 The What Sneak Show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies. Your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping, and great service. And by Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at bachmentrains.com and thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What Sneak for December 2022. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we do have a good show in that. Jennifer Kirk stops by and shares with us some footage of some amazing ride on trains in the UK in five inch gauge and seven and a half inch gauge. It's a really good segment this month on the show. Dan Michiel comes by the studio and shares with us their new DCC system from TCS. Larry Harrington also shares with us the brand new Easy Command DCC system that's been greatly upgraded and improved. We also look at some brand new models from K-R Models, a beautiful GT3 locomotive and a shea during a photo shoot that I did out here on the property. We've got some amazing drone footage from our drone pilot Dan Scheidel in that he exposé some of his best work through the years in this month's video and it's absolutely awesome to see his segment modeling ideas from above. Also be sure to check out the What Sneak this week video podcast that we shoot down here in the studio every Saturday night, keeping you updated on what's new in the hobby with special guests, new products and a lot of exciting stuff every week in this, the best hobby in the world. And so with that, let's continue on with this December 2022 What Sneak. I'm Jenny Kirk and today I'm gonna be talking to you about model railroads in larger gauges. And when I say larger gauges, I mean something like this. And this is truly amazing. It's five inch gauge and we've also got seven a quarter inch gauge here. Now you might be familiar with some of these if you've seen some great locations such as Train Mountain. And here in the UK, we do have some similar venues and I'm in the County of North Yorkshire at a place called Gilling where they've got a club that runs those large scale railroads. And we're here to take a good look at just how much fun can be had with these super large scales. Now you might be thinking that your yard isn't big enough to accommodate something like this. And this is where clubs and venues like Train Mountain are absolutely brilliant. Because in these gauges, they're small enough that you can put them into the trunk of your truck and take them to these locations and have a great day out. And at the end of that day, you can pack them up and take them home. So it really is the best of all worlds. So come with me and let's take a great look at large scale railroading. Large scale model railroading doesn't have to be just about the prime movers. There's plenty of scope too for the freight cars that run on the track. And you can see here, there's a whole assortment of different freight cars. All of these are UK outline, but it gives you a sense of just what can be achieved in these larger scales. And there's so much fun to be had just switching the cars on these tracks as well as just going for a run on the main line and just watching the scenery go by at high speed. I should be some lucky. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Like it was the big, big, big odd, right? It was every good day, that's what we had. Pick up a van there, it's not there. Come back, pick up a van. Only because we have a spare. Oh, right. So if you find a one, we need that. Yeah, it's the first one. Oh, is it? No, it's the second one. Film crew. It's in, it's in. Come on. We're here at the yard area and there is so many great wagons on show. And it just shows the amount of really great quality workmanship that's gone into all of these. From the great Eastern Railway brake fan through all of these private owner coal wagons with the great wealth of colors and also the different designs too. Further along, we've got the lime wagons, the three plank wagons, different styles of brake vans, the stannier brake van, some machine well wagons, press flow cement and some low fits as well. Such a variety of rolling stock that you can do in this scale. And each one of these is a great project. If you want to tackle these, they are available, some of these as kits. And it's something that you can put on your windowsill when not in use. And it's an absolute work of art. Really great day here today. And it just shows what these larger scale railroads can really give back. We've seen trains racing on the main line at high speed. And we even got a ride round on them. And we also saw some switching in the yard too. And it just shows there's so much on offer here. It really is a great day out and a great way of taking your hobby up to a larger scale. But until next time, thanks for watching. Take care. Bye for now. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm with Dan Michio from TCS, that's train control systems out in beautiful Philadelphia. And today he's gonna give us some tips and tricks and show us that brand new DCC system that's come out. And what is it called, Dan? What are you gonna do today? So what we're talking about today is we're talking about the internal roster settings for your locomotives in the CS105. That's our command station. Nice. It's a five amp command station, first generation. So it's CS command station, first generation, that's 105 five amps. Nice. Yeah. So what we're talking about is some of the options and settings that you have available to you in the CS105 for the locomotives that you run on your railroad. The CS105 contains an internal roster which allows you to save a bunch of different details and information on the system about your locomotives. And today we're gonna give you some demonstrations on what those options are and how to configure them. So behind me here, I have these RSD 15 alligator locomotives that if you'll remember from an earlier segment of What's Neat, my health can set up with TCS wild sound decoders. So we're gonna take these same engines and we're gonna be using these for a couple of demonstrations in a series of videos that are gonna give you the tips and tricks that you really should know about the CS105. So the very first thing that we wanna demonstrate with the system is how to set up more detailed information about these locomotives, such as what they are. You can give them a name and also we're gonna be eventually going into a segment on consisting. So the very first thing that we're gonna demonstrate to you is the settings that you have available on the UWT 100. I'll be using this for demonstration purposes, but you can set up these configuration options not only with the UWT 100 or the UWT 50. You can also configure these settings through JMRI if you have the CS105 connected to a computer. So to get started, I have a locomotive selected here, 9810. That's the very first unit up here. And by going into the menu, which is this button down here and navigating down to option eight, which is settings, I can then go to option three, which is the roster settings. Now I had already loaded this one in before, but if you're selecting a brand new address that's never been addressed before or you've never changed the settings for recently, it would take about five seconds to load in all of the data here. So you can see we have the name as an option. We could add a description about the locomotive. For example, we could give it a information about the decoder. We could say what type of locomotive it is. Below that, we have speed step mode where you can change the speed steps between either 28 or 128 speed steps. This function will be discussed in a future video on how the behavior of function zero behaves. And five for functions gives you an option to name your functions for your locomotive. You may find this familiar if you use jam or I where you have information that will display as to what each function is. So if you push a button, it would display on the throttle or in the function help as to what that does. And again, we'll be talking about that in a future video. We also have the option to delete the entry from the roster if you get rid of your locomotive and you have no use for it anymore. So going back up to the top, we'll start with giving the train a name. So instead of just having a DCC address 9810 in this case, we could give this locomotive a name. We could call it Jerry or Tom or we could call it something more akin to what the actual locomotive is. So I could call it RSD15 Santa Fe number 9810 for example. And that's what I'll do. So to save the time, we're gonna make a quick cut here until that's all entered in and then we'll come right back. Now through the magic of video editing, we have our name entered in for the locomotive. So like I said, RSD15 Santa Fe number 9810. If I'm happy with that, I can push the save button and now we return back here to the menu where I now have other options. If I escape out of the menu again and reselect that locomotive 9810. And so now you can see that we have the name of the locomotive RSD15 Santa Fe number 9810 selected. And that is how you add a name to your locomotive in the roster settings for the CS105. For this segment of What's Neat, I haven't done this in a long time in that I only do a few photo shoots a year, it seems like outdoors in the last few years. But I'm shooting some amazing models from a company called krmodels.net. And what these are, this is the first model that Keith Reville has introduced to the US market. His company has created this beautiful two truck shea locomotive, which I am doing some outdoor photography with in the past couple of days. This model runs like a dream, it's got full sound and it's just a very beautiful two truck shea. I photographed this outside in a really nice photo shoot. Let me show you how the photo came out as I shot this model from both sides, stacking the scenery and using the mountainous and the pine trees in the background for a really nice conceptual photograph of what this model would look like running on your layout. The other model that I'm shooting today is really unusual. This is a GT3. This model ran in the UK. And this is an absolutely amazing model in that it looks like a steam engine, but in fact, it's a turbine. This is powered by what sounds like a jet locomotive, a jet engine when it starts up and it starts running down your layout. It's got full sound in it. Both of these models come with low sound. I also shot this GT3 or this GT3 outside. Let me show you with you the photograph that I got from that. This model looks absolutely exquisite in real sunlight. And again, this thing runs smooth. It runs like a dream. And so this was just something that I wanted to share with you as I do these photo shoots of these models over the past couple of days. I thought they were very interesting. Jeff Schultz suggested that I share these models with the viewers of what's neat because again, they're fascinating models from krmodels.net. Check out their website. There's a lot of amazing locomotives that Keith is producing right now for the market, for us in this, the best hobby in the world. So with that, that is this quick segment for What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got Larry Harrington from beautiful Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from Bachman Industries. And Larry, you're gonna talk about something really new and exciting. And that's the brand new Bachman Easy Command DCC system that you guys have just upgraded and changed. Yeah, that's correct. Can we, 2005, we came out with the original Easy Command. Since then we've made, I don't know, tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousands of units included as a separate sale item. We've also sold locomotives paired up with it. And any of our sound sets that we've sold in the last few years have included the Easy Command in it as well. The whole objective is to get the model railroad or start it in DCC. And when we did it back in 2005, DCC was pretty new to a lot of people and very complicated. And so we made the system as we call it Easy Command. So it's simple to operate. This was the original Easy Command unit that we had. Yes. I'm sure you see these all over the place. And we've upgraded the newer version. So this is the Easy Command Plus. It still looks very similar. It has a lot of neat new features that I'll go over. And just to get, we've gone into the 21st century here so that we could, like I said, when DCC first started, it basically was just to control more than one locomotive on the track. There wasn't a whole lot of sound systems out there. But now, as you know, there are so many features on these locomotives, lighting features, sound features. You need to be able to control all of those. And the original Easy Command only had a couple of function buttons. So the new version allows you to support all 28 versions, all of 28 of the function buttons. So right now, I'm in showing you how basically we have the function key still on the unit like it used to be, but it has like three pages we call them. So you press it once and you're in the first page, which would be function zero through function nine. Okay. No light turns green. And then you do it a second time and you're in page two, which will be function 19 through, I mean function 10, excuse me, through. Hold that up about two inches higher. There you go, we can see it. Okay, I can see myself better on it. You think I know how to do this by now. But anyway, you press it the third time and you're in your third page. So you can get all 28, it turns green. So it has a little color code on the top of the unit there that tells you which version it is, first, second, or third page. Very nice. Another neat feature you might notice that it has a, let me, I have a locomotive on the track here down. So I have to watch what I'm doing. Let me change it to a different address. So address two, there's nothing on that address. So we have a little speed indicator now, as you see the, Oh, nice. So you can, this is 128 speed steps now as well. So you can finally tune the speed. And the one other difference on this is that the original one had a knob that would just go like 315 degrees and it would stop. This one, you can keep going around and around and around and around until you get to the speed that you want to be and you can back off as well. And then as you can see, the indicator is going up and down. Yes. And it remembers that. So if you get to a different locomotive, like number one, you see now it went down to zero because there's locomotive one is at rest right now. So you can control multiple locomotives up to, we've set this originally like the originally easy command so they can control one analog locomotive on address zero. And then you can do one through eight with full control of your locomotive for DCC with all the like all function keys and all that. And function nine, I mean, excuse me, address nine is reserved for turnouts. But if you don't have any turnouts on your lab, you can also use function nine to control an additional locomotive as well. Very cool. I'm sure many of your viewers are familiar with the easy command back and take it through its paces here as well with a couple of locomotives. I can show you what it can do. Also, one other feature that we added to this was the original, it still has the emergency stop, which when you press the emergency stop, that cuts all power to your layout and shuts down everything. Okay. The new version, in addition to that emergency stop has an E stop for your locomotive. So if you're running a locomotive and you see all that was going astray and I have to stop it, all you have to do is simply press down on the button and that stops just that locomotive. So the rest of your locomotives, if you're running with other people in a session, you're not affecting their locomotives as well as yours. So whatever the active locomotive is that controls the E stop on that. Okay. This is backwardly compatible to the previous accessories that we had for the easy command. We had an easy command companion, which you could plug up the three additional ones in with patch panels and have all the people operating, their locomotives, the only limitation is there that only has the function buttons that were supported on the easy command companion. So this is the master brains that controls all the functions and it has, like I said, full control with all function keys for the locomotives. So I can show you a few things what it can do. So I'm going to show you how to control the locomotives. I have two locomotives on the track down here. Okay. So down my, can you see the tracks there now? Yes, I can. Okay, so first thing I want to show you is that you can do turnouts on address number nine. I can, can you see the points on the crossover where? The crossover closest to the tracks, we don't see the points exactly. Just a little bit, is a way to turn the camera a little bit towards the points. There you go. Good job. All right. And here we go. We're going to turn the. Nice. So I'm controlling that with the easy command on function number three. You can do one through eight for the functions that when you program, that's a different time and space to show you that there's a command, there's a video on our website that shows you how to program on our YouTube channel how to do the easy command switches. Very cool. But that just, you know, shows you can control the switches. And now I'm going to turn this back over here and I'm going to fire up this locomotive that I have here. They all go FA1, FA2, excuse me. That's on address three. Okay. I'm going to show you as the controller lights up on three. When I go in the function mode, you see the three flashes, that's indicating on the locomotive address number here, controlling, but any of the illuminated keys are the functions that are active. And you notice I have number eight because I've muted the locomotives before we started this interview. So if I turn that off now, now you get the sounds of the FA1, FA2. Okay. Then I can actually start up the locomotive. This is the SD30 that I'm controlling right now. So start up, go over to the FA1 and get that pulled out. Wow. As you can see, I've controlled all the functions, all the sounds. I'll turn those off now so we can talk again. No, that's very cool. So basically with our last couple of locomotives that we've made the ACS64 and the charger, they've had so many sound functions on them and lighting functions that were used just about all of the 28 function buttons to control something or other, turning lights on, turning sounds on. And we ran out of that basically the way to do it on the easy command. We've incorporated some special programming on those particular decoders so that you could page by pressing function eight on the easy command, but you don't need to do that anymore. You can just go directly to the function that you want to control on the easy command plus. So this, like I said, is back really compatible with the other accessories. It's a great way to get started. And then going forward, our sound sets will start to include this instead of the easy command plus instead of the previous version of the easy command. So you're getting a really good value there. No, way to go. It's a great system. It's well thought out. The way you've changed things is amazing. Yeah, we kept it very familiar looking too. So if you're used to the old one, it'll only take a few minutes to get used to this. That's awesome, Larry. Well, that's perfect for Christmas sales. That's something to think about for getting on. They're in stock now, so go visit your favorite dealer and pick one up. That is awesome, Larry. Well, I want to thank you very much for helping produce this segment of What's Neat. It's always interesting, the products that you feature on this show. I appreciate it so much. We all love it. No problem, Ken. I'm glad to be here. All right, Larry, with that, that is this segment for What's Neat. Thanks. All of the products seen on this episode of What's Neat are available from Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois. Or order online at LombardHobby.com. Bachman trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com.