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Making me realize on my mini onetrak i should be doing some of this and just cut small buildings into two pieces and then i can use the back and front on two different modules and get a tad more space if needed on smaller modules. cheers jeff

Challenge is with regular cars there is the usual underside details that are usually small and stickers dont stick to as well and then most of the little bit of flat spot along the middle of the chassis usually has some raised lettering on it! Truck surfaces are recessed and can put them over the bogie pin areas. Just a bit of a hunt to find a good consistent place to put them on each train. Some are easy and some are harder. Funny you should mention the exposed gears. Years ago we had a club member who kept having motor cars getting gummed up with smutz. He never felt he had the dexterity to open them up so i ended up out cleaning out a few dozen of them over a year or two. Really could not figure out where he was picking up all the crap as he ran on a layout base at table height I had made for him and he did a lot of perceived scenery so no ballast, just some ground foam around and usual household smutz. After the first dozen I went and put scotch tape over the gear slots on his trucks to see if that could maybe stop crap getting sucked up into the trucks, but a number of them came back mucked up! I was a bit mystified, but just had to assume it got sucked up around the wheels more. Maybe why they didnt bother to close the gears over! He did run his trains a lot and very hard so way more use than the usual train use. Over 25+ years ive only had maybe a dozen really badly mucked up power cars/locos of mine that have required extensive cleaning. jeff

Major hassle - guess I we are lucky in the US as I head to France in a week and haven't had to worry about a visa. Hope you get it sorted. Tony

Another small update to the diorama: I started painting the second building while weathering the platform, which is finished now. I will now need to add details like the station name, safety posters, and so on. I thought about putting a big advert or something on the high wall at the back, but I didn't have a good idea. It could use the space of the four panels on the right side, I think. For the platform, I also need to model the chairs for people to sit on while waiting, and together with the station sign, some safety posters, and people waiting, it should fill the emptiness quite nicely. And all that needs to be done before adding the roof (which still needs its lighting). Another project I'm working on is the inside of the big building. Here a picture a little closer to the building: As said earlier, the right shop is a bookstore, so I added three hints of bookshelves to the wall at the back of the store. The grey area will get a picture of a bookstore to give it more depth. The upper levels will be apartments. In the original building (which currently has 3 open apartments), you have a small room for your washing machine. So I added an interior wall, a sliding door, and something that will look like a washing machine through the windows, and a shelf on top of it. The big white area will get another picture showing the room. Some apartments will have curtains blocking the view inside, too. Already modeled a little thing that will hopefully look like clothes drying on a rack when painted. Let's see how that goes. I hope I can find a figure that looks like hanging up some laundry... The building still needs lighting as well but I will do the interior first to see which rooms would look best with the lighting. Maybe you guys have some ideas for the big poster/ad on the back of the platform.

Been trying to organize a trip to France but it's impossible to get a visa for my wife. It's ridiculous, the company that handles visas on behalf of France has no appointments. You refresh the page over and over all day and occasionally an out of hours one comes up, which costs £60 extra, but trying to book one always gives an error. There is another option, pay them £250 to come out to you... It feels like a scam. Might go to Scotland instead, but my wife has wanted to go to France for years. Should have stayed in Ireland got Irish citizenship, then we could travel freely in Europe.

@Kingmeow Thanks I will keep the tape size in mind when I order tapes. I'll also remember to get a TZ or TZe machine, I think the P-Touch will be the best solution to my labeling side quest. Your examples are great reference material and show a good usage for the P-Touch.

I have to agree, it will offer a lot of flexibility. It would be a shame to have constraints built into the design. Sorry I should have clarified, I like seeing the wires if they are not too overscaled, etched wires are tricky because I could make them to scale but they would insanely fragile. I will try to get them as fine as I can. If I am happy with the results I will release them. Functional wires, darn you have my respect! I will be making the 2nd wire for Yurakucho, using rigging elastic. It is fiddly but I did manage to make a couple test sections that looked reasonably good.

BTW, in the first picture you see the "exposed" gears in the truck? They are actually slightly recessed so you can stick a P-Touch label over them with no ill effects. @cteno4 in case you can't locate space for your labels on your trains. As a matter of fact, people use a piece of blue painters tape to purposely cover those gears to prevent dirt, small pieces of foam, etc. from being ingested. Especially at a train show where the environment is not exactly the cleanest. Having to get out an ingested piece of dirt/foam that's inside all those gears is a royal P-I-A!!!! Often you have to take apart all the gears in the truck to find it! 🤬

9mm or 3/8" is the height size of the label. I found that to be just right for N-Scale. 1/2" is a bit too big. Unfortunately I bought my machine about 30 years ago! But it can still use all the modern tapes. If you are going to buy a machine today, make sure it can use the TZ or TZe tapes. Those are laminated tapes. Basically the printing is laminated over by a clear tough layer. There are cheaper machines that uses M (I think) tape only and there's no lamination with those. Rough handling over time will scratch off the print/toner. You can not mix tape types with machine types. DO NOT BUY imitation machines or tapes! I told one friend that but he wanted to save a few bucks. "Look! I can buy 5 tapes (from China) for the prices of 1!" He ended throwing the ENTIRE system and EVERY tape away due to frustration and lack of quality. And who knows what residue the tapes will leave over time. P-Touch tapes have been proven over time. Here is a 9mm or 3/8" tape I used on the fuel tank of a Kato SD70MAC. This is to prevent ownership mix ups at train shows. Yes you can! But I'm lazy with MRR equipment as the places I put them on normally no one can see. I use the same methodology for all my camera equipment. For that I use white print on black tapes as the tapes are visible. Looks really professional. I even use it to label Kato book cases. I use white print on (neon) green. It's not an exact match but "good enough" to blend into the Kato green. I wish Brother would make a dark/forest green tape. 🙂 After printing out a long label (I do a few at a time as each print job wastes a little bit of label for the leader/header), I cut them on a paper cutter to be as square as possible and use a tweener or the tip of an X-Acto knife to apply them after peeling off the backing. Here you can see the "F" on the front truck on an EF510. Again, 9mm or 3/8" tape. Now I don't have to use a magnifying glass to see where the "1" or "2" is! 😎 Extremely tough. I use them on my R/C airplanes and they go through much rougher conditions than my trains. Again, be sure to use TZ or TZe laminated tapes - genuine ones! As I mentioned my unit is 30 years ago and even with that vintage its has built-in fonts with circles, framing borders, special symbols like arrows, lightening bolts, stop signs, caution triangle, etc.

Usually with class action suits, the lawyers get all the money and the consumers, maybe, just maybe, get 10 cents on the dollar back, if that! It's usually zero. Good you got some money back!

Yes thats my hope as the Avery labels are quite tall. I forgot to mention the other trick with orientation is to just place the labels on one end of the car so they are always facing the same direction. Only issue with this is finding appropriate spots to stick the stickers on one end or the other on some trains. I guess i just got lazy as i stopped labeling trains many years back. Probably was i had labeled a lot of the longer trains when we had the larger club layout and with Ttrak usually smaller equipment now and easier to figure out car order. And maybe just lazier with age… jeff

I would think the P-Touch labels would be thinner and tougher than Avery labels. That's a good alternative suggestion. After a lengthy search, I found numbers in circles in font form. So I could print those onto decal sheets and apply them to the train cars.

One of my key inspirations for my European tram adventures was a 1976 ERA Headlights article Why Not a European Vacation? written by the late John Bromley. John was a long time member of the Toronto Transportation Society, a group focused on buses and streetcar operations as I am. John recommended eating in train stations and this was the first time I have done this. The Man in Seat 61 recommended a schnitzel & fries or bratwurst & rösti and decent beer at the Brasserie Federal on the north side of the main concourse. As this was the type of food I wanted to try I was all in. Its not cheap, but nothing is in Switzerland. Third photo is after my model train store adventure.

I did get into one of the two model train shops I had targeted for a visit. This was Zuri-Tech GmbH at Stampfenbachstrasse 14 within walking distance of the train station. From the Central tram hub one stop east of Zurich HB you walk north on Stampenbachstrasse. The store is on the right side of the street. While I was there I got a Kato/Noch Bernina Express Souvenir Coach Api 1301. I will photograph it tomorrow.

Bummer it looks like at the time the only lawsuit against ups here in the us was by the gov and they got a $25M fine, no class action in the us. Looks like there are some big class actions going right now against fedex, DHL, and ups over custom safes being applied to small de minimis shipments. In the end it’s these fees i worry about the most as they will probably be quite unregulated [consumer protection is in trouble here] and no way to fight back on them really. They could easily be more than the duty owed. jeff

UPS lost a class action law suit years ago in Canada over the bogus customs brokerage fee. I was on the list and twice got a payment for damages. First because I was on the list and second time because there was money left over!

@Lessigen That would be good as TinyHK is not exactly great quality and decent detail (its known for doing hong kong theme stuff). Now i just need china/hong kong train station diorama to match. Just doing the high speed rail station in hk even some of the major stations like central/admiralty will be lot of work.

The day I took the photos of the lineup of electric locomotives, it was dominated by SBB Re 460 locomotives. These are mainly used for long-distance passenger trains. There are 119 of the Re 460. Wikipedia notes: The Lok 2000-family locomotives are the last mainline locomotives to be quasi fully developed and produced by Swiss companies. Locomotive construction in Switzerland has since been largely discontinued for economic reasons. Only Stadler Rail still manufactures shunting and rack railway locomotives in the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBB_Re_460 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBB_Re_460

The very common SBB Re 420 electric locomotives were produced over a period of 21 years, from 1964 to 1985. It is the largest series of locomotives on the Swiss Federal Railways and they are the most common type of locomotive in Switzerland. They were used for passenger services alone or in pairs throughout Switzerland, but as of 2024 these workhorses are mainly in freight traffic. I the photos I got at Zurich HB I believe were in shunting duty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBB_Re_420 First three photos were taken at Zurich HB and the final photo from the train enroute to Basel.

I can definitely see Minitown doing something like that. They're already working on models for some of the Beijing and Shanghai metro rolling stock.

When you cleaned all the gears did you re lube them? Also a tiny bit of very fine oil on the motor bearings? Amazing what clean and lubing can do to a very old engine. Sweet you rescued the old gal! I would not do well in Japan with the bargain bins of stuff like this as i would get too much enjoyment in resuscitating older stuff and Frankensteining things. cheers jeff

Yeah even with de minimis exemption in the past ups especially has been the one to sometimes pop on the full customs processing fee coming into the us, especially from canada. I use to order some equipment from canada for work projects and just bought it in my own name [im a freelancer] and like a couple of hundred bucks usually and every time it came across the boarder ups they added the fee. Was totally silly with NAFTA and de minimis exemption. None of the other carriers triggered this. Usually a customs review should only happen if over the de minimis limit or something funky in paperwork or contents and UPS would need to be the agent [none of my packages were like this and invoice or package op ended by customs]. I would call UPS to investigate and get the run around every time but from what they were saying it was sounding like they just did it to most all the packages. When I would ask for customs paperwork to show what they were upset about as no duty owed or any inspection done to invoice or package ups would just say it was all internal paperwork and the process UPS had to do to bring a package across the boarder. So i just tried to avoid ups but sadly then [this was the 90s and early 2000s] for some reason many of the vendors i used insisted on ups to the us, total PITA. Luckily never had a single customs charge with probably a couple of thousand packages of packages from japan and china over the last 30 years so fortunate. Life does not look so simple in the future here, but hopefully something reasonable will work out with all this stuff, but maybe thats being too optimistic. jeff

Kofu, Yamanashi. https://maps.app.goo.gl/8uwDaJ7nbGeTs6Uf9 Maybe a bit too yellow.

Interesting i never thought of the Ptouch labels. But smaller font for just doing numbering like that would be easy and could use a hole punch to make a dot easily. They do stick better and are thinner than the usual Avery dot stickers and dont have to try to write cleanly tiny. Going to have to experiment with that. could also do black with white letters to make the labels blend in a bit better on the usual black underbody stuff or black on gray. do you just use a tip of an xacto to peel off the backing? jeff

The number at the bottom of the chassis is unfortunately misleading... The actual item number is 302, the first EF65 Kato produced, being first released in 1969. The mismatching item number is due to the EF65 sharing a chassis with the Kato EF70 (numbered 301) which released in 1967. Afaik there's no publicily available catalogue of all Kato products, but searching for "manufacturer + loco type + item number" gets you there like 90% of the way. There are plenty of blogs detailing the early years of Japanese N gauge who like to document releases like yours.