Over the last weekend my daughter Kirsten and I drove up to the lovely German town of Boppard, on the south bank of the Rhine River, for a little Klettersteig hike. It was a fabulous, warm, sunny day and there’s no better way to escape the utter stupidity of covid than with a great hike along the Rhine.

There’s no English translation for Klettersteig, but it is a method of hiking along rock faces in mountains along fixed-rope climbing routes. The routes are much better known in the Italian Alps as “Via Ferrata”–which literally translated means The Iron Way. Basically you walk along cliff faces wearing a harness, which you clip into wire ropes along the way, to prevent you from falling to your untimely death. See below.

This route wasn’t too demanding, but there was one climb, about 100 feet straight up, that was quite a challenge for this old man.

One of the best parts of the hike was the view from the start, where I could see the Deutsche Bahn hard at work on their busy, electrified Mannheim-Paris main track.

With that said, lets get to the HO railroad. Here’s how Hermitage Road looked in the end of February. The roadbed is a sheet of 3 millimeter cork laid on Styrodur, which is a German product much like American pink or blue Styrofoam. Styrodur is light and very sturdy.

The turnouts are all Code 70, and the track is all Code 55 flex track from Micro Engineering. I cut the fourth or fifth tie out of the web on the Code 55 flex, and repositioned all the ties to be a little wider. Man, that takes a lot of time but I like the effect.

I glued the track down with good-old American Elmer’s white glue, full-strength. I positioned the track using pins, and kept it down with old switch locks until the glue was set.

I’ve mentioned this in previous posts, but I used a lot of track details from Proto87 Stores, Details West, Grandt Line, and Keyser Valley Models. It took a lot of extra time to add all these details, but the layout is small—only 6 feet, ten inches long and 17 inches wide, and is built at sit-down height—so it was easy to take my time and install all the details in comfort.

Here is a view of some of the detail parts. The joint bars at the bottom left, and the tie plates, are Code 55 from Proto87 Stores. The joint bars at right are Code 70/83 from Details West. They are the best-detailed product on the market, but they cannot be installed on the inside of the rail.

Once the details were set, I painted the ties with a base coat of Testors Rubber. Then I went over each tie with various colors of tan, gray and light brown to simulate some aging. I painted the rail and tie plates with Mr. Color Red Brown, which I think is an excellent color for lighter-duty rail.

Here’s the result, before cleaning the top of the rail of course.

And here’s another view of the track with all the varied tie colors.

Once the paint was dry, I ballasted the track cinders I collected from the site of the Pennsylvania Railroad roundhouse in Richmond, Indiana. I dug up a couple of buckets of dirt back in 2014, sifted it, and demagnetized it, and have been using it ever since. Because it’s real dirt and cinders, it looks like real dirt and cinders.

Here’s the painted track, with the cinders installed, prior to gluing down the ballast. I use a variety of brushes to keep ballast off the tops of the ties, and out of the inside of the rails.

Here’s the stuff I use to secure the ballast. I mix about 20% Elmer’s glue, 70% or so water, a little bit of rubbing alcohol, and a few drops of dish soap. The latter two ingredients break up surface tension, keeping the ballast exactly where I want it.

Before gluing the ballast, I give it a good soaking with rubbing alcohol from a spray bottle.

While the ballast is wet with alcohol, I use a pipette to apply the ballast glue. I try to keep the ballast glue off the rail or on top of the ties. Doing so tends to change the color of the ties, and sometimes–by capillary action, I think–brings ballast stones up on the ties and rail and glues them in places I don’t want them.

I tried something different while applying the ballast glue. On a couple of the tracks, I tinted the ballast glue with water-based Tamiya black paint. The idea was to apply black glue to black ballast. Why would I want to apply white glue to black ballast?

The experiment worked well, and I’d do it again if needed.

Here’s the track when ballasting was complete. Some nice variation in tie color and ballast color. The extra tie spacing cut into the flex track can be clearly seen now.

Here’s a close-up of on the turnouts, with the Proto87 frog, track details, and ballast installed. Not bad….

I’m way behind on the blog. Here’s a photo from just a couple of days ago. As you can see the layout is already operational. I’ve been running little operation sessions for a month now, but the layout is far from what I’d consider “complete”. I’ve still got a lot of factories to build.

Below, I filtered this picture to look like all the Kodachrome slides I took in the 80s. Too much green and yellow. Thank goodness for auto-exposure cameras.

There’s much more to come…just need time to get it all in the blog. – John

Last week I received a few locomotives I bought from my friend Jim Dick in Minneapolis. Here’s one of them: a second-run CNW GP-7 in as-delivered paint. I figure this model was run around 2003. That makes it–what, 18 years old? The paint still looks great.

As soon as I got the engine out of the box I removed the original DC underframe and replaced it with another one I had rebuilt with sound/DCC that I’ve been using on a PRR engine. The 1601 will get a few prototype-specific details as soon as I can find the time.

Earlier this week I sent the photo to a private online group we informally call Ron’s Train Club. Everybody came back and asked me about the track and track details. So here are a few comments on the track and detail parts I used on the new Hermitage Road layout.

There’s a whopping total of four turnouts on the Hermitage Road layout. Two are old Code 70 Shinohara wyes, and two are Micro Engineering Code 70 #6s. All the track is Micro Engineering Code 55 flex track.

I extensively rebuilt all four turnouts at the workbench. I put a lot of work into the Shinohara wyes. First, to make them “DCC friendly” and improve electrical connectivity, and second to improve appearance. Here’s is a short photo essay that explains what was done to the Shinohara turnouts. The photo below shows one of the two wyes right out of the box as I started the rebuilding.

The first thing I did was remove all the ties around the points rails, and remove the point rails and the throw bar. I unsoldered the point rails for re-use, and discarded the plastic and metal throwbars parts, and all the plastic ties. The white thing at the top of the photo is a piece of .010 styrene, which will be used to align new ties to the model.

I made a new throw bar using PCB ties from Fast Tracks. I cleaned up the original point rails and re-used them. The photo below shows, after measuring the spacing for the point rails, how I taped everything into perfect alignment on the workbench, and then soldered the rails into position.

Next I re-attached the point rails using Code 70 joiners. Joiners provide a much more solid connection, and much better electrical connectivity. Then I glued the styrene to one of the remaining plastic ties on the turnout (the one on the far left). Then I glued a tie to the stock rails to the right of the points to keep everything in alignment. Then I slowly slid ties underneath the rails and glued them to the styrene. Once they were in place I trimmed the ends of the ties.

You can also see that I cut a notch in the throw bar to electrically isolate both sides of the point bar.

Below. After completing the tie replacement around the point rails, I cut off more of the original tie strip–about ten ties at a time–and replaced the ties one-by-one. I did this three or four times and worked my way from one end of the turnout to the other, replacing almost all the original ties. I retained about four of five of hte original ties to keep the track aligned properly. You can see them if you look close. They’re the ones with the big spikes and wood grain detail.

I secured the rail to the ties, and the ties to the styrene sheet, with simple ACC. Once the turnout is put in place I spike the rails down to keep everything in place.

You can also see that I replaced the original Shinohara frog with a #4 frog from Proto87 Stores. The rails are physically isolated on each side of the frog.

Here are a few of the parts I used to decorate, or detail, the turnout. These Code 70 joint bars and tie plates are all fromProto87 Stores. I cut them out a bunch of these at a time and fix them to the turnouts in the right places with ACC.

Below. A closeup of the replacement frog and tie plates. Can you pick out the remaining original Shinohara ties?

Here’s a photo that describes some of the detail parts used.

Here is one of the two wyes installed on the layout. I just had to glue it down with Elmer’s Glue and that was that. The holes seen at the diverging rails are where wires were soldered.

I lightly hand-painted the track and turnouts with Testor’s Rubber. Later I went back and painted almost every tie with slightly lighter shades of brown, tan and light gray.

Finally, below, is one of the rebuild wyes after cleaning, wiring, ballasting and weathering. The weathered ties are subtle but you can see the differences in color. The grass is a combination of static grass and Woodland Scenics stuff. I take my time and try to never get any scenery material on the top of the rails or the ties. I’ll cover track scenery later.

Here’s a closeup of the switch block while applying ballast. I have added a few turnout rail braces from Details West at the point rails. The bars running across the rails are styrene rod simulating Gauge Rods, which used to keep track in gauge around hard-beaten areas. The joint bars are visible, as are some of the tie plates. Some spikes are visible showing where the track had to be spiked to maintain correct alignment. There are also straps made across some of the ties; those were occasionally used by the real railroads to keep the ties in proper horizontal alignment. I added them for fun.

The ballast is stuff I picked up from the old Pennsylvania Railroad roundhouse site in Richmond, Indiana back when I lived in the U.S. I sifted it down and baked it, and removed all the metal particles with a magnet. It makes a great cinder ballast–because it’s real cinder ballast. Trimming them also makes them look a little more rough-cut, which was common in the 1940s.

One of the two installed Micro Engineering switches is shown below. I didn’t modify these turnouts very much, other than replacing the frog with a part from Proto87 Stores and and adding detail treatment like was done with the wyes. I didn’t replace any ties.

And one last photo of one of the Micro Engineering turnouts in it’s natural habitat. Again, it’s easy to super-detail track and turnouts like this on a small layout, and even easier to do it at a layout like Hermitage Road that’s built at sit-down height.

I hope you enjoyed this. Here’s a view of the layout from my first operating session last week. There’s a Seaboard VO-1000 working hard behind the backdrop. The industry in the left foreground is the Alcatraz Paint and Varnish Company, which is almost entirely scratchbuilt. I’ve already replaced it with a much larger industry, the Sitterding-Carneal-Davis Contracting Co. More on those changes another time.

Hope you all have a blessed week! Begone, Covid! – John G