DriverD’s Trains of Thought…
#0 - Stay Foolish! An Introduction.
It’s April 1, 2023 which seems to me as good a day as any to start a new endeavor. “Stay foolish,” and all that. I once started a business on April 1st… Ran that business for 18 years. Met my wife that way. Sometimes good things come from foolish decisions. And if things don’t work out, you can always tell people it was a joke all along. A very long running joke.
This is a KZfaq channel about model trains. For starters, it’s about a small HO scale, shelf switching layout I built using sectional track, a used Athearn Genesis GP38-2, and some 20 year old rolling stock. But it’s also got newfangled tech like DCC-EX running on an Arduino, JMRI, WiThrottles running on my iPad and phone, and custom switch lists generated in Excel. And when I say it’s a shelf layout, I don’t mean that it’s on a shelf running around the perimeter of my basement. I mean it’s on a one foot by six foot shelf board I bought at the hardware store. But that little layout is easily good for an hour or two of brain-bending switching puzzles every session, and no two sessions are the same.
Through a series of videos I will tell you about my inspiration for the layout, why and how I designed, tested, and built it, and how I set it up with DCC-EX, JMRI, and WiThrottles. I’ll also show you how I coded my own switching puzzle generator in Excel to create the switch lists for each session. Later I’ll show you how I add some basic scenery to the layout. This is a work in progress so we’ll find out together where it goes next. So hop on board fellow hobos and let’s see what’s waiting at the next stop!
A huge thanks to all that went before me in this hobby, and all that shared their own journeys here on KZfaq and elsewhere. And of course thanks to Mrs. DriverD for all her support and encouragement.
And stay foolish!
DriverD