The Little Trees and Surfside recently acquired a new loco, a Bachman 0-6-0 side tank Porter. The LT&S is a tourist/logging railroad set in the present day, but operates vintage steam equipment for excursions and such. The current roster is a Climax, a Heisler, and a couple of diesels. (A Shay is in the shops for restoration). The ruling grade on the mainline (all 7 actual feet of it) is 4.5%. What does such an operation want with a rod loco? Well, an occasional visitor to the layout room is a seven year old lady.

I recently completed the staging/fiddle yard for the Little Trees and Surfside. This is a simple shelf extension off of the right end, cantilevered over my office space.

Next Up:

My layout (tentative name LT&SS) will feature geared steamers, so there needs to be a service area. That includes the water tank, of course and some sort of engine house. The pike is too small for much, so this single stall model from RSLaserkits is ideal.

Maybe this won't be the comedy the water tank was.

pqe

No, not that kind. I'm a mac user. I mean windows in model buildings. I find them intimidating, especially the kind where you have to install upper and lower frames inside an outer frame. So much opportunity for my shaky hands to wreak havoc. Here's what prompted the thread:

After all of the good advice I got in the building buildings thread, I felt ready to take on something more challenging. 

I have to admit, I have too many pliers. I put myself through graduate school working as a musical instrument repairman, which is very pliers intensive work. You need big ones, little ones, flat nose, chain nose, needle nose and so on, both knurled and smooth. As my career moved on to electronics, more pliers appeared, along with cutters of various types. When I retired and began working with trains again, I ruthlessly culled my collection but I still wound up with this:

This is what's on my workbench today:

Just checking to see if this is visible on an iPad.

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This is an Arduino program that provides high speed pulse width modulation suitable (with appropriate electronic drivers) to control LEDS, lamps, DC motors and DC locos. So far I have tested it with LEDs and a small DC motor. I invite those so inclined to try it and point out the bugs and suggest improvements. (There's more than one way to code a cat.)