 on the January 2024 What's Neat. I've got Daryl Cruz, who has modeled the Union Pacific Evanson sub railroad. We met him up in Chicago, and his layout is an absolute treat. What's Neat 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 Broadway Limited Imports, the cutting edge leader in model trains. Check out their website at Broadway-limited.com. And by Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com. And thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What's Neat for January 2024. I'm your host Ken Patterson, and this month we really do have a great show. In that first, Campbell Rice stops by and shares with us some tricks and some connectors he's discovered to make layout wiring that much easier without any soldering. Also this month, Larry Harrington from Bachman Industries stops by and shares with us a lot of the new products being released this January that you're sure to see in Springfield. It's a great show up there in Massachusetts coming up shortly. Also this month, I've got Daryl Cruz, who has modeled the Union Pacific Evanson Sub Railroad. We met him up in Chicago and his layout is an absolute treat in HO scale. I mean to tell you, when you stand on his layout and look at the scenery, you feel like you're out west. So good job, Daryl. You really pulled that one off. Also this month, Broadway Limited has sent a lot of wonderful end scale models for us, for iCandy, starting with two SD-40-2 locomotives. One of them is in Bicentennial and the other one is in this special Wisconsin paint scheme that we are also used to seeing this beautiful model. They've replicated it quite well. These models come with Paragon 4 sound in them so they also sound fantastic as we run them on the end scale layout over there last week. And I mean to tell you, they're a treat. Also this month, they've sent two tank cars for us to look at. I shot these out in outdoor sunlight. These are cryogenic tank cars and there's two variations, one of each that I'm showing you right now. They're absolutely beautiful. And also they sent some stock cars and this is fun. Stock cars would sound in them. The first one has cattle sound. The next one has got mule and donkey type sound and the third one was a special release that they had made for Halloween where it's got spooky sounds in it which is kind of a treat for those that want animation on their layout just like that. Also they mentioned to me that the Pacific's that we shared on last month's show are now in stock in hobby shops. So be sure to get yours. These are an end scale Paragon 4 sound. They sound absolutely fantastic and they look just as great as they sound. So be sure to check out the What's Neat this week video podcast that we shoot down here every Saturday night keeping you updated on what's new in the hobby with special guests, our regular podcast crew and just a lot of fun camaraderie and conversation. After all, this is the best hobby in the world and we love presenting it for you. So with that, let's continue on with this January 2024 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm standing with Daryl Cruz. I'll bung this beautiful home layout that he calls the Union Pacific Evanston sub. And it looks like Daryl, you definitely have a passion for this hobby in that you like to model prototype locations and you're also into operation. So let's start with the passion part. Why did you build this beautiful art? Well, I actually spent 50 years modeling in M scale and doing a Midwestern scenery. I did the Geneva sub from Provisal, Illinois to Clinton, Iowa and did a pretty extensive layout there but then I did that for like 50 years and then we moved here to be closer to our grandchildren. Nice. And I had a layout that was already moved once. I didn't think I could move it again so I decided I was gonna do something brand new and when I did something brand new, it was all brand new, a new scale. Instead of a Midwestern, it was mountain scenery. I stayed with the Union Pacific but definitely wanted to do something completely different. So I sold all my in scale stuff, 50 years worth of collecting, sold every single bit of it and used that money to build this layout here of the Evanston sub in HO scale, which I'm really enjoying. You've taken a lifetime change and made it amazing. This is beautiful. Thank you. Now, what part of the country are you trying to represent on this? This is the Evanston sub from Green River, Wyoming to Ogden, Utah. And the upper level represents the Wyoming part of it from Green River to Evanston. And that's just basically a pretty desolate area with, but there's a Trona, lots of Trona mines. So we do have a Trona mine on the upper level. Then the lower level, once we get to Evanston and then go to the lower level we're doing from Evanston to Ogden, which is through the Echo Canyon, which is some beautiful scenery which you can see behind us here. This is beautiful. And some that I still have to do a lot of and then the Weber River Canyon, which is also a beautiful scenery but it's different color rock and a completely different type of locale. Okay. Now you, I've noticed, haven't really chosen to use a lot of foam on this layout, have you? Your old school, would you say, is this plaster? It's that paper, rosin paper and then yeah, plaster over that, cardboard web and so forth. But I did use some foam roadbed from Hobby Innovations, which I don't think anybody has heard of, but they were open for a little bit and they have some really nice profile roadbed that really fit the class one Unipacific mainline. So there's a little bit of foam there, but as far as the scenery goes, no foam. I did not build this to be transported anywhere. It's definitely for here in my basement. That makes sense. There's so many things I wanna talk about the signals. Let's start with track. What type of track did you decide to use now that you were starting all over in HO? Well, I use microengineering code 55 and N scale. So I stay with code 83 microengineering for this layout. And then I've been using fast tracks. I use fast tracks in N scale on the Geneva sub. And then I'm using fast tracks for this layout also. And I might note that I sold all my fast tracks jigs and use that to buy my HO jigs and tools and so forth. And I actually sold all my fast tracks turnouts to help pay for everything. So it's important for the folks that don't know, but when he says fast tracks, that means that he's hand laid all of his turnouts, but yet the mainline track, it's just microengineering. That's correct. That's correct. Now what height, and I see various heights on this. Right. This is definitely built from my height. It's a little bit higher than I think what most people are used to. The lowest is 45 inches that's in the staging yard. And then it goes all the way up to 60, 68 inches, which we have right here at West Fagel. But I do have a platform there. So for me, I can see everything. It's kind of cool. The highest areas are at eye level and I can see the ground and everything. But if anybody's not quite as tall as me, they have a little bit more of a hard time. But then there's footstools around it they can use to step up and take a look. Now I don't even think minimum radius comes in on a lot like this with all the sweeping curvatures that you do have. But what are the typical radiuses on this layout? Well, a lot of the curves are like 50, 60 inches. What I liked about end scale was that you could have broad curves, long trains and a high scenery to track ratio. And that's why I stayed away from HO scale. Since we moved into our retirement home, which is brand new and we paid the extra to make sure we had a full basement and not a partial basement. So we had 2,200 square feet and I was like, well, I have enough to do HO scale but I wanted to make sure that it's not the typical HO scale where you have narrow aisles and tight curves and switching everywhere. I wanted it to be what I enjoyed about end scale which is long trains, broad curves and a lot of scenery to track ratio or a high scenery to track ratio which really is what I really like about trains. Now tell me, I see, what do you use to operate? What system? Ditch tracks. Okay, and you've had good luck with that. Yeah, I like a lot. I'm pretty good at using local net and everything and I've used it not only for running the trains and so forth, but that also runs the signals. This is the hardware for running the signals and driving the lights and everything. That's another thing, this layout is fully signaled. I mean, just all around, we see the various lights changing as these trains and I think you've got, what, like four or five trains running right now? Yeah, hopefully they're not derailing while we're talking. So that brings us to the next thing is you appreciate or understand operation and you do that with this layout. Yeah, so this is not the typical, what's it called, the train and T and T-O. I forget what that stands for, but that's what's into a lot of HO scale, people are into that type of thing and this is more of a double track, mainline moving trains across the subdivision. And we still have a lot of meets and so forth because there is switching that takes place at different industries, so we still do have the switching and then the dispatcher has to route the trains around the trains that are switching. We have maintenance away trains that work at different areas so that the dispatcher has to work around that and so forth. We have the excursion trains which has to stop at all the different places that have the full opportunity so we have to route the trains around that and so there is switching and a lot of that, that people enjoy, but to me what I really like is having the trains moving and having meets and having one weight for the other train as it takes the crossover and they kind of route trains around whatever's going on. So you've got the best of both worlds. You can have an operating session with your friends, and yet you can just come down here and run trains while you're working on scenery. Yes, I have a foam that I use that uses JMRI and I can run four trains at a time on the throttle and then I have a panel on there also so I can throw all the turnouts and route the trains myself and so I actually run an operating session by myself and I just run trains and then do the switching and so forth. It takes me maybe two weeks to go through the full day but it still gives me time to run trains and have fun. This is absolutely amazing. Now you said that your backdrops, they're very beautiful and your wife held the camera as you drove down the road and she shot them and then you seamlessly put them together. Tell us how you did that. Well, I have to say my wife is the best train spouse anybody could ever have. She went all the way out to Wyoming and Utah with me. We drove across Iowa and Nebraska and we spent a couple of days on the Evanston sub and yeah, we drove along the highway and she took the cell phone and she took pictures as we went by and then so we had a string of maybe seven or eight pictures of a certain landscape and then I used photo editing software and spliced them together, made sure I had everything scaled correctly so that it would look good and then I went to Walgreens which will print a two by eight banner for $36 and if you wait for the 50% off sale you can do a two by eight banner for like $18 and you cut it in half so you actually get 16 feet of backdrop for $18. This is absolutely amazing. Your scenery is beautiful. As we watch this train go by behind us right here I would say that your consists are something that you pay close attention to. These trains all running, they all look relatively accurate for the era and the location. Yes, what was kind of cool is that I could start from scratch. I sold all my in scale stuff and then I bought everything over the period of the last 18 months so I could make sure I bought everything that was for the period. I'm kind of shooting for about 2018 so I could have everything fit that era and they all have sound and decoders and everything and by speed match all of them and we have DPUs and so forth and everything, it runs real well that the DPUs are powered and they do make a difference and the trains go up the helix better with DPUs than they do without because they lessen the friction on the curve and lessen the stress on the couplers. This is absolutely amazing. The scenery is exquisite. The build out of the room, your white ceilings, there isn't anything you missed. You're well on your way to creating an absolute work of art. Yes, I thank you for saying that. I really appreciate it. I do have a YouTube channel that I update every week. It's the UPRR Evanston sub and there are still plenty of people that can find fault in how I'm doing different things but for the most part, everybody's been very supportive and it's been a lot of fun sharing it on YouTube. It definitely motivates me. So, if the weekend's coming up, I gotta have something done or I feel like I have to have something done and so it kind of motivates me to do something on the layout. I've only been working on this layout for about just over two years. Wow. And so I had all the bench work and all the track done in about a year and about a year and a month. So, 13, 14 months, I did all the bench work. Well, I actually finished out the basement, did all the bench work, all the track. They had the golden spike after about 13, 14 months. Nice. And then things kind of slowed down because it was so much fun running trains. Once you had the whole loop done, then I could actually start running trains. So, I'm not always working on a layout. I have a lot of times playing with a layout. So, definitely slows things down a bit. Darrell, I would have thank you so much for sharing this with the viewers of What's Neat. There's a lot of sweat, a lot of tears and a lot of beautiful work down here. So, thank you. Well, you're welcome. And that is this segment for What's Neat. I'm Campbell Rice and on this segment of What's Neat, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about layout wiring. Now, I'm in the process of building a new layout and wiring is not my favorite thing. In fact, I hate it the most and maybe you do too. But I have found something to make it much easier and I wanted to share that with you. So, this is what I traditionally have been using on my other layouts. I have the main bus wire that runs the entire length of the layout. And I come off of that with these track feed lines here. And I go up to each side of the track. So, what typically what you'll do is you'll strip these off and then you have these splices here. So, what you have to do is you stick this in here. Mind you, this is all done typically under a layout, okay? And then you've got to come in and clamp that connector. Once that's done, you need to kind of look in here and make sure that that is centered because I have seen them get off-center and they won't work if they're off-center. So, they need to be centered and pretty much straight. So, like that. All right, so let's say that this is... And exactly, that's what happens. Well, either y'all are gonna see a good show or I'm gonna have a bunch of blueprints into it. Try it again. This goes in here. All right, now make sure it's centered in there. If not, you'll need to take your screwdriver and kind of make sure it's centered in there, in there. Okay, that's good. All right, so this is the main feed line and these are, I don't know, column suitcase connectors or whatever. So, what you want to do is you want to put those, put this right over and you can kind of see there's a little notch here and what you want to do is you want to put that over your wire and close it. These have a lock. You'll have to take a pair of pliers because this has got to go down in there real good, so. All right, so that seems to be pretty good. All right, and then this end has an opening where this goes into there. Just like that and it will lock in there. So the idea of this is to transfer the power to that suitcase clip and then out to your wire, to your track. It's always a good idea to test these to make sure you've got a good connection and your power is good. Now, unfortunately, if you have, you reduce something or if you don't have a bad, if you have a bad connection here, either here or back here, you basically have to start over. So you have to pull us apart. And it seems pretty darn good. The point is, you basically, this is run. You run this clip, you run this, so you're down to having to do something different. So there it is. If this didn't catch good, then you kind of have to pry it off. It gets just, frankly, it just gets to be a pain. And I was looking for something different and I found it. These are called WAGO connectors. I don't know if anybody's heard of them. If you're an electrician, I'm sure you have. So what these are, and they're actually made for home 120 power. So here's what they look like. They're these little connectors here. And they have, if you wanna do this, get the ones that have the flip up. And then basically you can flip these up just like this. So what I'm gonna do is this is my main track wire, my bus wire, all right. Coming in from the power supply. I need to strip that. Strip that back there. So that's stripped. So I'm gonna take my WAGO. Now, these WAGOs, I've seen them in singles, like a splice, I've seen them in doubles. This is a triple. And I've seen them up to five holes here where you can put things in. Now, it'll take several different sizes. So what I do is I take where I wanna put a connector in. I'm gonna cut this main bus wire and I'm gonna go in here and I'm gonna flip this down. Simple as that. Now, let's say we're coming out and going on down the line. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cut it. I need a little more of that. And I'm gonna stick it in right here next to it, okay? I'm gonna close that down just like that, all right? Now, what I'll do is I'll take my track feed line and yes, this is smaller and I'm gonna stick it in there and close it down. And that's all there is to it. Now, how strong is that? It's strong. Even this one, the small one. These things just don't come apart. They just don't, all right? So let's say that you wanna change up your layout or you wanna mess up something and you got a short and you say, oh, I need to redo it. All you have to do is clip these up and redo it. This connector is still good. You reuse it, you don't throw it away. And you can use them time after time after time. Now, these have been tested in home use instead of wire nuts. And I've seen several videos where they really pumped the power to it and they pulled up pretty good. So I know there's no issue with layout wiring on these. And I'm currently building my new layout with these. I'm gonna get some of the five because I can run several tracks off of one connector. But you know, so I wanna share these with you. You can buy these on Amazon, eBay, probably maybe even your local electrical house. I'm sure has these. They're fairly cheap. This is a box of 50. And it goes all the way from 24 to 12 AWG wire. And it says to strip it back 11 millimeters. I don't ever really measure it. I know there's a scale on the side so that you can actually, it actually shows you where it is. But I just strip it and put it in there, no problem. Just you just have to make sure that you get your wire all the way to the inside where you can see it. If you look, you can sense it clear. I mean, that's the very thing because you can see right in there. Because you can see where the wire has come up and just climb it by down. And it makes contact right there with this bar at that point. So great, great little connectors. I think this is a box of 50. I think I paid maybe a little less than 20 bucks for them. But yeah, just kinda wanted to share that with you. So that's What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got Larry Harrington from Bachman Industries in beautiful downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hey Larry, how are you this January? Hey Ken, and happy new year and all that good stuff. How are you? Absolutely, thank you. I hope this is as good as a year as last year was for our industry. Yes, sir. And I've got, you've got a lot of neat stuff you wanna talk about today. Oh my God, and Christmas came and we got all kinds of stuff in to show you. So I'll start off with one of our new HO locomotives. We got the BL-2 here. Oh, they came out, isn't that beautiful? These are the paint samples. So these aren't the actual production models yet, but they turned out very nice. If I'm turning it too fast, let me know. There's the Western Maryland, that's the local favorite. Okay. Right down the street in the B&O Museum for me. And then this is the Rock Island Early Scheme with the silver trucks and very striking paint scheme as well. And these were the BL-2s either kind of a love, hate locomotive. A lot of people like them a lot. A lot of people hate them a lot. So it's, regardless, it's a very important historical locomotive. This pretty much set the stage for the modern Jeep as we know it. It was not a tremendous success as far as the mechanicals were difficult to get to. This was basically an F7 that was an F3 modified hood and it made it difficult to get to. But it did give the all-important rear view mirror. Yes. Rear view from the cab so that they could use them in switching operations. So this set the stage for the Jeep 7, the Jeep 9s and further engines. But there was a good bit of these locomotives that were actually preserved. I think there's over four of them. I think there's nine actually, but this is the Chesapeake and Ohio paint scheme. There's a couple of paint schemes in each one of the Western Maryland had two paint schemes. I believe the C&O had at least two, maybe three and the Rock Island had several as well. So they made 59 total units, but there's a lot of variety that will be available as to decorate if we choose to do so in the future. So this will be a DCC on board locomotive and I can get better pictures to you through our marketing department, but I'm just gonna show that around. So also in HO, we have last year, we came out with coil cars and this year we made new hoods for them. We made the first ones were the later versions of the rounded hoods. These are the angled hoods for the HO. So we have that available and one thing that we do that some other manufacturers don't is we include the coil loads with our cars. So it's a complete set. You can use it prototypically to have the unloading operation on your layout. It comes in B&O. Here's, I'll keep these in the packager a little easier to hold that way. The Rock. Yes, nice. And then another Midwest paint scheme we have here is Milwaukee Road. And finally, an East Coast Reading, which is Kermit the Frog. Oh, nice. So, yeah, they're a little bit of a variety there. And with the first release, you can probably get a good number of them on your layout. So, that's very cool. So I'll switch over to the little lower scale. Since we already had it in end scale, how about that? I'm gonna give it an end scale. So this is the end scale version with the rounded hoods and this is the one with the angled hoods. We skipped the second order. We just did them all at the same time with the end scale. So, and again, they do have the loads inside of them. So, this was our first test shot. We haven't had any painted samples yet, but we should see them in a couple of months. Excited about that. That's a neat little car. Now we do have painted samples of the car way now it's already, which is our chemical tank car. So here's diamond chemicals. And we have Engelhard. Nice. And all the chemicals. And then Colful Pen Salt. And finally, we have Hooker. Oh, wow, yes. Just like we did with the HO version, we made two different style domes, a small dome and a large dome so that we can have multiple prototypes available for the model. So, and finally, in our end scale line, we have our painted samples of our SD40-2. We have three of the four and we're still waiting for one of the other ones. So this is the Norfolk in Southern, Norfolk Southern. And this is DCC with sound on board. Nice. And this is the CSX model. Who's sound decoder is on those locomotives? This is the soundtracks. Okay. Very good. And Union Pacific and one I don't have, I was waiting for is the Santa Fe model. So we should be getting that shortly. We'll pop that up on our, if you don't subscribe, you should go on to our Facebook page and go on to subscribe to that and you'll get a lot of information as it comes available. We have a new product, new model Monday we make and we also make some announcements as we go along. We share viewers' photographs of their layouts and models that they've used. So it's a neat way to keep in touch with everything at Bachman trains. That's fantastic. I'm telling you what, man, that internet sure has changed things from the way it was about 20 years ago. Oh yeah, for sure. So rock and roll. Rock and roll. Larry, all those freight cars you showed me have metal wheel sets, is that correct? All the end scales and well, all of them do. Yeah, our H.O. Series, Silver Series has metal wheels and then all of our end scale products have that metal wheels. That's very cool. And Mark II couple, knuckle couplers as well. So is that what we've got for January? That's what we have for January, yes. That's fantastic. I want to thank you and Bachman Industries for helping us promote the hobby through Model Railroad Hobbies Magazine. Most of the freight cars that you've seen on this video, you can also see inside the magazine at Model Railroad Hobbies Magazine, whereas the What's Needs segment is also in print. A lot of people may not know that everything that we do in these videos every single month is also in print in that magazine. So with that, Larry, thank you so much once again. We're all ready to start the new year with the show circuit again. We'll be heading out to Springfield shortly and keep on going from there. So I hope to see y'all there, show, stop by our booth and say hi. Tell them you saw it on What's Neat. And that is this segment for January for What's Neat. 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. And by Broadway Limited Imports, the cutting edge leader in model trains. Check out their website at Broadway-limited.com. Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com.