 Hi, I'm Joshua Barton and the September What's Neat starts right now. The What's Neat show is sponsored by Caboose, sharing our passion for trains since 1938. This is What's Neat for September 2020. I'm your host, Ken Patterson, doing all I can to promote the best hobby in the world, model rariting. On this month's show, George Bogotoc stops by and he shares with us how to set up a programming track on your layout for programming DCC to your locomotives. Also on this month's show, Stephen M. Conroy shares with us some beautiful drone footage of an Amtrak consist running through the mountains in California. It's absolutely beautiful to see in modeling ideas from above. Also on this month's show, I talk about garden rariting and my 19-year learning curve adventure on my layout in the backyard. And I go into how to pour cement roadbed for your garden railroad, ensuring smooth, stable performance year-round. I do want to say please be sure to check out the What's Neat This Week video show that we produce every single week. It is on YouTube where we keep you informed weekly on the latest news in the hobby. And with that, let's continue on with the rest of September 2020 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, we're going to talk about garden rariting. Now, my garden railroad is going on 18, 19 years old now. And so far, so good. It's been a great way to entertain folks. A lot of garden railroads are simple around the patio type of loops of track, which is great and acceptable. The one I've got is 200 feet across with 400 feet of mainline and a simple dog bone. The area where I'm sitting right now was an area on the garden railroad where I had a long trestle when I originally built it. I did my first Bachman ad photograph at night time on this bridge, which was about 33 feet long and five feet high at its highest point. But being in this location on the property and having a bluff right there, the trestle was always an area where I had problems with the wind. A wind between 12 and 17 miles an hour would blow an entire train off of the bridge, which led to a lot of broken up trains. So what I've done is I've filled this entire area now with dirt. I've removed the trestle to simplify things and make it safer. But what I've got to do and what we're going to talk about on this episode of What's Neat, this segment is laying the groundwork for putting down cement roadbed. Now, when I originally built this garden railroad, I had a dump truck load of a quarter inch, half inch minus gravel brought in, which is limestone ground up to about, again, half an inch down to powder, which worked really well. I used to grade the main lines on the double track main line section, for example, whereas I even went as far as super elevating the curves in the gravel. And that worked out really good, but it didn't last long. After rain and after the moles took their toll, it was usually after about two months that I'd have to go through and regrade the track work to get things to be level enough to work, where couple earlers wouldn't separate and the trains wouldn't derail. So I got kind of tired of that after a while. I wanted to make the garden railroad something simple where I could flip a switch and just be able to run a train anytime I wanted. And the way I was able to accomplish that was by using cement. Over the time, I had put down 128 90 pound bags of cement along the main lines, made forms, poured it, and it all worked out really well. I had to make sections for drainage on the yard because the yard is built on a great hill, and I needed the water to drain away from and through and under the track successfully. And I did that by making gaps, whereas I would then either run aluminum stud 2x4s or wooden womanized wood across to make those water runoff areas work well for me. But now after filling in this trestle area, and it's taken about two years to completely fill it in, I didn't work on it obviously every day. It was something where I'd work on during the spring, maybe in the fall, or when I had dirt become available on various construction sites around the property here, where I could actually get free dirt to do the projects. When I originally built this railroad, I had like 12 dump truck loads of dirt brought in so I could make the bonfire pit area level various areas on the yard for walkways, and of course to build out a great portion of this trestle area leading up to the trestle, where everything would be level. So with this area now being filled, and it's been about six months or eight months, since the last time is I've dropped dirt here, the area settled down. And it settled down about six inches. When I did the dirty was level all the way across. It settled down about six inches in the middle area on the areas on the ends. It hasn't settled very much at all. I'm pretty level with the cement that's already existing. So I'm not going to fill in more dirt at this point. I want to get started on the cement road bed so I can pour this and get this done. Now I've got an area here to do that is 23 feet nine inches from where the cement starts on that side to where the cement ends on this side. And it's all built at a 10 foot radius curve from the center. That allows me to run otter racks and larger pieces of equipment on the layout without any problems. I've got a long eight foot level here and what I've done is I've put in stakes and the stakes are in an area close to the main line. So I can see how much the dirt has dropped and how much cement I need to build up in this area. Now what I'm going to do is take quarter inch luan and I'm going to drive in stakes all the way on both sides. What I've done here, I'll show you this clip, is I've painted white paint on either side of where the stakes are going to go, where the bricks used to be that I temporarily put in here to run trains on top of. And I'm going to dig this out and I'm going to start to create an area where I can pour four to six inch deep sections of cement keeping it completely level across the top. The stakes or the top of the stakes here are what give me my point of level so that I know exactly where the road bed needs to be. Now if you're building a smaller garden railroad, say off of a patio with flowers and a fountain and things like that to accent your enjoyment and your quiet space in your backyard, I would suggest using cement even on the smallest layout, say you're doing something that's five feet by 10 feet long. Cement ensures the fact that your track is level all the time, it doesn't float out of place. And if you live here in the Midwest like I do, you have moles and moles will dig tunnels, channel underneath the road bed, you come out in the morning and you'll find your track has been raised up two or three inches and it's kind of frustrating. And cement alleviates that problem. It makes it so that your garden railroad's flat and permanent. And if you only use it once or twice a year, year after year, it'll always remain stable. Plus another benefit of cement is in the event you have deer and deer step on your track, they don't damage it as bad because the cement is a good solid flat surface. So let's do this. I'll videotape clips as I continue on with this project. I'm going to run plywood through my bandsaw on the inside, making strips of between one inch and six inches wide. And then I'm going to use a staple gun and staple the strip of plywood into a curved form, attaching it to these stakes that I'm putting in all the way across at absolute level point so that we can take our cement leveling tools and then run them across the top after we pour the cement. So let's continue on with this what's neat topic of laying cement road bed on your garden railroad and see how it turns out. Continuing on with the project now it's getting into the night here and I'm working under spotlights. I've cut some strips of wood and these are about two and a half inches wide. I ran these through the bandsaw. I also put in stakes on either outside on the edges where I had the white marks painted where the road bed essentially is going to set. And my plan is to take this stapler and staple the plywood to the very top edge of the stakes because the stakes are laid they're hammered in absolutely perfectly level at the top of the stake as it goes around the curve. And that's where we want the very top of our cement to be. Also by having the stakes in level with the plywood it'll allow me to run the trowel across the top of this without having any stakes in the way disrupting my smooth movement as I roll the trowel through the top of the cement leveling the road bed as good as I can. Now this may not be absolutely perfect. I could be off a 16th of an inch as I go through but that won't make any difference on the track road bed it'll still be very level as the train runs across. So let me staple these into place. I'll cut some four inch wide strips as I continue around the curve as the slope starts to go down the stakes are a little bit higher out of the ground but again the top of each stake is the point of level where I need the cement road bed the top of the cement to lie as it sets up going around this curve. So using an eight foot level and some stakes some scrap wood stakes I hammered the stakes into the dirt following the white paint lines on both sides of where the main line would go making sure that the level the eight foot level I'm using coming off the cement road bed already existing gave me a perfectly level area all the way around the entire 10 foot radius curve for the length of the 23 feet that I had to fill with cement. Once I had all the stakes hammered into position around the curve it was well into the night that I started ripping strips of plywood parts of the plywood on some of the areas was only two and a half inches wide and on the areas where the dirt had settled I had to use plywood that was closer to five and a half to six inches wide in order to come to the very top of the stakes so the plywood would be smooth and level with the top of each stake as I then used a staple gun and worked my way around the entire curve stapling the plywood from the inside to the stakes. This would be strong and would hold the heavy cement within the bed that we're creating with the plywood working again all the way around. Mixing the cement was as simple as following the instructions on the bag and mixing a consistency and a wheelbarrow of that of oatmeal. I used a hoe and a wheelbarrow and mixed the cement quite thoroughly. Once I poured the cement between the wooden forms I simply took a 14 inch flat trowel and I smoothed the cement all the way around the curve making sure that the top and everything was just nice and flat and level. Kind of getting ahead of myself I used the wheelbarrow of course to pour the cement between the boards. In this video clip you're seeing me now well into about four hours of working the cement and in fact we did a podcast in between so before the pizzas arrived I finished this the last section of the garden railroad and simply poured the cement right out of the wheelbarrow. I wore gloves so that my skin wouldn't come in contact with the cement until I filled the entire area between the two pieces of plywood all the way around the curve. Once the cement was poured it was simply like making a cake. I took the 14 inch trowel and I worked the cement in between the boards and just used this trowel to make it nice and flat and smooth. It helps to have a garden hose on hand to keep the cement just a little bit wet on top so that it's very smooth as you trowel it level with the plywood. Notice that the stakes are well in the ground and they're not interfering with the trowel as I work it back and forth completing our brand new roadbed for the layout. So as soon as the concrete had set up and I let it set up for a couple of days I immediately laid the track around the 10 foot radius curve and everything ran great. So the only thing left to do now is to pull out the wooden forms and all the stakes and discard all of that. Now I use microengineering track on this project. I've been using that because it's reliable and it looks scale. I use code 250 rail. Microengineering track comes in six foot long sections of rail and then you've got a slide on the railroad ties onto that and the railroad ties come into six inch sections and I've been using that for years. I'll show you a picture here of all the various types of track I've used. When I curve the track I run the rail through a rail bender first curving it to the exact radius that I need for the given area and then I go ahead and slide the ties onto it same way with the straight trackage. I used to also paint the track with a Rust-Oleum earth color just to give it a brownish shade of color. But with that all I've got to do now is simply raise up all of the pieces of wood that line both sides of the cement and pull that out and discard of that and we're ready to run some trains. And this is exactly how the garden railroad looked upon pouring the cement for the very first time. I had a straight edge track set right on top. All the way around it was around two to three inches thick on most of the garden railroad. And what I had discovered was I had to come back and fill in cement at about a 45 degree angle on the sides to prevent the grass from getting too close to the trackwork and the railroad ties. This gave me a profile that looked relatively prototypically accurate with a shoulder built onto the sides of the cement roadbed on each side. This also helped facilitate weed-eatering so that as I trimmed and ran the weed-eater along the side of the main line I wouldn't sit there and cut up and hit the ties because as soon as a weed-eater string hits these ties it'll break them right off. I like microengineering track because it's got scale-sized spikes which is great and it looks good but it's something where again if you hit it with a commercial duty weed-eater you're going to destroy you could destroy three feet of ties and have to replace them right away. So with that the trains run good on this they run level on this. Let me show you a great run by using a couple old aristocrat locomotives that are going on better than 17 years old simply because they run reliable forever. The freight cars are a bit tattered up and I'm going to start working on those next working my way through all of the freight cars and just trying to make everything look relatively nice. The nice thing about freight cars outside is they weather all by themselves but they do get a little beat up. So with that that's my ideas and the way I go about doing cement roadbed on a garden railroad for this segment of What's Neat. And this month's segment of What's Neat we're going to talk about the programming track, what it is, why we have it, and how you can have one on your home layout. So first off let's talk about what is the programming track. Now the programming track is a small dedicated piece of track where it allows us to communicate with our decoder two ways both back and forth so I can program to the decoder and I can interrogate and read the values of the CV in the decoder. I can't do that on the regular mainline. Now when you have a programming track the programming protocol does not rely on an address so when I send a programming command on the programming track any decoder that can receive that communication will respond and set the CVs appropriately. Now when we're on the mainline that command any CV programming command is no different than sending a function command it's prefaced with an address. So if I was to send a programming command to locomotive 2272 say we want to change the horn volume then all I would do is send my CV via the mainline the programming command is prefaced with address 2272 listen up here's the command all these other decoders 3888 1460 and so forth ignore the rest of that command so it's no different than sending a whistle or a horn command so when I press the F2 on my throttle the command is 2272 listen up turn on F2 and then the decoder then responds to the command but when we're on the programming track as again that protocol is different and there is no address prefix so therefore any decoder that gets the command on the programming track will respond. Now one of the biggest things is why do we have it so this gives us a controlled environment and a small piece of track where we can communicate exclusively to that decoder and hear that decoder respond. Now when we're reading a CV it doesn't read the CV the way you think it does in other words it does not say hey decoder what's the value of CV 29 the decoder says 34 or whatever that's not the way it works remember back in school when we played a game of 20 questions well it's essentially the same way with a decoder on the programming track basically the decoder is asked hey decoder is the value of CV 29 0 is the value of CV 29 255 is the value 1 2 3 4 5 6 and so on and all the way up to 254 so that's 256 questions when the decoder answers no nothing happens it doesn't respond doesn't do anything the DCC system moves on to the next question when the decoder answers yes in the tsunami to an economy internally it draws current in our previous generation tsunami our motor decoders and other generations of decoders and other brands typically draw that current through the motor the DCC system then on that isolated piece of track can now detect that change in current accepts it as a yes command and then displays that last question in the window CV 29 equals 34 so this is why we have it the other thing is that we can also interrogate a decoder so let's say for example we just got a decoder from a friend somebody installed a decoder or let's say we were running at somebody's layout and we had to change the address let's say they already had a 22 72 so I changed that to 72 but it's been months and I forgot well if I can't remember I cannot talk to the decoder on that programming track because again I don't need to know the address so I can either overwrite with a new address or I can interrogate it and find out what the address actually is so this is a handy tool so for example if you've got a decoder that's making noise but you can't control it this is where we can use the programming track to determine and troubleshoot what's wrong with the decoder so for example with soundtracks products if you read CV 8 you should always read back 141 if you can't that tells us that there's a problem if you do get a value of 141 that tells us that the decoder is actually responding in a wake so therefore we know that we can probably regain control of that decoder because it's been making sound and we can read a CV so we can either just flat out reset the decoder or we can change the address to what we want it to be and then put it back on the mainline as you can see it's a great tool to allow you to talk to your decoder so now the question becomes how do we connect now here I have in my house a small piece of kato unit track with two bumpers on the end and what I've done is soldered a couple of pieces of wire to the end now as you guys know I'm using an nce power cab on my layout now the power cab connector only has two track outputs and what this does is when you go into programming track mode it takes those two outputs and turns them into a full powered programming track now where this can be dangerous is in a case like this where right now in this camera window you can see five locomotives if I was to go into programming track mode with all those locomotives on and my mainline turns into a full powered programming track any CVs I set will essentially set on all of those decoders so this is why we have a separate piece of track so what I can do is I get from nce the little two pin connector that you can get and plug into the back of the power cab so what I'll do is I'll set this on top of the layout plug this in place of the track power and that creates a small isolated programming and test track that I can now use with my power cab to be able to interrogate decoders find out the status or if I want to change CVs to match other decoders other locomotives so this gives us a great place to be able to program and read and write our CVs on our decoders without having to interrupt or take off all of these locomotives on our layout now on other DCC systems they do have a dedicated programming track output in which case you can hook this up directly to it keep this on your work table or keep it nearby the work the command station so that that way you have easy access to it whenever you need so there's one other thing that it's a programming track is really great and I kind of mentioned it earlier and that's copying the CVs on another locomotive and I want to show you a little trick on how to do that so bear with me I'm going to move these guys and we're going to set up our programming track and I'm going to show you that neat little trick right now so here on my programming track I've actually got two identical GP 15s both with tsunami two now this one is the new installation that I just got done doing this is one I've had on my layout since the beginning of the development of tsunami two now when I'm trying to read a CV value if I leave both of these decoders on there I'm going to get whichever one is the lowest quantity or the lowest value just like we talked about is the value zero is a 255 is it one two three four five well if this one's brand new this has a zero value in CV three so let's say we want to match the acceleration this has the lowest value in CV three with a value of zero now this one I've set up already with heavy momentum to follow practices that I use on my layout so if I want to find out let's say I don't remember what this value is and I do want to copy it I can use the programming track to do that yes they're both on there but what we're going to do is we're going to go into program you're going to go to use programming track we're going to press the enter and now this track is powered up as a programming track now what I want to do two for CV now I want to program CV number now the nce power cab will actually read the CV value first so before I hit the enter button what I'm going to do is I'm going to tip this locomotive over so that the decoder is not powered now I'm going to hit the enter button to read and you can see that it's going to take a few minutes to read the CV value now when it does finally pop up we can read that value which is 150 so now I can take this other locomotive down and I'm going to program CV three to a value of 150 now when I hit the enter button it will program both decoders but this one was already at 150 so it's not going to change this one now will become 150 so now let's try to read CV three but we're going to tip the old locomotive and it does take a few seconds and you're going to see that it comes up now as 150 so that's a really quick way that you can use the programming track to copy momentum and breaking rates from one locomotive to the next so guys I hope this little glimpse of using the programming track will really be helpful and insightful now for more information visit our website at soundtracks.com we do have a full video on CV programming we also have a video on how to use many of the different DCC systems and these are in our webinar series so be sure to check those out for more information all of the model railroad products seen in this episode of What's Neat are available through Caboose in Lakewood, Colorado or order online at mycaboose.com