The Coastal Titans Railroad operates deep in the jungle of Baja Fibiger and barely gets by as we explore what resources can be harvested from the local area and trying to build a tourist destination at Fibiger Park. So we generally buy second-, and more often, third- or fourth-, hand equipment. This leads to an eclectic rail yard with cars of all sorts of liveries and paint schemes. Of recent, we have started transitioning to our own livery for a much more uniform experience on the rails. However, our staff is inexperienced and is having to learn and experiment as we go. Here are some of the early results. I'll note that we are yet to get a satisfactory results out of paint barn. One small box car was found at auction quite cheaply and we figured that would be a good starting point to working on painting techniques. We have also recently converted an old refrigerator car into a Maintenance of Way car that helps keep the tracks clean [aside: Need to make a post of that sometime]. T...

The Coastal Titans Railroad tourist line is getting steady business which means folks need a place to gather, board and exit the train, and buy their souvenirs. So an early addition to the line was a station. I decided to build a box that would allow me to store the station away to help protect it from the elements and reduce the cluttered look in the garden when trains aren't running.  I took some leftover 1x12 boards and cut them to size. Inside of the top half This was my first project like this and the corners were not quite square and the boards seemed slightly warped so I needed some wood putty to fill gaps, some planing of the surfaces, and caulking the inside cracks.  Top and bottom ready for painting I primed and then put on two coats of grey paint.  The painted boxes I wanted to use the box to store the station when not displayed to protect it from the weather but have to drag it back and forth from the house every time. The two halves fit together to enclose th...

B aja Fibiger is home to many species of dinosaurs that have managed to survive in this hidden part of the Americas for millions of years. I'm sure you have seen some of them during rides around Fibiger Park, the area that we allow tourists to visit. While the dinosaurs are free to roam, we do monitor their health and try keep them from wandering too far from the park.  Today while doing my rounds I wasn't able to find one of the Euoplocephaluses that has been spending time around the park and was due for some blood work. Nothing serious, just a check to make sure she was doing well coming out of the cool winter months. Euoplocephalus (pronounced you-OH-plo-kef-ah-luss) are one of my favorite herbivores with their rows of spikes on the back for protection. We have yet to see one attacked even though they do draw the attention of the carnivorous creatures when they pass. Also, the spikes, being about six and a half meters long offer a good deterrent. Despite their look, they are...

I bet that caught your attention. Back in the fall, someone in my local train club sold off a bunch of equipment from a guy who was closing down his railroad. Among the items available were a couple of log cars, something I had been thinking about adding to my collection. I usually wait-and-think with the result that everything good is gone before I'm ready.  Not this time! I made a quick offer for one of the log cars. The price was good so when I was offered both for about 50% more, I went for it. When I picked them up, I found out they came with a piece of track with a middle rail to trigger the car to dump to the side. The cars are in fabulous shape and in their original boxes. They are MTH Operating Log Cars . The instructions talk about hooking up the middle rail to a separately-purchased switch box to activate the dumping. That system was more than the cost of the cars and I figured I should be able to figure it out without much trouble. To start working it out, I thought I...

 Greetings friends of Coastal Titans Railroad. I am Bartolome Thorvaldsen, Chief Engineer for the line and I wanted to share with you some of the grand happenings on the railroad this past year. The turning of year is a great time to see how far we have come and dream of where we want to go.   The best part of my year was adding four new cars to our stock. We were able to acquire a pair of log transport cars from a railroad in the States that was closing down and they were received in the fall. They are nice looking and run smoothly. They will be a good addition as we move forward. We also had a second passenger car offered to the line. It just arrived in the shops and hasn't been out on the rails yet but looks good. Our visitors will enjoy the ride in comfort. And speaking of the shop, the team constructed a bulb dumping car for use when we move these ginormous plants for export .  One of the new log cars The Bulb Dumping car built in-house The shop was busy as earl...

  One of my hopes for the garden railroad is to be able to build some of my own electronics for it. Whether some off-track movement or lights, or a piece of automation that helps manage the trains. It would be very useful to be able to control the automation from the DCC throttle. So there is my starting point: build an Arduino system that listens to DCC and does something with the signal.  After some searching on line I found several options and settled on the basic design from  Dave Bodnar at Train Electronics . One of the components needed is an optocoupler. I wasn't familiar with this so did some reading and turns out, this is a pretty ingenious little device. It provides a way to have signals pass from a high voltage part of a circuit (for me DCC running at about 15-18V) to a low voltage part (the Arduino at 3.3 or 5V) while having them electrically isolated. The incoming signal get converted to light (hence to opto-) which is picked up by a photodetector and sent ba...

 This is part 2 of  How Far Do We Go  from a few months ago. I left off there with a working prototype of an Arduino-based odometer installed in my refrigerator car. That car was part of a starter kit and doesn't fit well with my theme right now so it is doing duty as a utility and testing car. It was the first car where I replaced the default hook-and-loop coupler with a knuckler coupler. It now is the transition between the starter set and a few of cars I have acquired that came with knuckle couplers. However, as I ended the previous post, that car didn't lend itself very well to having a display or a battery pack with easy access.  So I've torn that all out and started with a fresh design. The new design would have a four-line LED display, instead of two-line, to show more data and I decided to have a dedicated Arduino board. After trying a few combinations, I realized that the coal tender would be a perfect place for the odometer. It has a removable coal load wit...