My Project: A fictitious place somewhere in Japan

[Lazertron]

Good morning, fellow railroaders!

 

I am attaching my first (yet unfinished) layout, which should be doable regarding space and hopefully money (plenty of tracks). I took the layout from the Kato website, built it with WinTrack and modified it a little bit. As you may notice, a part of the track is elevated (but I do not know yet, how to do that in WinTrack). The shadow station is part of the visible layout and is not lowered.

 

I marked a few spots:

 

1... I want to connect the Kato Unitram here, so that the Trams also may use the shadow station. Is this possible? Of course, the Tram has its own power source. The tram line will extend to the empty space east of the viaduct. Now, not to overload things, but I also want to use the Bus System. I have to find a place for that as well.

 

2... As we all know, the Japanese and Chinese love to copy buildings/themes from other parts of the world and here they want to make a little replica of the Swiss Alps (my excuse to use the Glacier Express with all my Japanese trains 😉 ). I want to elevate the tracks from '2' to north of point 3, where the Alps will be and I want to place a 'track spiral', which will be partly hidden.

 

3... I modified the switches a bit, but I somewhere read on this very forum, that special tracks need to be placed after a switch. Is this layout correct?

 

On the original, two power feed tracks are installed, which I also replicated. Will that be sufficient for the length of the layout?

 

I keep you posted when further details arise.

 

Thanks!

Edited August 28 by Lazertron

[bill937ca]

Unitram is a different track center than Unitrack.

[Lazertron]

Will this one from the UniTram TV4 set do?

[bill937ca]

Yes.

 

[brill27mcb]

I'm not sure how you are attaching double-track Unitram to a single-track lead off of the turntable...

 

Rich K.

[Lazertron]

@brill27mcb

neither am I yet 😉 but possibly using one track and a buffer stop on the TV4 adapter pictured above or extending the single track to a double track. This should work, no?

[Lazertron]

So, in the meantime I looked at many layouts and decided to go for a U layout. The included picture shows what I have planned so far, but it is not finished yet. The blue line is reserved for Shinkansen. Green is more of a scenic route. Yellow is the fiddle yard. Let's see what comes out of it.

 

On a side note, I acquired a nice book, which seems to showcase all EB, ED and EF trains ever made for Japanese railroads. 

 

[Lazertron]

It begins 🙂 Some impressions.

 

 

I have to build 16 of these, who will carry the load.

 

 

MDF.

 

 

MDF.

 

 

Some stuff I plan to use.

[Lazertron]

Sponsoring the Kato/Tomix companies.

 

 

And another page from the book.

 

[Rez]

My gosh, the plan looks insane! I wish I had so much space! Wishing you very best of luck with the construction. Keep us all posted!

[Lazertron]

 

Some impressions from previous days/weeks. After the MDF plates had been screwed together, we began with placing and sticking on two layers of styrofoam boards. I had the *genious* idea to fill some of the slits between the styrofoam boards with foam instead of plaster, which wasn't that good of an idea. Lession learned.

[Lazertron]

We began laying some tracks for the outer line ('Shinkansen'). The blue foam pieces prove to be too high and were removed later on. 

 

[Lazertron]

 

The blue foam pieces are gone and we decided to build the complete 'Shinkansen' track. This whole track will be risen between 3 and 1 centimetres to give it more variation.

[Lazertron]

And today, I had my first backlash when I tried to try out a train for the very first time. The 'Shinkansen' track is quite long, so I am planning on adding 5 feeds (the ones which are tucked in from below for a two-track viaduct track). For the test today, I added three just for the outer line (combined with the Kato 24-833 3-way branch connector to the power supply). What I felt strange is, that on some tracks I didn't get the 'click' when the plug is correctly plugged in. I tried harder, but seem to have damaged one of the two small pins on both plugs.

 

But what really puzzles me is that the Shinkansen did not move at all when powered. I tried the regular Kato SX power supply and the Kato DX power supply. Not even the light is coming on on the Shinkansen. On the power supply, all lights are green (I got a red light and a humming noise when trying one of the tracks where the plug didn't connect properly with a 'click' sound).

 

Could it be, that I get this error as I also have normal tracks in the station area and switches, which are not wired up yet?

Shinkansen No-Go 😉

[cteno4]

Lazer,

 

The viaduct plugs are tricky to seat, you have to push them in carefully and seat them evenly before doing that final pressure push to get the tabs to snap into place. I thing some may have gone in at a little bit of an angle and the metal tab got caught on the side of the rail and when you pushed it bent the contacts over. The viaduct connectors are a bit fiddly but once in place, pretty solid.
 

Make sure all the directions of your feeds are the same, ie like white wire and blue wire all on the same track. It’s sounding like you have a plug/track reversed somewhere and are shorting out the pack. 
 

Do you have a multitester to check continuity on your feeds? If not it’s worth $10 to grab one and you can put one lead into your plug you would be plugging into the power pack and then verify you only get continuity to one of the rails, not both. 
 

Also a very good trick with power feeds is to hook one up, run a train, then hook in the next power feed in and run the train to test. This lets you see which feed may be causing the issue when you add a feed and thing stop working correctly.

 

Cheers,

 

jeff

[Lazertron]

Jeff, thanks for your quick and informative answer. I did try with just one feed (I tried all of the three alone alternately), but to no avail - no lights, no movement. The viaduct plugs have a little nipple on one side so you cannot plug them in the wrong way, so these three plugs are inserted with the correct orientation. I will get a multitester this week and will report back!

[brill27mcb]

Is there a circuit breaker reset button on the power pack? If so, try to fiddle with it, with an engine on the track and a single track feeder.

 

Rich K.

[Kamome]

8 hours ago, cteno4 said:

The viaduct plugs are tricky to seat

I have to agree with @cteno4 and if the intention is for a permanent scenic layout, I would do away with these feeders altogether and solder power feeds to the track. I had a number of issues with these viaduct clip feeders, not to mention they can have a tendency to push up the track in their location. 

 

The copper wire loops that provide the power to the underside of the track can easily be pushed in after a few assemblies so are, at best, temperamental, at worst, useless. Fine for temporary layouts but I’d want a little more reassurance on a permanent set up. 

 

As for the orientation issues, the feeder clip itself will only go in one way but the track section can obviously be connected in either direction which will cause a polarity issue. Just double check all of the same coloured wires are powering the same track on each loop. 

[cteno4]

If single feeders didn’t get any result then I expect all your viaduct feeders have a pin bent over. Multimeter is always your friend as you can measure current at each step thru plugs and feeders to track. It can also help you see if any Shirts have happened due to a track reversed as you will get continuity across the tracks. This is the first thing I do when we set up Ttrak loops quick way see if something is amiss before even turning on the power pack. Also useful to make sure there is power coming out of the power pack and you have not tripped a breaker.
 

Yes when we built our club sectional layout we did away with the viaduct power connectors. You can pop the surface piece of track out of the viaduct bottom. Then I carved slits below the rails with an roto tool and then soldered 18g or 20g feeder wires directly to the bottom of the rails. Tin the bottom of the rails first then tin the feeder wire, then put the feeder wire down on the bottom the rail (ad a tad of flux to the tinned rail) and just heat the tinned lead wire and it will quickly fuse with the tinned area of the rail. Then it’s just snaking the wires out down the side of a viaduct support. We put a piece of styrene tubing around the feeder wire so it would look like some sort of drain pipe or other structural piece.

 

This is a big loop and I would suggest putting a feeder into the curve piece in the top right and top left corners just out side the points to feed the station and its sidings well. Also a feeder down on the lower right corner somewhere. Soldering in feeders also lets you use bigger gauge wire to easily supply amps to the rail. The Kato wires are pretty whimpy at 24g and break a couple of strands here and there.

 

jeff

[Lazertron]

@cteno4, @Kamome, @brill27mcb

Thank you all for your very valuable information. I shall try this out in the coming days. You guys are amazing, thank you so much 😊

[Lazertron]

After all your kind and knowledgeable help, we went through all feeder tracks and... IT WORKS!

 

@cteno4 your suggested two power feeds will be installed tomorrow. We made a short video with the first ever run of a railroad on the track (an EF-65-0 from Tomix (7188)), and it ran the full long track but I cannot post an MP4 file here. Thanks again! Is it possible to move this thread to Layout Building, please?