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Takahachikawa

railsquid

By railsquid
in Layout Building

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TimWay4

TimWay4

Posted
Posted

I absolutely love getting to see pictures of your layout, seeing it evolve. It was amazing before the backscene, but the backscene does really add to it like you say.

 

Fantastic layout

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sandiway

sandiway

Posted
Posted (edited)
11 hours ago, railsquid said:

Turning away from the hills, by happy chance I found a backscene for the rear side of the layout which is more-or-less what I've been looking for, i.e. a vast swathe of Japanese outer-urban landscape which looks pretty much like that of the main station's intended location in the far west of the urban area where it sweeps up against the mountains.

 

42656772520_eda5f1f772.jpg

Station backscene, 2018-09-04 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

From this angle, even the scale of the backdrop looks natural. Great. Wonder if they do a night backdrop on transparent plastic with pinpricks for lights.

 

Edited by sandiway
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railsquid

railsquid

Posted
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A rather blurry ride through a very untidy layout, just in case anyone has got the impression from carefully angled photos that it's anything like complete 😉

 

 

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Pauljag900

Pauljag900

Posted
Posted
19 minutes ago, railsquid said:


The Man from Del Monte Python, he say yes.

 

 

Wow,that’s a blast from the past squid! Wish I could say I do nt remember seeing it,but unfortunately I do! Vividly,like it was yesterday ha ha!😂😂

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railsquid

railsquid

Posted
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7 hours ago, Pauljag900 said:

Wow,that’s a blast from the past squid! Wish I could say I do nt remember seeing it,but unfortunately I do! Vividly,like it was yesterday ha ha!😂😂

 

Glad someone gets the reference... at least it's not in black and white. eh? 😉

Sort of related, in one of the Squidlet's picture books there's a picture of an olde-style rotary dial phone, I asked him what it was, and he thought for a while and then said "clock!". Full marks for lateral thinking though.

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cteno4

cteno4

Posted
Posted

A number of years ago I was teaching multimedia high school. Of course I had a big lab full of all sorts of computers. I needed to do some labels for a bunch of things in the lab and had a few off small sheets of sticker sheets so I pulled into the lab an old selectric typewriter on those ubiquitous  roll around metal adjustable typewriter stands (I think it had been there 20 years before when I went to school there). One of the kids walked in and honestly asked “what sort of old computer is that?” I explained no computer just typed on a page, thats it no memory but later ones would remeber the last 20 characters. His response is who could you get anything done... I asked the class how many had typed on a typewriter and only a couple of kids raised their hands and said at their grandparents house to play! Made me feel old! They the. We’re thinking it stupid me using the typewriter instead of the computer and printer. So it turned into a great teaching point as I showed them the pile of misc sticker sheets I had to work with and said ok let’s figure out the steps I would need to go thru to try and print some various stickers I needed on the computer: find the size, look for label template, make one if it didn’t exist, make the word merge list and then run the merge, figure out where the first open label on the sheet was. First try turned out that printer driver did not sheet feed as the template expected so had to do a second one. I then sat down at the type writer and did 10 labels in alike a minute. Small stunned silence from them. They just assumed using the computer would always be faster! To this day I still have this issue with labels...

 

Jeff

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Pauljag900

Pauljag900

Posted
Posted (edited)
26 minutes ago, cteno4 said:

A number of years ago I was teaching multimedia high school. Of course I had a big lab full of all sorts of computers. I needed to do some labels for a bunch of things in the lab and had a few off small sheets of sticker sheets so I pulled into the lab an old selectric typewriter on those ubiquitous  roll around metal adjustable typewriter stands (I think it had been there 20 years before when I went to school there). One of the kids walked in and honestly asked “what sort of old computer is that?” I explained no computer just typed on a page, thats it no memory but later ones would remeber the last 20 characters. His response is who could you get anything done... I asked the class how many had typed on a typewriter and only a couple of kids raised their hands and said at their grandparents house to play! Made me feel old! They the. We’re thinking it stupid me using the typewriter instead of the computer and printer. So it turned into a great teaching point as I showed them the pile of misc sticker sheets I had to work with and said ok let’s figure out the steps I would need to go thru to try and print some various stickers I needed on the computer: find the size, look for label template, make one if it didn’t exist, make the word merge list and then run the merge, figure out where the first open label on the sheet was. First try turned out that printer driver did not sheet feed as the template expected so had to do a second one. I then sat down at the type writer and did 10 labels in alike a minute. Small stunned silence from them. They just assumed using the computer would always be faster! To this day I still have this issue with labels...

 

Jeff

Bet that shut em up jeff👍😂😂

Edited by Pauljag900
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cteno4

cteno4

Posted
Posted

Good teaching moment, right tool for the right job. It was a fun year as there were so many places to just teach basic critical thinking which sadly many of the kids had not gotten a lot of. But seeing the little lightbulb go off in their head on little things made the long hours, low pay and hard work of teaching really worth it.

 

jeff

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kvp

kvp

Posted
Posted
15 hours ago, cteno4 said:

So it turned into a great teaching point as I showed them the pile of misc sticker sheets I had to work with and said ok let’s figure out the steps I would need to go thru to try and print some various stickers I needed on the computer: find the size, look for label template, make one if it didn’t exist, make the word merge list and then run the merge, figure out where the first open label on the sheet was. First try turned out that printer driver did not sheet feed as the template expected so had to do a second one. I then sat down at the type writer and did 10 labels in alike a minute. Small stunned silence from them. They just assumed using the computer would always be faster! To this day I still have this issue with labels...

It's very similar to the raster board and drawing a custom pcb. You have to determine where you draw the line between wiring it up by hand on a raster board and designing a custom board. For a simple one and just one piece, the raster board is faster. For 2 pieces, usually faster. For 3 or 4? There is a point where drawing a pcb and ordering it is less work for you than manually doing each one. The limit gets lower and lower if you can make it yourself (like with photo etching or a small cnc). With cnc cutting, i would draw a custom board for a single piece as most machines cut faster than i can solder trace wires.

 

For your label printer case, i would have probably grabbed a ruler, measured a label and their position to the top left corner and added aligned boxes in Word's built in vector drawing app using the ruler or absolute position entry. Then clicked and typed in the labels manually in places where there was still a label on the sheet. This works 100% a time and you can do a test print on plain paper and overlay it above the label sheet to check before printing (in case you don't have spare sheets). This allows nice fonts and even graphics, not to mention 90 degree rotated text. For a single label or like a dozen though, i would probaly just use a pen and write the text on it. For a single sheet, imho the Word trick above is enough and i would think about using a proper label printing setup around two full sheets and an already available xml set up with label texts.

 

ps: I did use typewriters many moons ago, a nice electric one which two colors (red/black), a built in eraser and a ball head that belonged to my mom's typist (it also had a centronics port, but afaik they never used that) and the old fully mechanical one kept as a backup. Usually the latter as they always let me play with it. I already had a Commodore 64 at home, so that's why i knew the electric one was also a printer and could type faster than the mechanic one could keep up with. A few years later the typewriters got replaced with a full office computer system (afair Windows NT 3.x based) and the typist got a promotion to be a secretary.

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railsquid

railsquid

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Back on topic, a random video, albeit of a German train.

 

 

(That little loco is one of my favourites, simply because despite dating from the 1970s and being a very short-wheelbase Bo-Bo, it is surprisingly reliable and consistent and looks the part too).

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