yards and the start of the ladder tracks into the main yard were wired up with jumper cable for the night but at least there were trains running. Layout dis-cussions and a lovely supper finished off the night. Saturday afternoon the men headed off to the show and Christine and Viv went shopping. The show was a bit like our Railex shows with layouts and trade stands, Stewart and I bought a few things to bring home. Then we met up with Christine and Viv and were off to Brendon’s for tea. Tea at Brendon and Val’s turned out to be a bit of a cele-bration because on the Wednesday before the weekend he had just completed connecting his main line and had trains running, a sort of Golden Spike event. Nothing like people visiting to give you a deadline to get something done. Brendon’s layout is a Pelle Solberg layout design with a few modelling adjustments. Construction is going well and I am sure Brendon will produce a very nice layout. Brendon models the Santa Fe and Val has gone for Kan-sas City Southern as can be seen by the photos. Running trains, layout discussions and then we went back inside for final chat, supper, goodbyes and the trip back to Dave’s ( 1hr ) Sunday morning after breakfast and more layout discus-sions we departed Dave’s on our drive, next stop Dune-din. In Dunedin we did the usual touristy things, saw the Taieri Gorge train at the station but with no time to travel on it we bought the DVD. Also in Dunedin Neville Bur-gess who we saw at the ChCh show took us to his local club which has a Ho and N scale layout. Departing Dunedin we headed to Invercargill, arriving mid-afternoon and with Chris at work we decided to car-ry on to Bluff to do the touristy thing and stand by the sign post, as you do. The weather was beautiful there. Heading back to Invercargill we caught up with Chris and headed off to his new place which is on Brydone – Glencoe Rd, according to Chris 30 Minutes peak hour or not from Invercargill. A modest house, 3 acres of land, 1

neighbour and some sheep. While there we visited Bill Richardson’s truck Muse-um, well worth a look, took a few hours to wander through. Chris took us out to dinner on the last night to say they have sold their house in Upper Hutt so the move is done. Heading back to Picton via Queenstown we stopped in at Kingston to see the condition of the train and associated bits which are not in a healthy state. Onto Queenstown we were hoping to get a ride on the Earnslaw but with traffic and crap parking in the town we only got to see it sail away from the wharf, maybe another day. Next stop Arrowtown, Cromwell and onto Tekapo for the night. All the night gazers were out on the beach by the stone church. Leaving Tekapo we were on a mission to get back to Blen-heim, not enough days left to sightsee, so we missed a few things we had hoped to see. Maybe next trip. Next day a short drive to Picton and caught the ferry home.

DOWN SOUTH TRIP TEXT AND PHOTOS BY ALAN DUSTON

Top: Dave’s temporary wiring. Next: Brendon and John running trains on Dave’s layout.

Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 9

DOWN SOUTH TRIP (CONTINUED)

Brendon cutting cake.

Photographer says this needs no ex-planation.

The South Island Branch with a couple of North Islanders.

Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 10

DOWN SOUTH TRIP (CONTINUED)

Top: The Group minus Alan at the table. Next: Val’s locos. Next left: Storage tracks under the main yard. Next right: Brendon’s track plan.

Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 11

DOWN SOUTH TRIP (CONTINUED)

DUNEDIN MODEL RAILWAY CLUB’S

LAYOUT. Top: The steel mill on the N scale layout. Centre: A freight yard on the N scale layout. Bottom: Part of the HO scale layout.

Volume 11 Issue 17 Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 12

DOWN SOUTH TRIP (CONTINUED)

Top left: The Chain. Always wondered why the South Island hasn’t floated away. Top right: Larnach Castle. A Dunedin tourist spot. Next : The railway station at Kingston. Next : Ab 778 one of the Kingston Flyer locos in a very sad condition.

Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 13

OUT IN THE GARAGE, A PLACE CALLED BEND.

BEND OREGON

ZZA

In the previous issue of HIGHBALL Alan Duston had given us a preview of work on Bend which is part of his layout out in the garage which we never seem to see. In an-swer to his question of “what to put there?” I have traced a rough drawing of the tracks at Bend drawn from Google maps on the internet. From this drawing, just maybe, some of us might have some suggestions upon which Alan could enhance this part of his layout. As an aside, on Google maps I followed the main line north from Bend to Prineville Jn. and then on out to Prineville. In 1995 we had a look at this line and recorded the track layouts from what we could see. On check-ing my notes with what I could see on the Google mapping my notes were 100% cor-rect. There were however new sidings and a crossover laid at Prineville Jn. since our visit.

Les Lovejoy Les Lovejoy, father of fellow model railroad-er Neil Lovejoy passed away on 19 October 2017. His funeral on 25 October 2017 was attended by a large crowd from all walks of life. Les was a builder by trade but had inter-ests in cars, camping in caravans and later in life an interest in model railroads. He had built one when living out at Rongotea. On shifting to Palmerston North he built another layout with interesting operating industrial sidings supported by impressive scenery. He was one of life's true gentlemen.

Les and two scenes of his wonderful layout.

Page 14 Volume 11 Issue 17

In early September we had 4 days in Northern Wales. We stayed at a Castle in Ruthven. This was located about an hours drive from Porthmadog. The departure point of both the Welsh Highland Railway and the Ffestiniog Railway. These photos show the trains of both railways The Ffestiniog was mainly using Fairlie built locomotives while the Welsh Highland Railways main source of power comes in the form of Garrett ex South Africa. There is a significant size difference between the 2 lines even though they both run on 2 foot gauge track.

WELSH NARROW GAUGE Photos and text by Tony Owen

Top photo: One of the Fairlie types getting ready to depart Porthmadog for Ffestiniog. This engine is David Lloyd George and was built in 1992. Photo above: Departing for Ffestiniog

Volume 11 Issue 17 Page 15

WELSH NARROW GAUGE (continued)

Top. The brand new observation car built for the Ffestiniog Railway. This is a beautiful car Above: On the Welsh Highland Railway our train stopped at Beddgelert to cross a train heading in the other direction. This in one of the Garrett locomotives in use on this line and really stretch the loading gauge