 Hi, I'm Jeff Hodl and October's What's Neat starts now. The What's Neat Show is sponsored by Caboose, sharing our passion for trains since 1938. This is the What's Neat Show for October 2017. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we've got a great show. Thomas Howell comes by and shares with us how to upload off of the Digitrax websites updates for our systems. We do an update to the DCS-240 and we also do an update to the T400 throttles that we've got. It was a very interesting segment as Thomas takes us through the whole process step by step. Jason Quinn comes by with three beautiful tangent freight cars that he carefully weathered and he shares with us the process and explains to us how he made the cars look so absolutely realistic. Dennis Norris, an old friend of mine from the Midwest Valley Modeler days, comes by and shares with us a lot of the video that he shot back in the 80s and 90s, which he's now made available for all of us to model from on DVDs. Jeff Otto from Oak Hill Model Railroad Track Supply comes by and this time we don't just build a turnout, this time we take his products, a double crossover, switches, and straight track and apply them real live, real time to a diorama and the diorama came out so nice that I ended up almost turning it into a complete Fremont module with complete scenery and everything to go with that. So that's actually a really good layout construction segment this week for the show. Now our podcast has been doing exceptionally well. The What's Neat This Week podcast designed to give us updates of what's going on in a more up to date type of broadcast where we broadcast it live from down here on Saturday nights on train night and then we edit it and upload it to YouTube, to the Ken Patterson YouTube site, which there is now a link to in the Model Railroad Hobbies Magazine. So you can find the What's Neat This Week podcast, a breath of fresh air in that it's not as groomed and professional as I like the What's Neat show to be. It's more raw where we can discuss products, discuss experiences that we've actually had with various situations. It's kind of a really, really neat way to present the hobby to folks. Now we've started a GoFundMe account. It's called the What's Neat Model Railroad Show GoFundMe account. And the reason for that is we are upgrading the equipment to make a much better presentation for the show. We're trying to get a travel budget to travel around the country and interview modelers because the fact is this is your show. This is our show and it belongs to all of us. It's our way to promote and keep the hobby healthy through knowledge and education to all, to all folks, the newcomers and the experienced modelers alike. So we've graciously say thank you to the folks that have contributed at this point and we are going to make the show the very best that we can using the funds we get. For example, new microphones and just updated equipment for the podcast. So we're thinking this is going to be similarly to the way they support public television, whereas they ask for money in order to make the show better for all of us. And that's the full intent of doing that. So with that, let's get on with the rest of October 2017 What's Neat. What's Neat, we're going to do an update to the DCS 240 digital command control installation that we did a few months back. Digitraxx has informed me that they've got a patch or an update to the system. Similarly to that of what Microsoft does with Windows when they update your computer overnight with new things that they've discovered that might improve the performance of the system. And that's exactly what Digitraxx has explained to me that this will do. I've got Thomas Heil here to help me do that. He's our greatest computer expert that we know that also loves trains. And so we're going to quickly walk you through the process of what you need to do to get the update for your DCS 240 command control system. The entire process is pretty simple, Ken. It's just a matter of taking the USB port on your DCS 240 back there. We're going to plug it into our computer over here. It's going to show us a comp port that it's assigned. Digitraxx has got this all nicely laid out on their website on how to follow it. We downloaded and installed their program here. We got the latest firmware ready to roll. So we're going to check a few settings, make sure we get everything all ready to roll here. We're going to download the program and then we should be up and rolling to the latest version of the operating system for their software here. So we'll get that all set up and we'll show you how it's done and we'll get you rolling. Okay. So Thomas is about to start the update on the DCS 240. And I want to show you what we've got here. We've got it hooked up simply with the USB cable running down here to the computer. And Thomas is on the Digitraxx website where it's going to give us the update. And we're going to screen record this right now so you can actually see the process. And say it's pretty straightforward, pretty simple, works pretty nice. They got good directions on everything on the Digitraxx website on how to update it. On the box it is important to... So we're going to start updating the DCS 240 first to the latest firmware. And it's important that we have all the other local devices disconnected, which I have done. And I went ahead and switched the mode switch into sleep which turns all the track power off and leaves the device powered on. So we go to Digitraxx website. We find their download page and we find that their latest firmware is here. And that if you haven't already installed the... It is. It is recorded. And then we downloaded the software program which updates it. Now you should be able to just take a simple USB cable, plug it into your computer. It may or may not find the driver needed to... necessary for it to update it, but that is also conveniently located on the website. And the driver that you need is the PR3, Windows 7, 8, or 10 depending on what version of Windows that you have. You download that. And if it says... When you plug it in, you'll see a little icon that shows up in your right hand corner of your screen down here. I'm going to demonstrate for you. Plug it into a different port. Let's see if it gives a different com number. It did not, but that's okay. I can show you. If everybody goes into their devices and printers, you will see the DCS. It'll say DTS 240 on there. If it has not installed correctly, it'll have a little error icon next to it. You can update that by down... Let's say if it does not install the driver correctly, you can download the latest driver, which is that PR3 as I said before. And it is in this file here. These are the drivers it's going to need. So I've created a folder on my desktop here, which I've simply named DCS 240. So I have the drivers in here correctly. If you go to your computer, right click, hit manage, and you go into device manager, it'll have it listed here. It'll say DCS 240 error. So you tell it you want it to update your driver. And you simply point that to where your driver location is here. It takes about a minute or two for up to update depending on your computer speed. And then once it's done, this screen here should refresh, and it'll tell you you have a new communication device. And it'll also tell you that if you go into your devices and printer. And it's important to know what comport you have here. So when you open up the Digitrax updating software, which is Digi PL2, you'll have to select a comport that you have it connected to. So we're going to go ahead and go through the process of updating the DCS 240 here. And once you have your com selected, you can say discover or identify where is it here. Hang on. My mistake, I already have it selected. You tell what it is. We're going to head and select the firmware file that we downloaded from the Digitrax website. This is right here, 240 firmware. I put that in our desktop folder. We'll go ahead and select it, DCS 240. And then we will hit start. And if you look on your DCS 240 there, it should start flashing back and forth to indicate that it is programming. Yeah, I see all the lights flashing just like you said. And away it goes. And so it's uploading right now. It is updating the firmware on it. And you can see from the screen capture here. And I got to tell you what, this is fascinating to watch the screen capture as you're actually doing it. I'm going to tell you I'm probably going to have to watch this video twice in order to understand exactly what you just did. But that's the advantage of what we're doing. You can press pause. You can watch it. You can follow through and learn this. And this is something that we all need to learn if we want to update any of our systems. There it went. I heard it. I heard the DCS give me a little, a little beep. I've been in the track power came back on to indicate that we have a successful flash. Just like that, the system's updated. And then if I hit the find devices after that, I can verify that it has been updated by checking the software version is now 0-3. Okay. And the neat thing is we can also do your throttles too. So all we have to do now that we have our command station hooked back up or updated to the latest, plug our local net back in and we go back to our software here and we should be able to hit discover. And boom, look at that. There it is. So then we can go down to the same process. We can find the latest file for your throttles if you need to update. I went ahead and downloaded that from Digitrex already. So I can select it and then hit start. And it is now programming the throttle. It's a little light on it and IPL run to indicate that it is now programming. So the DT402 is getting an update, whatever the update is that Digitrex has for that system. That's fascinating. Yeah. So I found that when we were going through yours that yours originally had version 1.7 and we are updating to 2.1. I would call this advanced DCC, but I've never seen anything like this and I'm so glad to be able to learn what it is you're showing me right now. And all of us, all of us together. It's good to know because we all have bugs, same thing like your computer. You find a bug or something like that, same thing with the manufacturers. They take note and when they get everything compiled together, they will send out an update. And that's exactly what we're doing here. So we should have better functions and better performance out of our system by updating to the latest and greatest that they offer. Thomas, man, thank you for showing us how to do the updates to our system. I can't wait to actually play with it and see if I can detect any differences in performance. But so far I've been satisfied with my system other than I've been trying to figure out a few things that I didn't quite understand and I'm hoping that this patch will fill those holes for me. I certainly should get some definite improvement out of it. I can't say for certain if it'll fix your issues, but we'll keep our fingers crossed and say we know we're going with the latest and greatest that we've got for right now. Very good. Thank you. No problem. You're very welcome. For this segment of What's Need, I've got Jason Quinn all the way from Indianapolis, Indiana again. And I gotta tell you, he's got some beautiful tangent freight cars that I really think that he needs to share his technique on weathering with. All three of these cars are the same. Tell us about these beautiful cars we're looking at. Well, Ken, these are all tangent X-58 box cars. They're from their latest release, which is a couple of months ago at this point in time. But by the time you're seeing it, it'll probably be a few more months. But they're beautiful cars, as you said. And these things lend themselves to prototypical weathering so well because they're such a prototypical car. We're going to kind of go through each one of these three. They're all three, basically the same car, but different paint jobs. And we'll start with this Lehigh Valley, which is patched out for Conrail. This car is completely a tangent paint job. It was pre-patched out when I bought it. You can buy it that way. And I came in and I weathered it with multiple different types of weathering. I started with an enamel wash, which I used the McBrand wash. It was light rust, which the wash was actually too strong. So I had to thin it down heavily with their thinners to kind of just give the rust-dust appearance on the white paint. Once that was done, I came back in with the craft paints. I believe I used a raw lumber and added in all the dark spots that you see on it. And then once those were dry, I came back in with burnt sienna oil paint. I took just a toothpick and touched the spots, especially the larger ones, with that oil. I mean, it's just a little prick of paint because the oil paints go a long way. And then I took thinner and thinned out the area and that creates the rust bleed of the heavy rust. And basically, that's what we're looking at. The rust streaks on this car were done with the oil paints. And honestly, I am thrilled with this car. This is probably the best one I've done today and I'm very happy with it. Boxcar roofs for the longest time. I did not know how to get one that looks right. And then one day it dawned on me. And I'm going to show you how I did this one. And I think this is about as real as you can get. This roof come and it was bright silver. So the first thing I did is I took a little bit of white, once again, cheap craft acrylic paint, and put a little bit of black into it, just a bit of black, to make a light gray color, which is the oxidized roof. And I even left the brush strokes in it because that adds to the visual interest of the roof. And then I came back in and the dark areas of this roof are raw umber, cheap craft acrylic paint. Once that's dry, I came back in with my burnt sienna oil. And once again, put the dobs of paint on there, came in with the brush loaded with paint thinner, and blended the burnt sienna out into the rust bleed that you see here. And then let it dry. And that's it. It is, I thought it looked terribly hard to do, but once you do it, it's so simple. It just takes a little bit of time. And then we're going to move on to the Pennsylvania X-58 here. This car is almost entirely pan pastels. I used three colors of pan pastels. I believe it was black, raw umber, and then earth. And actually, that's a lie. I used burnt sienna too. But I come in and I followed the prototype photos. In both of these cars, I used photos off Tangent's website. So I come in and I put the pan pastels onto the car, which will basically obscure the print. And I came back in with a damp toothpick and cleaned the print off. And ended up with this. I also added the data plates and the barcode system of these cars at that point in time. And the roof, which we'll show that later, was done with oil paints. And here, let me get our picture a little bit better, is the Pen Central. And this car is also done basically entirely with pan pastels, following pictures once again on Tangent's website. And then the roof is done with oil paints. The only thing that's different from this car versus one on the Tangent's website is the P in the worm logo is a little bit too red. But the one on the photo was pink, and I personally liked the red better. So I took, I guess, the modelers. I like the red one better. So that's what I went with. So here they are. Hope you guys enjoy them. Man, I'll tell you what. These are some exquisite models, Jason. I really appreciate you bringing these by and sharing them with us on What's Neat. Thanks, Ken. Hi, I'm Ron Perry, and you're watching Ken Patterson's What's Neat. So, Ken, What's Neat this month? For this segment of What's Neat, I've got an old friend from the Midwest Valley modelers, Dennis Norris. He sat down with us today in the studio to tell us about some new videos. But I want to talk about the Midwest Valley modelers' layout, Dennis. Tell us some of the things I remember that you had done on the layout. Well, I worked on the city module quite a bit, as well as the yard handling a lot of track. That's actually where I first learned how to handle a track by you as a master teacher. So that was a very fun project, and it was a good time. I remember you helped us build those track lights, too. We had you actually in an article that ran in the model press, probably in either Real Model Journal or the NMRA Bulletin about how we made those lights for the layout, but that really worked out. Now, today you are taking a lot of the old material that you used to videotape in the 80s and the 90s around St. Louis and different parts of the country, and you've come out with a line of DVDs to help us modelers model. Tell us about your DVDs, Dennis. Well, I have two titles currently available. The first one is a DVD covering the last year of operation of the Chicago and Northwestern during actually the year that it merged into the Union Pacific. The video was shot in 1995 in April and October. It has full stereo sound. It was shot with modern high-eat equipment from Sony, so it's a very good quality video. Nice. And how long is this? That one is actually two discs. It's a little under two hours. Okay. Two discs, one for April and one for October. 1995. 1995, yes. Okay, now what's the other video you've got here? The other one is kind of a pet project of mine. I've spent a lot of time in the 80s and 90s being that I live so close to the Norfolk Southern St. Louis district out in O'Fallon, Missouri, and I used to go to one of their control points in St. Peter's, Missouri every afternoon when I was off work with my camcorder in hand, wait for a train, and chase it. Nice. Sometimes for 50 or 60 miles along I-70. So I decided to put that together in a video. Like the other CNW DVD, it features stereo sound. It's only one disc, but it's got a lot of run-bys as well as a lot of pacing where I'm actually alongside the train going along the highway. Nice. And you're working on a third DVD now? Yes, actually. The third one is going to cover the St. Louis area railroads in the 1970s. Oh, nice. It was shot by a friend of mine who's a retired engineer from the Alton and Southern Railroad. Okay. He was kind enough to let me produce this on a DVD. It's going to be about an hour and a half in length. The majority of it features the Frisco in the Missouri Pacific. Okay, nice. And what website or how do we attain these? Where do I go to buy one of these? Actually, I have several dealers that are carrying these DVDs. You can go to trainvideodebo.com or railfandebo.com or you can go to ronsbooks.com. Okay. And we can help share some of his work. And I got to tell you what, it's stuff like this that really helps us model, especially the one from the 70s. I can't wait to see it. Well, Dennis, listen, thank you very much for taking a few minutes to tell us about your new stuff. And it's really good to see you, buddy. Appreciate it. Thanks a lot. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got Jeff Otto here again from Oak Hill Railroad Track Supplies. And the last time Jeff was here, we built a really neat turnout. It took 30 minutes and it was straightforward how to work and build a turnout using his jigs. But today, I want to put him to the test. We've got a sheet of foam here where we're going to build a real-life scenario railroad track pattern using his product. So he needs to build a turnout. I believe we're going to do straight trackage. And we're going to lay it out in such a way that we've got a small diorama that's going to measure about 8 feet by about 15 or 18 inches across. Whereas we're going to figure out exactly where we're going to put the track. So let's see how this turns out next as we go through the entire process of putting the Oak Hill modern railroad track supply products to the test in a real-life usable diorama that we can run video through. I'm actually looking forward to this, Jeff. Yeah, me too. It's going to be fun. So not only are we going to have fun in the process of doing it, but hopefully the end result that we end up with is something that you will see that you can apply to your modern railroad layout as well. So let's see what happens next. Using blue masking tape, we started to lay out the track pattern onto the foam. This is how I generally like to start handling my track on my layout. And for this, it worked just perfect as we took our time plotting things out so that it would look good for video and still photography. Where's, how far is this going to go into here? Where do you want to start it? Where do you want to have it on? You want it more to the middle so we can get a good run-by through it. Okay, so a lot like this? Yeah, yeah. So can you pick up the turnout then right here? So the turnout can start right here. And all we're doing is something like this. Yep, the turnout can literally start right here. Yeah, wherever. Something to that effect. Then we can grab in some super elevation. I think I'm going to double up the foam because we're going to need to carve this down so the camera's angle looks good. A curve? We'll get it. Using a pruning saw, I cut the foam following the flow and curvature of the main lines. After making sure the work table was perfectly flat and level, I glued a second layer of foam with the Great Stuff Foam Pro, making the module about four inches thick. This will help in keeping the module from bending or flexing, potentially damaging our hand-laid track. So while the Great Stuff is drying on the diorama that is now sitting underneath a great deal of weights on a perfectly level table, Jeff is over here building the straight sections of track, and he appears to be putting on the tie plates and all the ties into his jig. And I also see the solder, what are those called? PC ties. PC ties that you're putting in there, Jeff. So this is what you would call the time-consuming part. Is that right? Yeah, it can lay, and the tie plate is definitely the most time-consuming part of this. Otherwise, we would have the track laid and running by now. So you have to put down each tie plate where the rail is going to go, and you've got to glue each one with super glue, and it appears that you're using a plastic needle to apply your glue. So when you put them on, there's a D. The flat part goes on, and this edge right here, goes flat up against this part of the template. So you know as you're laying the other side, it's perfect. Perfectly gauged. And you've got those all in place? Yep. So if you put a rail on it, check the gauge. Perfect. Could you show me the ones you've done so far? Those are the ones I've done so far. Okay, well, while the scene's drying for half an hour, I'll get in there and start helping you glue. All right, sounds good. Now the double cross over that we're going to use on the scene, you can see right here, it's got a K frog in it. And what kind of frog is this, Jeff? That's a bent rail frog. A bent rail frog right here all through this. So this is a pretty nice crossover, and that was built using this Oak Hill template, which you can see the ties are laid in place right now, along with the PC board ties. And then simply all you do is glue your rail onto that and solder it to these PC ties. And what you end up with is this beautiful turnout that we're going to use on this scene. So Jeff is over there still laying the straight tracks. So as that goes on, I'm going to start carving this diorama and getting the topography ready to go with this. I used a chainsaw to help carve the scenery. I wanted to do this very quickly. So I set up the high speed camera so you can see exactly how quick the 35 to 40 minutes it took to carve this out. So Jeff, I see you've got all your tie plates on this first piece of track. What are you doing right now? Right now I'm putting on the rail braces or I call them fish plates. Okay, like the joint bars? The joint bars, yes. And on my template, every arrow is every 39 scale feet, so you know where to put them on the track. You don't have to guess. It's exactly 39 scale feet. And you also notch the rail where these arrows are for the 39 foot clickety-clack sound. Yup, I just used this 0.09 inch cutoff disc. 0.009 inch. I noticed that was really thin when I put that on. That's pretty amazing. Now, who makes those discs? DeDedco. Okay, we can find that online. Can you say that name again? DeDedco, D-E-D-C-O. Those are some pretty nice dremel discs. I like those. Now we're going to attach the rail to the PC tie. And you're using air soldering to do that? Yup. So you're blowing hot air onto the PC tie and that's soldering it. And you've also got... And we put solder paste in there? I see the track, um, the plate is on there too. The tie plates are on there, yup. And the solder sticks to that as well? Uh, yeah, it's CA down in the solder just melted all together. Okay. What are you doing now? Well now I'm putting the ties onto our custom curved straight track. So you've got it all soldered together with the PC ties. And now you're putting in the wood ties where you had it marked on the rail, the spacings. Yes, the little black lines. And these have got all of the fish plates on them. The tie plates. Which we use the template to put the tie plates on correctly. So now that it's... You put the tie plate on and it engages. So you're gluing them on one at a time? Are you soldering these? What are you doing here? I put Plia bond underneath of the rail. Okay. I put it tacky and now I'm putting it on and then I use heat to bond the Plia bond because Plia bond is heat activated as you may well know. Yeah, we talked about that in the last show and that was amazing to me. So now you're just individually gluing each tie into this position with the soldering iron to activate the glue. Yup, once we get it done we'll wait it down and let it rest for a couple of minutes and then we'll hit it with the heat. So you've got about three feet of track here to go on there. Yup. Cool. I mean it's going pretty quick. As Jeff Otto finished each section of track things were laid into position forming our double track mainline and siding trackage. We used dark walnut stain to color the ties and this went relatively quickly when you considered the one inch brush covered things very fast. Then we painted the sides of the rail with Rust-Oleum camouflage brown paint using a piece of paper as a mask. This also went very quick and now this track is just about ready to be laid into position. Okay, so we're looking at the double crossover here the Oak Hill monorail road track supply double crossover that was made with that beautiful jig and I've got to get power into these small pieces of rail that are in between the frogs. I'm going to leave the frogs unpowered and power up these rails. Now we've done this before on normal turnouts where we make our slice to isolate the frog and then we run jumper wires underneath between the ties to power up the rails. And I didn't want to run jumper wires on this although I could do it very easily but if you look at this the way it's designed Jeff has got these PC ties in here and this is an isolated circuit on one side so all I simply did was took this beating wire this brass beating wire and I used the tie as our conduit to get power to each one of those individual sections of rail between the frogs and as you can see I've done that in three spots here and then three more spots here which takes care of this side of the turnout and I did the same on the other side so now the entire turnout has got power throughout all the individual small pieces of isolated rail here so that when we want to train through this it'll run smoothly across the dead frogs and then pick up power on each one of the rails. I used liquid nails adhesive from a one quart can now this looked a little bit lighter in color than the regular liquid nails in the tube or the cocking gun that I'm used to using and also this material cured a little bit slower taking a full three hours to set up now this is a good thing as it gave us a little bit more time to work the track into position when we were finishing off this part of the layout so it looks like we've got it all glued down and what we've got to do next is after this white liquid nail a new formula that is foam safe after this dries we're going to spray it with some Rust-Oleum camouflage brown paint and go over the area very well with that and then Jeff I guess I've got to start putting ballast and scenery on this but so far your track building part it looks like it's just about complete would you say? Yeah I think it's all set ready to run trains so we wanted to test it first before we ballasted it so this is the test run right here so we've got it wired up on all four corners of this turnout in order to supply power to it everything seems to be wired up correctly the way we put in the jumper wires go ahead and let it go and let's see if it'll run through there Jeff it looks like it works so yeah good so far now we're just ready to paint it whether it ballasted and scenic this thing it looks like it's ready to go Yeah I think it definitely runs through those middle frogs pretty good this is DC so DCC will work better once we power the middle frog No I like it I like it I can't stop doing this I just want to keep going I don't want to go home and the points for Pro-287 function flawlessly the throw bars function flawlessly it's amazing the frogs it doesn't get any realer than this right here Okay I brought this diorama outside now we've got it in the sun just to see if the temperature is going to affect anything about the rail the glues or any of the attachment of any of that I've got a laser meter out here right now it's reading 130 degrees surface temperature on the diorama and the diorama has been outside for approximately four minutes at this point so and I don't hear any popping so so far this is looking really good so let me monitor this for about 10 minutes and then I'll record another short clip to see what the end result was so my reason for trying this experiment is I just didn't know how track that would be glued down with of course heat activated plyo bond glue but nevertheless glued down with no spikes would react if it came outside with the expansion of the sunlight and right now the diorama is reading about 137 degrees 140 degrees all the way throughout the diorama right now nothing has moved the track has held the rail has not come off of any of the ties I'm very satisfied with the fact that I think this is a good way to actually build track and it can still hold up to outdoor photo shoots out in the sun now this is extreme you're not going to do this but if you're bringing the layout in from a train show let's say wintertime and you're going from an ambient indoor temperature of 72 degrees to an outside of 20 and then back in again as you come from your vehicle back into a environment I've seen rails kink and pop doing that so that's why that was a concern with me on this diorama nothing spiked down but simply glued down with the heat-activated plow-bound glue that Jeff likes to use and I've got to tell you what it's holding up to the extremes so now I can ballast this and put scenery on this and I can continue to finish this project so we can get some really neat run-throughs and future photography using this diorama but I just wanted to do this ending real quick of the temperature checking on the expansion contraction of things and so far so good no problems I started the scenic aspects of the diorama by building a railroad crossing laying HO scale railroad ties into a bed of wood glue and letting this setup for about 24 hours before sanding it smooth and flush with the top of the rails I also built a road to cross the track by making forms from scrap wood and then using a 4 inch putty knife to apply the latex patching cement between the forms and drawing the road smooth with the 4 inch putty knife and a little water I then built a 7 foot long 2 lane road paralleling the flow of the main lines and let this setup and dry for about 2 days I did final carving along the track edges forming the ballasts topography lines then sealed the exposed foam with brown latex paint I did go through the diorama and spiked all of the rails into the ties for added strength ensuring years of reliable service while shooting this in hot sun or while it's being stored in the garage subject to seasonal and temperature humidity extremes I then covered the diorama with sifted dirt from the backyard I formed a shoulder on the road with woodland scenic's gray fine ballast also ballasting both main lines and the siding track Everything was shaped and smooth with an artist brush over a period of about an hour After applying various shades of green ground foam I sprayed the entire diorama with about 3 bottles of woodland scenic cement just to secure things into position I ran wire through the foam in 10 locations providing power feed wires to the rails I cut a groove into the bottom of the diorama to accept a main power bus wire as you can see here All of the power feed wires from the track will be soldered to this bus wire which will then be pigtailed at the end of the diorama which I could connect alligator clips to providing power to the diorama outside during a video run by photo shoot All the wires were sealed into the groove in the foam with a bead of great stuff foam pro permanently embedding the wires into the bottom of the base After cutting off the excess foam that had expanded sealing all the wires into the bottom of the diorama it was now flush and smooth After laying the diorama flat and doing a quick inspection of the entire scene it was time to clean the track with a bright boy track cleaner paying close attention to the switch points electrical conductivity at the point of contact with the outside rails with the diorama ready to run and the basic scenic elements in place, I decided to shoot the scene the next available afternoon in full sun and powered so that I could film run buys for future what's neat shows It turned out to be a very exciting and unusual photo shoot day So after working on the Oak Hill model railroad tracks applied diorama for seven days after Jeff left I finished the scene with brand new roads I'm out here to do a test photo shoot right now on it It's not necessarily a nighttime shooting I'm having a bit of an issue with the moon in the way of the sun at the very moment but as soon as the moon moves away from the sun I'll be able to shoot this diorama and we'll see how good this thing comes out So let's see what happens next So the sun is back and I'm outside again and I did do the photo shoot with the Union Pacific locomotives on this diorama and it came out really decent but I gotta tell you what that was a pretty amazing moment to see that eclipse it was totally dark here about a minute 45 seconds Now that the diorama is outside I've got it powered up I've got a locomotive on it now and we can see how it runs the only thing I really need to do to it still is put railroad crossing gates on it I need to paint lines on all the roads and of course I need to add some switch machines to the switches but at this point I'm going to put some details west switch machines just on top some white metal ones and paint those up so that aesthetically it looks good for a photograph but let's take a look at it now I've got this locomotive set up here this is one of those scaletrains.com locomotives and let's watch it run through the turnouts for a moment it runs smooth everything's powered up except for the frogs but this locomotive is able to get through that with no problems so I would call this project a total success the track work is held up well I've spiked everything in place without the sun again and everything's holding up so this is going to be a great diorama with different photo shoots and videography or I can mix buildings and different backgrounds into it and still have the interest of roads plus this might be a great diorama to drive the RC vehicles on then we're taking them outside to do various photo shoots with the new models as they come about anyway that's this segment of What Sneat on the Oak Hill Montereiro Track Supply using all of their templates their products to create a real-time, real-life diorama that can be used and I would say that this was a total success this is this segment of What Sneat all of the model railroad products seen in this episode of What Sneat are available through Caboose in Denver, Colorado or order online at MyCaboose.com