For this year's holiday decorations, I wanted to do something more than a circle under the tree that I have been doing the past years. I started thinking about it in early fall so there was plenty of time to design something new (or plenty of opportunity to procrastinate past the time when anything new could be designed).  My first thought was a simple point-to-point trolley or street car. I've seen plenty in displays or builds in the club so I could envision what I wanted. It also seemed like a pretty simple Arduino project to build. But, I don't have a trolley. And looking on line, even used ones were a bit expensive for a "maybe-I'll-get-to-it" project.  My wife liked the idea and found a box car transport for Santa's reindeer that she gave me for my birthday. We could use an existing engine and pull it along. She has a small LGB engine that would be a great size and it still runs on DC so easier to program using the Arduino. My plan was to put a senso...

 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...