Since I am such a fan of the Walthers amfleet and horizon passenger cars, I’ll post the howto to modify the wheelsets to make them roll significantly better. Normally, a locomotive would have trouble pulling three stock cars. Using this brash bushing modification, train consists of eight or more cars are easy.
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Photo post of work morale event where our team went to a restuarant and were split into pairs for each course. I was matched up with my manager and made the dessert (Baked apples with a cheesecake filling).
We worked on a few projects over the last few months but weren’t able update the blog (read:lazy). The biggest of these projects was our overhaul of the garage. When we bought the house, the garage was pretty barren (bare drywall and cement floor) except for wire shelving running floor to ceiling on either side. Unfortunately, the previous owners decided to rip the shelving out and take it with them when they left. Yay for buying a house for the first time!
Anyways, we knew we wanted to clean up/fix up the garage enough so that Thomas would have nice space to do his computer and woodworking projects. We thought this meant patching a few holes in the wall and throwing on a coat of paint, but like most projects we start, we got ambitious. It began to grow after someone told us “Your garage is the first thing you see when you get home – it should some place welcoming and a part of the house.” And so began a project that spanned about six months (we only work on it during Thomas’ breaks from school; it is more like 4-5 weeks of actual work).
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Continuing from part one of this article series, the next obstacle I needed to clear was how to build this layout. I had pretty much ruled out a setup on carpet, mainly because carpet fibers aren't great for small gears and there's a very high risk of stepping on trains (especially at night). Kato turnouts (switches) are also powered, meaning that they have a wire underneath them that can connect to a turnout controller. Normally these wires simply run across the underside of the tracks to the controller. If you have one or two turnouts, it's not a big deal. I have fourteen.
Why OMG? Because this is by far the richest, most moist carrot cake I've ever had. Made these over the weekend in order to use up a large supply of baby carrots that was taking up space in the fridge. The carrots were originally for Thomas' veggie shakes but our consumption rate was not nearly fast enough to for bulk Costco carrots. If you prefer a cake rather than cupcakes, then all you need to do is double the baking time. The cake component is tasty without the frosting as well, if you want something less sugary.
When I decided to continue model railroading again, I wanted more than just an occasional small layout that lived on the carpet or dining room table. The problem with small oval tracks (or even slightly more complicated ones with a viaduct crossover) is that they're just not very interesting. For one, there's really only enough room to run a single train at a time, and it doesn't take very long to cover the entire loop.
My intention with this new layout would be that it was constructed in Kato Unitrack (which I discussed in a previous article), and run at least two trains at once. I wanted to use Unitrack because 1) I really like its quality and versatility and 2) I already had a bunch. Another necessity was to have sidings large enough that I could have other trains railed up and ready to go. I figured the best way to start was to try to find something preexisting on the internet. What I came across was this site, which had several potential layouts that had already been plotted.
I ended up settling on layout 612 as it had two main lines and options for several sidings. I personally like very busy layouts. There's really not enough room in any house to sparsely populate a model railroad without drawing too much attention to the fact that you have a train on a small loop running in circles. On the other hand, this one was complicated enough to where I actually had to trace out the mainlines to see how a train would work itself around the track.
My wife tells me that someone at her work was wondering about getting into the hobby of model railroading. So, guy at work, I write this article for you.
For me, I started model railroading as a kid and sort of picked it up from my dad. I have no idea when he started, but he had locomotives that were far older than I was. Given that he already had a collection of them, I started collecting HO scale trains so we could use our existing sectional track. Our layouts were nothing special. I built small circles on the carpet, ran my engines as fast as I could, and accepted inevitable derailments. It wasn't until I was older that we actually laid flex track down onto cork and particle board and made layouts with proper easements that didn't fall apart.
In the mid 90s, my dad was part of a model railroading club and we gradually started switching over to N scale. The advantage there was that we were able to do more with our temporary layouts in the same physical space. Additionally, a company called Kato was producing a type of snap together sectional track called Unitrack, which was far superior to anything we had worked with previously. The same company also had a variety of very high quality train sets that were priced quite reasonably.
These days, I run both HO and N scale, although my goals with both are completely different. I'll get back to that.
So, what about starting from scratch?
When I design something, I expect that the final product should look EXACTLY like I wanted it. So, when I started designing this blog, I wanted a different header image for each of the sections. I made the assumption that there has to be an extension for this; it's such a common and obvious add to a site. The best pre-made solution I could find was the Header Image Module from PillWax, which although they advertise that you can "This is a flexible module able to display context related images, media or other files. Based on the context of the current displayed Joomla Content, that is the ID's of section, category, item and content, the module selects a corresponding image or media file to display." this functionality is only available if you purchase a commercial license (39 Euros). For this small personal site, I'm not interested in spending money (hours and hours of time, but not money).
Thankfully, I have experience with php and coding in general so I was able to figure out a free solution to this problem. For those of you are still looking for the answer, here is what I did to add the change the image at the top of each page without having to resort to creating individual templates.
This post is in regards to setting up VirtualBox to run as a service on Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 x64. This would also probably work on Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and a number of other Microsoft Windows operating systems. Other tutorials exist (and work) for most OS's before Vista.
For whatever reason, Sun decided that VirtualBox should not natively run as a service. If you've found this article through search engines because you couldn't find a way to enable it, (which is why you looked on google in the first place), now you know. If you weren't aware of this limitation, sorry, I know it sucks. Even the current version (as of Feb 2010) doesn't support this function. The good news is that there's a dirty hack you can use to get around this. First and foremost, if you haven't already considered VMware Server instead, you might. It's free, and handles the starting and stopping of virtual machines as background tasks so much better. But honestly, VirtualBox is a much cleaner application and I much prefer it.
So, onto the nitty gritty. After six hours of trial and error with other tutorials, I found the solution in this post: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=16914#16914
If there weren't enough of these already...
Yet another incarnation of www.tfenet.com and www.thomasdye.com. Both URLs lead to the same place.
My wife Amani and I have decided to create this site as a way to document specific processes or events that we would like a written account of. There's really no specific audience we're looking to entertain--this is purely for our own record keeping. That said, I'm hoping that if you stumble upon this webpage, for whatever reason, you find some use in it. My main purpose in posting here is to allow other people to find information about a certain task that I needed to perform, but could not find one centralized collection of relevant details. Hopefully the magic google search robots do their job and make it available to the general public.
What will you find here?
Well, the topic tabs up top should kind of spell it out. Expect to see mostly computer and modeling (as in railroad, aircraft, cars) related posts from me. But honestly, who knows. If it's worth writing about, it'll get a mention.
There's really no specific audience we're looking to entertain--this is purely for our own record keeping. That said, I'm hoping that if you stumble upon this webpage, for whatever reason, you find some use in it. My main purpose in posting here is to allow other people to find information about a certain task that I needed to perform, but could not find one centralized collection of relevant details. Hopefully the magic google search robots do their job and make it available to the general public.
