A new place for tips, tricks and stories.
My dream of entering a very expensive and time consuming hobby has been rekindled.
When I was a kid I got a Märklin set with a locomotive, some wagons and tracks and loved playing around with it.
It was a locomotive like this.
At one point at a New Years party with a colleague of my farther, I got a box with several wagons, lots of tracks, including turnouts and crossings and a number of buildings.
I used it for a time until the locomotive direction shift stopped working and it was put up in the attic.
I moved away and several years later my parents sold the house. We cleared the attic and discovered that almost everything up there had been ruined by moisture including everything Märklin, Scalextrix and all of my LEGO instructions and worst of all, the pictures of the LC-39 Saturn V complex that was in LEGOLAND the first time I was there. To young for the Traffic School and the next time we got there I was to old and the Saturn V was replaced by a STS-1 complex.
The Saturn V in LEGOLAND
Denmark
Germany
On these pages I can remember having the following LEGO sets:
386: Air Ambulance
387: Excavator and Dumper
425: Fork Lift
435: Tipper Truck
460: Rescue Units
485: Fire Truck
695: Racing Car
712: Sea Plane
Probably the Sterling Boeing 727
At least one like it as I still have the wings and engines. Maybe the Learjet version
And even more sets.
Wow! That was a nostalgia trip.
Okay, back on track. That is Märklin tracks please.
I don’t have any room for any HO setup in my 48 m2 apartment, so abandoned dream.
What has happened?
My farther has always looked at and talked about getting a trainset, preferably in a smaller scale than HO.
When he turned 70 I suggested that we could give him money for a trainset and the rest of the gang agreed.
Z and N being to small for his eyesight and wanting to have some turnouts, he decided upon the 29721 HO Digital starter set.
For that Christmas I gave him 2 sets with 5 buildings each.
He haven’t done much with it and the main reason for that is that their house is for sale and that precludes a permanent setup.
So my Nephew and me have been the ones using it the most.
This Christmas, when I was down there, looking through a Märklin catalog that he got with the set, the dream sparkling in the back of my mind, I asked if I could get a locomotive and wagons to use on his layout and let them stay by them. (I use public transportation, so it limits the load capacity, when going back and forth.)
The reply was “Since it is going to be yours when I am gone, you can do whatever you want”
I have been in Railroad mode ever since.
For now there is a 90x210cm plywood board and I have purchased the SCARM (Simple Computer Aided Railway Modeller) and their Model Trains Simulator and have been playing around with it.
I have always dreamt of having a layout with a Turntable, so this is with the 74861 version.
I have done a lot of layouts but these 3 are the ones I like the best:
My favorite. (Note that red tracks are from 29721, gray from 24905, black from 24902 and blue is separate tracks.) I may skip 24902 and get them separately instead. There is also room for some buildings. I hope that this will be the end result. At least with the current baseplate.
This will probably be the next step as the Turntable alone is 3109 Dkr, roughly 480 USD
The add Turntable step.
This is a fully populated version, but it leaves no room for buildings so it’s not going to be.
I am looking into controlling all the Turntable functions with a buttonbox and some Arduino magic. For the time being I will probably go with the 72760 button box and the 4 functions that provides.
I am also determining how to control the Turnouts and wagon decouplers. That could be with 72710 buttonboxes, a homemade button box or a trackplan box with toggle switches, pushbuttons and LED’s. Button box and/or trackplan probably with Arduino or whatever else I discover that can work.
It’s a jungle to figure out what drives to use and whether I want to do it analog or digitally. I just know that I prefer to run Turntable, Turnouts and the rest of that stuff separately with their on powersupply and control connections. I don’t like the idea of running it through the tracks.
There are so many possibilities, so now I just have to narrow them down.
I have already bought the first 2 wagon sets.
46934
48795
I also preordered a locomotive.
Happy Simming and Railroading.
