John's Alaska Railroad HO Scale Layout

February 1, 2023

John's Indiana grandsons were in town for his birthday. This was a great opportunity for each grandson to run a locomotive at the same time! Younger grandson Lincoln picked an F7 while Liam chose a heritage paint scheme GP49.	Everything went well although Liam liked to ride up real close to his younger brother's locomotive. Ah, sibling rivalry! All and all, this first dual operation went well and takes us one step closer to four grandsons running simultaneously.	The next step was to let each grandson run locomotives pulling railcars. The above video shows Liam running a mixed passenger/freight train. He was clever enough to put box cars between the passengers and the tank cars according to FRA rules.

John spent some time painting over Rick's most recent Liquid Nails work. Undoubtably, this process will repeat itself for at least another four weeks.	Lincoln is excited to be a part of train night. He even wore his train night T-shirt!	The layout is composed of seven segments. One of the segments was powering off. Rick removed the CB-1 powering the segment and hooked it up to a single piece of flexible track. Lincoln took quite an interest in watching the troubleshooting effort. Rick also check continuity of the segment and found it was good. He hooked the CB-1 back up, ran some test trains and found everything worked correctly. Our best guess is maybe one of the wires hooked to the CB-1 was lose. We will keep an eye on this segment to see if further problems develope.

Rick removes the east APU foam board and takes the necessary steps to level it from end to end.	He then removes the west APU foam board and levels it from end to end as well. In the photo above, Rick points out the wooden support piece he added to the southern end.	Rick continues the effort to stabilize the inner foam boards. He uses the hot wire cutter to create foam board shims. Once these are all in place he will fill the gap with Liquid Nails.

Lincoln helps his grandpa with scenery by adding bushes between the main line and Whittier siding. This completes all the greenery from the swing gate to the end of the Whittier siding.	Bonus video #1 of Lincoln running a freight train	Bonus video #2 of Lincoln running a freight train

February 8, 2023

In a now familiar cycle, John paints over the Liquid Nails put down by Rick.	For some unknown reason the fascia along the double track came loose from the bench work. Rick uses a piece of foam to hold the fascia out so he can spread Liquid Nail on the bench work.	Boards are put into place to hold the double track fascia against the bench work while the Liquid Nails dries. This will be left in place until the next train night to ensure the Liquid Nails completely hardens.

Rick moves at the speed of a photon and puts Liquid Nails down between the foam board and road bed. Soon he will also have Liquid Nails between the foam board and fascia as well as the road bed and inner foam board.	Continuing around the layout Rick spreads Liquid Nails past Flint Hills Refinery.	The Liquid Nails effort continues on to Koole's Bridge at Tunnel.

Here is another view of the Liquid Nails work. Even Rick was impressed with the distance he covered in one evening.	And what is train night without running at least one train! F7 #1510 and GP40 #3001 pull a short consist of an old passenger coach and a Royal Celebrity Ultradome.

February 15, 2023

Real life funeral directors LJ and Leigh Combs are hard at work on their cemetery project. All stone work and rail fence are primed and painted.	Additionally, they have created a landform and covered it with grass. The project is portable and once completed will be transported from Kentucky to Clayton, Ohio.	John cut styrofoam filler for under the mountain and glued them in place. Rock molds will be placed over top to complete this area.

John began the long process of creating rock molds to place in the canyon. First, Hydrocal is poured into the rock molds.	Next, the rock molds are covered in a base coat of black wash. This will prevent any white from peeking through.	John used black paint on all the Liquid Nails put down by Rick during the previous Wednesday's session.

For train night Terry had a fun Valentine's Day meal beginning with red heart shaped Jell-O jigglers.	She also did a heart shaped pizza! This went well with Jackie's salad bar.	She finished the meal with heart shaped chocolate chip cookies. Fantastic!

For some unknown reason the passenger car track had power when it was switched off. Rick spent train night trying to track down the problem. It turned out to be a faulty reed switch. He removed the old switch and will bring a new one next week.	John painted the rock molds with various colors and they are now ready to be put into place.

February 22, 2023

John worked hot and heavy on the plaster rock molds. After cranking out two batches he applied them to the western base of the mountain using Liquid Nails.	A third and final batch of rock molds is needed so he once again mixed the plaster, poured it into the molds and then painted them with five different colors.	Once the molds and paint were dry John added them to the base of the rock wall using Liquid Nails. There was lots of back pain resulting from this effort!

Using Sculptamold and a small trowel John filled in all the gaps and cracks between the molds. The next step will be painting the five different colors and then adding the vegetation.	Our construction foreman was asked how he got his job title. He replied, "Because *Miracle Worker* isn't an official job title."	During train night Rick discovered one of the dead man switches needed to be moved to work correctly. The cause of the change was unknown. Rick made a few adjustments and all is now well.

The layout doesn't have an on/off switch so everything is live all the time. A year ago, Rick installed a reed switch which enabled us to turn power on and off to the diesel shop and passenger car tracks. Somehow the wires to the current reed switch were yanked and the switch was damaged. Rick found a new reed switch and wired it up.	This time the reed switch was wired up to a terminal block. The short wire connection between the two will not be suspectable to snagging/yanking. If wires leading to the terminal block are yanked then the reed switch won't be damaged.	Using his printer, Rick made a label for the terminal block. It is now obvious which connections lead to the diesel shop and passenger tracks.

During train night, Rick installed the new reed switch. Additionally the switch was mounted to a wooden block to provide strength. Rick had to widen the hole in the train layout to accommodate this configuration. Rick did a great deal of testing and found everything operated correctly. Success!	Somehow the rear coupler on GP49 #2805 was broken. Rick took it home and replaced it. This Out of Service (OOS) locomotive is now once again roaming the rails of Clayton's Alaska Railroad.	We always run a train or two during our Wednesday night work sessions. Rick ran our flagship F7 #1510 pulling a Ultradome passenger car consist. Number 1510 is an Intermountain unit whose operation is the smoothest of any other locomotive on the roster.

Feel free to contact me at john@alaskarails.org
Page created 9/4/17 and last updated 2/25/23