JR-Chiisai

[cteno4]

Wonder what matte acrylic medium would do. I like it for ballast and scenery glue as it’s matte finish and also not rock hard like PVA gets with ballast so you can pick it out if needed later pretty easy with a dental pick.

 

did you try rinsing the ballast first? Wondering if rock powder may be causing the lighter dry color. It is a big change, especially with them saying it will not change color with glue.

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

Pretty sure the VMS glue is some sort of acrylic medium, but obviously not matte. It's also a lot more expensive then the Koemo ballast glue. They do have 2 different types of ballast glue, 1 that goes rock hard, and 1 that keeps things a bit flexible. I went with the one that remains flexible, and it's very noticeable once the glue has dried. I do quite like working with this glue actually, it flows really nice.

 

I haven't tried rinsing the ballast, but I did notice when mixing 2 types, there is actually quite a lot of dust in it. I could try rinsing a bit of it and see what happens. I think the discolouration also depends on the scale of the ballast. I have N scale, TT scale and H0 scale ballast. I initially thought the N scale would be a bit too fine, even if it's to scale. So I got some TT scale as well, but that didn't quite look right either. The H0 stuff I obviously got for the H0 1067 / H0e layout. I'll also try gluing down some of that, to see the dicolouration there.

 

There is also a lighter shade of grey ballast, which I can also experiment with a little bit. In the end though, the darker ballast is more correct for steam era, so I guess I should get used to that 🙂

 

I will probably see if I can pick up a static grass applicator and some shades and lengths of static grass, and do another, slightly longer section of test track, but this time use the actual materials I would use on the layout, rather than just grab whatever I just happen to have around.

 

[Martijn Meerts]

 

A little more testing. This time I painted the track a different shade, I think it looks a bit close to the prototype like this. Maybe a little bit too dark, but I've mixed up a slightly lighter rust colour to try that as well. I think this is pretty close to where I want to be. I was thinking of dry brushing the sleepers with something like a lighter brown to bring out a bit of the molded detail, but I'm not sure yet. I don't have any lighter brown paint at the moment anyway 🙂

 

After painting the track, I added the ballast. I used a slightly lighter grey with a little more brown mixed in. It didn't look much different from the previous test, so I'll probably just stick with the previous mix. That one's a lot easier, since it only involves 2 different types of ballast. This ballast also darkened quite a bit after gluing, so it's probably normal. I do want to pick up some samples from a different brand as well to test with that.

 

After ballasting, I used the airbrush to add some rust colour around the rail and on the ballast. Here again I used a little too much. I was working with pretty crappy lighting, so I couldn't really see what I was doing all too well. After airbrushing some rust, I then painted the sleepers with some diluted black mixed with some rust.

 

I then tried to use the rust pigment again, but a bit more careful. The dark rust pigment worked fine, but it was a bit too dark. The lighter rust is a different brand of pigment, and wasn't as easy to control, so there's definitely a bit too much of it again. I'll probably pick up some additional shades of rust at some point. I'll probably also need to clear coat this, so the pigment won't wash away when gluing down the greenery.

 

Speaking of which, I (finally) ordered a static grass applicator and a bunch of static grass. I will be experimenting with that a bit once it arrives.

 

[Martijn Meerts]

So, during my time off from work, I went to Hamburg for several days to visit a friend. I didn't actually visit Miniatur Wunderland this time though, not much new has been added since last time. We just took things easy for the most part, and I managed to actually get a little bit of motivation to work on my layout

 

 

 

Started with cutting out the base board for the start of the urban line station. Base board is the same 12mm baltic bitch plywood as the frame itself. It's probably a bit overdone for the base board, but the helix for example uses thinner plywood, and I've noticed a little bit of sagging there. I then glued on some cork, which is about 2mm wider than the track on each side. This eventually will become the ballast bed.

 

 

 

I used some Woodland Scenics earth undercoat mixed with a little black to paint the cork so it looks a bit like dirt, and then started laying some track. As you can see, I have a large strip of circuit board on the end, this is where the tracks need to line up with the helix. In the previous version of the urban line, this connection wasn't smooth at all, and caused some trains to derail. That's probably one of the reason why my motivation was rather low, because getting this connection right is very fiddly.

 

 

 

Both tracks now soldered to the circuit board. In this picture it's not quite lining up, but it's also not attached yet. I've since made some adjustments to get it to line up, and screwed to base board to the frame. It still needs a little bit of work, and I'll also paint the circuit boards to prevent them from corroding. I did forget to solder wires to the track (I always solder them to the underside of the rail), but I do have some large solder pads I can use. These bits will be hidden under some scenery.

 

 

 

Finalised the contours of the front of this section, and started cutting the cross sections. Also cut the base board for the shinkansen and express lines and glued cork to them.

 

 

 

Cut some more contours in the cross sections, and placed the first building 🙂  This will be about where it'll go in the end, together with the 2 accompanying buildings which I have yet to put together. Much of the scenery will also be removable, so I can always easily access the yard for small fixes. For large fixes, I can relatively easily remove sections of the yard.

 

 

 

Picked up some more plywood for the 2nd and 3rd sections. The 2nd section is in place here, with the legs being temporarily attached. By now I've permanently attached the legs and have started working on the frame for the 2nd section. The attic is still a bit of a mess, so there's not a lot of space to work in, and I keep having to move stuff around. Once the 3rd section frame is up on its legs, I'll probably initially use that as a bit of a sorting table, and sort through some more stuff. Once the track is down on the 1st section, I can also start working on figuring out what I want to do there scenery wise, and start actually using some of the many buildings I have stored on shelves. That will then give me more room to store stuff that's everywhere else on the attic 😄

 

 

 

Little bonus, EF13 is almost completely built now. Only thing left is to attach the headlights, and then look at painting it 🙂

 

 

[Martijn Meerts]

Quite a lot has been going on since the previous post, much of it not very visual though. I did build the frame of the 3rd section, lined all that up, and permanently installed the legs. That also means the entire storage yard could once again be put in place, connected and tested. After a bit of cleaning I ran a loco through every block of the yard to make sure the occupancy detectors were connected in the right order, and that they were detecting the loco. Also checked the settings in iTrain to make sure everything was correct there, which was the case.

 

I then started on finishing up the top loop of the helix. In the previous plan I never finished that, because I never ran trains to the express and shinkansen lines. The urban line doesn't need the top loops. There were a few sections of track missing, and not everything was wired up yet. It took quite a while to once again figure out the wiring after many years of not working on the helix. For now, there's only 2 stop sections left to wire, as well as a small section which will need to connect to the 1st section of the visible layout. I also need to wire up 3 more turnouts in the helix itself, which are for the express line freight siding. I do have the servos and servo decoder for it already, so it should be fairly quick.

 

Finally, I started figuring out the exact placement of the express and shinkansen base boards so I can screw those in place and then line up the track with the helix.

 

Meanwhile, I got my first "official" package from J-Scale. I did get some Chinese trains through them before, but that wasn't through their online shop. This time it still wasn't entirely through the shop, but at least my order is visible there 😄

 

 

 

Picked up a set of books on Chinese trains (they have some really nice ones)

 

 

 

And also various Tokyo Diorama Factory and Miniature Kobo kits. I had a quick look into 1 of the smaller Miniature Kobo kits, and it's pretty intricate. I'm going to use this one as a test to light up separate rooms, I just need to figure out what the interior layout would've looked like in a small house like that 🙂

 

[Beaver]

11 hours ago, Martijn Meerts said:

I just need to figure out what the interior layout would've looked like in a small house like that

 

House sale or rental adverts may include floor plans.

[Martijn Meerts]

1 hour ago, Beaver said:

 

House sale or rental adverts may include floor plans.

 

Ah yes. good point. I'll need to try and find some of those.

 

[RS18U]

On 1/20/2025 at 12:48 AM, Martijn Meerts said:

I just need to figure out what the interior layout would've looked like in a small house like that

I did a Google image search for "small Japanese house floor plan" and it came up with what looks like lots of ideas, although some don't seem to practical (1 small closet for the whole house 🤔).

[Martijn Meerts]

5 hours ago, RS18U said:

I did a Google image search for "small Japanese house floor plan" and it came up with what looks like lots of ideas, although some don't seem to practical (1 small closet for the whole house 🤔).

 

I managed to get a few examples a well. 1 of those was very similar to this small house kit. Space certainly is limited in these. When going by tatami mats for sizing. the small house is only 4 x 3 mats.

 

But, the examples give me an idea of how rooms would be divided, so I can get an idea of where to add LEDs. For this kit, only 2 lights are required, 1 would be the bedroom and another for the combined living room and kitchen. That's also where the big windows are. Not sure how much point there is adding a separately controllable toilet light which is a 1 x 2 mm window 😄

 

[cteno4]

My dream is to create a little Attiny board (those arduino all on a chip guys) with 3 or 4 led outputs and then each could be programmed to randomly cycle lights on and off and set proper light levels. Put one in a house or high rise floor. Then it makes sense to have the bathroom light going on and off!
 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

That's pretty much what I want, expect instead of an Attiny I'll be using an existing system (OC32), which I can control from the computer software I use (iTrain), but which also has various automation options, and can also be controlled with physical buttons and switches.

 

An OC32 has something like 32 outputs, and can control anything from LEDs to servos and all that. Having the bathroom light go on and off randomly would definitely be possible, but you'd really want to only add it to buildings where you can actually see it from the front of the layout obviously 🙂

 

I still need to do some experimenting with lighting the card stock kits, but I'll get there eventually. It's rather nice being able to work on several different bits of the layout. 1 day it's working a little on a brass kit (either N or H0 1067), the next day it's laying some track, the next installing road bed / track. And if I don't feel like doing any of that, I can just run a train through the yard and helix, and check the iTrain setup. There are still plenty settings missing there.

 

 

 

Speaking of which, I tried sliding out a section of layout today, and that worked rather well. Definitely not something you'll want to do every day, since it does involve going under the layout to remove some bolts that hold the yard sections together. But still, a few minutes of prep work, and the whole thing just comes out.

 

The idea now is to get the shinkansen and express lines on this section in place and wired up. This should be rather straightforward considering there's no turnouts for those lines on this section. Once they're in place, I can experiment a little with some scenery work between the express and shinkansen line, and between the shinkansen line and the rear of the section.

 

Definitely still need to always remind myself not to rush things just to be able to run trains. That's really what caused issues with the previous section I built. While it was possible to run trains, they weren't running very reliably, and that's not good for motivation 🙂

 

[cteno4]

I like the attiny idea as you just have to run power to a building and it can then run itself. I guess could run the serial bus and do computer control thru the attinys as well. I like the idea of putting more dim leds in a structure than one or two bright ones so that ends up meaning more wiring so keeping as much of that local inside each building the better. Attinys could be like a dollar a building. The biggest headache is the I/o wiring for the chip. It would sort of need a serial port for each to do more custom programs as needed after install.

 

ifnyou turn down the LEDs I’ve not see bleeding with sankei’s laserboard. The skimpier cardstock kits I fear may need a little light baffling, but again if you turn the LEDs down a lot you only need a bit around the led itself, like sort of a lampshade behind the led. I’ve been playing with hot dog wrappers for this kind of light sealing. White stiff paper on one side and foil on the other. Very thin but will even block a bright led. You can wallpaper a room with the white side out pretty fast while building a structure, but more to do it once built, but so far keeping LEDs dimmer usually just means a small backing shade for the led itself.

 

Great the modules come apart well and easily! Did you do big wiring plugs between modules? Or just extra wire to snip if you move. If you bother to make it easily movable you will not have to move residences! Don’t and you’ll have to move after most of the work is done, Murphys first law of model railroading.

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

A self contained lighting system would definitely be a lot easier, so there's definitely advantages to using an Attiny. So far I only bought 1 of the OC32 devices which I'll use to test things with. If it turns out annoying to work with, or too expensive, I might look into other devices.

 

I've not tried lighting any of the Sankei / TDF / Miniature Kobo / Flor Verde kits yet, so there will definitely be experimenting. I do have the Cricut available now to accurately cut out bits and pieces I need. What I see often is that for each window that needs a light, a small cardboard / card stock / laser board box is made that's glued directly behind the window, and the LED will sit inside that box. I have some pretty heavy black card stock to try that. But I could also use the same card stock to sort of simulate in interior layout, which makes it easier to light up multiple windows with a single LED where it makes sense.

 

For LED dimming I've been considering making some sort of miniature lamp shades using thin semi-transparent / frosted sheets to diffuse the light. I can also paint those to give the light different tints. Again, definitely something to do a bunch of experimenting with before permanently installing anything.

 

The sections of the layout I try to build in such a way that they need very little wiring from 1 section to the next, preferably only the main bus wires. For the yard that was obviously not doable with all the occupancy detectors, so the yard has 4 bus wires, as well as a 25 occupancy detection wires. Both use connectors so it only takes a minute to disconnect them. I'll try to remember to take some pictures of it all when I reconnect the yard section 🙂

 

[cteno4]

I’ve found the best results for dimming LEDs was to just cut their amperage down. 1k or 2k micro pot does the trick really well and is easily adjustable if you decide to change it later once everything is assembled. The little 3mm x 3mm SMD pots are great for this, they take up little room. Put a limiting SMD resistor in line with it to make sure you don’t blow the led if you crank the pot all the way to zero.

 

It’s funny this is reminding me of a long time back when I helped a friend move a good sized layout he had. He had made it in bolted together sections luckily with the thought of it having to move at some point, but his wiring was an absolute mess. It was an old school block wired 2 throttle layout with atlas 2 coil/3wire switches and lots of things lit up with very insane wiring. It was a rats nest. A lot of the wires had little slack, no color coding or labeling of wires, same uses like points had different kinds of wire he had at the moment (all the way to bell phone wire!), nothing of the idea of main chaseways, and things went every which way. I stared at it a long time on my back trying to figure out if we could clean it up for the move by adding some extensions to try to run like things together and such. I finally decided the simplest thing to do was to find up to 12 wires at some location we could bundle at a point crossing section junctions and we would just label each wire 1-12 on each side (with a letter before it to indicate the set), bundle them on each side, and then snip all the wires at the junction. Then when we reset it up we just put in 12 post terminal blocks at these junction locations with bundles, stripped all the wire ends, and connected them on the terminal. It was crazy as wires went thru the terminals in a totally scrambled order but it was fast and easy to get it all working once reassembled. Amazingly it all worked first time out except for a few loose connections and broken wires. I left it to him to come back and clean up his wiring later, but I doubt he ever did. Taught me a huge lesson in what not to do.

 

of course we have seen your wiring and organization and it’s the other end of the spectrum from this chaps!

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

I'll have to experiment a bit with the lights. I know the OC32 allows you to dim each light as well, but since it uses PWM, if you dim them too far down, they'll start flickering. I might end up doing a combination of a micro pot and software dimming or something similar.

 

I have to say, my wiring has improved over the years. Early layout were also always a mess with the wiring. Now that I've been working on the layout a bit again, I did notice that the helix especially could've been wired up better. For the new sections I'm building, I'll probably try some different components, such as PTFIX distribution blocks and WAGO connectors etc. I'll definitely need to label wires a bit better, I do have a label maker, but I need some extra sticky tape for that I think.

 

[cteno4]

I like the little SMD pots, you can solder wires on pretty easily. I use that 30g wrapping wire that is tinned stranded wire so easy to strip lime 2mm and dip in flux, then solder pot then quick fuse to the tinned pot tabs, they also solder down onto blank pc boards with tinning and a quick hit to fuse it down. I’ve always thought Ipof making a custom PCB that had pads or solder down led leads, SMD pot and SMD limiting resistor. Make it in a strip with a power bus so you can just snip it off for the number of circuits you want for a building.

 

Funny my child hood layout went thru like 6 additions over 5 or 6 years so wiring got more and more complex as things went along. You could look under the layout and see a pretty clear evolution of my wiring and dressing skills over the years.

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

I did pick up some small boards with resistor and LED pre-soldered. They obviously don't come with a pot installed, but I'll see how these look. The nice thing is that the board is nice and flat on the back, so easy to install using some double sided tape, and they're only about 10 x 7 mm, so should fit in most buildings / rooms. I decided to get the pre-built ones, because I'm at a point where I feel I'm just wasting too much time trying to build these kinda things from scratch, even if that would be cheaper.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, I've been doing some more woodworking. In my previous builds I used to have the track bed butt up against the section's edges. This time I decided to have the track bed sit on top of the section's edges. It looks a bit cleaner, and it's a bit easier lining up the track between sections. It's of course a little bit more work, since I need to cut out some slots so as not to get a weird transition between section end and track bed. I initially miscalculated things a bit, so some measurements were off, but it did work out in the end. Of course, my plywood sheet wasn't big enough to cut the track bed in 1 section, so I had to splice 2 pieces together. I figured I'd add plenty screws, since they're cheap anyway. These are currently not glued yet, but I most likely will do so before laying the track.

 

 

 

All the track bed installed for the first section. Also got the cork glued on and painted with a bit of an earthy colour. I've started laying and wiring some track. Just waiting for new occupancy detectors to arrive now. I can also start thinking about some scenery now, for example the area between the shinkansen line (furthest in the back) and the rear of the section. 

 

The 2nd section (just visible on the right in the picture) is still used as a bit of a base for "stuff", but I do want to clean that up and also start with cutting out the contours and installing the track bed on that. I do also still need to install some servos for the turnouts on the upper loop of the helix. Once those are in place I'll likely cover up the helix with my little test / speed measurement loop, so I can continue preparing trains for use on the layout

 

So far, motivation is still mostly there. Some days I don't feel much like doing something, but once I do get going, I normally can get a few useful things done at least 🙂