Roadbed for the Nebenbahn and some wiring gets done...

Hey all,

There has been more activity on Carstenbahn One thanks to rainy days and an attack of gout, which kept me indoors for much of the past two weeks.

I added some wood underneath the Koenigstein branch line, and have been able to run some trains up the hill.  The grade is quite manageable, and even a longer freight train can make it to the top with little difficulty.

I also started some of the wiring of the layout.  I learned about a 'bare copper' wiring technique from Tim Eckert of Eckert Engineering fame via a project he did for a client in California.  The idea is to run bare copper wires for all your power needs, then tap off those wherever you need juice.  Here are some photos of the design:

Sorry this image isn't sharp, but as you can see, there are three copper wires passing through eyelets and making their way around the layout.

In the image above you can see one end of the wires.  I used eyelets at the end, wrapped the wires around themselves, and ran some solder onto the twisted wires to hold them together.  FYI you don't want to make a loop on your power circuit.  Not sure why, but that's what I've been told...

Here's the other end of the wiring system near the control panel.  There are adjustable eyelets on this end to allow me to set and maintain decent tension.  Note the tabs of yellow, brown and red electrical tape.  These tabs, which are placed every few feet, remind me which wires carry which type of power.  Yellow is accessory power, red is digital track power, and brown is ground.  In the image above you can also see the dabs of solder that hold the wires together where they are twisted.

Opinion time!

There is a website for 1-scalers that provides frequent updates on new products, train shows, etc. that I visit about once a week.  It's www.spur1info.com, and even if you don't read a lot of German, the site owner takes excellent pictures and provides lots of updates on what's happening in the (mostly European) 1-scale community.  A recent post showed the following picture from a recent train show:

photo courtesy of www.spur1info.com

The article's author mentioned that he thought the layout shown in the image above was, well, "meh".  He's right. The structures shown are all commercially available kits, the trees only remotely resemble the real thing, the curves are too tight to be realistic, the rolling stock (and the crane) aren't weathered, the grass looks like it was spray painted, and the locomotive service facility is comically small and simple.

But I love this photo, and I am trying to understand why.

I think it speaks to the diversity of the hobby of model railroading, and how different model railroaders approach it.  Coming from an H.O.background, I found my enjoyment in watching trains proceed through scenery, and I replicated that in miniature as these pictures from my H.O. layout show:

So you can imagine how I feel when I see layouts like this:

Building a layout that ends within inches of the edge of the track roadbed is not the kind of layout I would ever want to build.  Now, 1-scale is a different creature, and the hillside that I built in H.O. shown in the first picture of my H.O. layout would be about four feet tall in 1-scale, and wouldn't fit in my SUV, so it's not a surprise that you don't see a lot of those on portable layouts like the Württemberg team's or the Wuppertal club's layout (above).  But I would never have any interest in those two layouts simply because the detail of the rolling stock, or the attention to trackside details like weathering the track and the bumpers, and replacing the plastic with real wood like the bumper on the right, have little appeal to me compared to seeing trains, in any scale, making their way through scenery.  And that even goes for scenery that may not be the most realistic.

So thank you, Marklin, for what is a decidedly pathetic layout that first introduced me to the possibilities of building something grandiose back in 2001 that caught my eye at the Modellbahnmesse.  If it hadn't been for this layout, one that makes even the picture at the top of this post look impressive, I may never have fallen in love with the King's Gauge...

- Carsten