 For this What's Neat This Week, it's January. Happy New Year! In this episode, I start talking about soundtracks, decoders, and a feature inside of them called Dynamic Digital Exhaust, which is a really cool feature. I show how it works on the video with hill tests. Later on in the show, Jeff Meyer stops by with some gorgeous tangent. Illinois Central Golf Hopper City has just finished with his weathering effects, and he discusses with us and shows us how he achieved those effects. A little bit later in the show, I talk about my photographic props, my roller carts that I use and I put all the props on, whether it's other people's props or dioramas and things that I've finished. These things fit in the car, they're versatile, I discuss that a little bit, and at the very end of the show, I talk about weather, and that is what one-inch hail does to garden railroad track, and also what happens when you get six inches of rain and your house is not a boat. I literally, my layout got really wet that day. So enjoy the footage and the clips, a lot of high 8mm stuff this time. For this January, 2015, What's Neat This Week? For this segment of What's Neat This Week, I want to talk about soundtracks, digital decoders, and something inside them called Dynamic Digital Exhaust. Now, you may or may not know, the soundtracks and Blackstone models are one of my new accounts for the past, I want to say, past year, and I went kicking and screaming at the electronic stuff because A, I didn't understand it, but B, once I read the manuals, I completely understood it. I could not believe how simplistic it was, and there's a couple of features that I'm going to talk about over the next few months on my What's Neat This Week segments, and the one I'm going to talk about today, and the reason that I've got all these crazy hills that I've created in dual gauge and narrow gauge, is to demonstrate dynamic digital exhaust. And what that is, is when you adjust CV 177 through 188, and you kick in a little bit of delay, a little bit of CV 3 and 4, adjust though so that when you adjust the throttle, you've got a slower response, I call that delay. And what that allows you is that triggers what's already in all tsunami digital decoders, inner mountain steam, ather in steam locomotives, the narrow gauge Blackstone steam locomotives. This features already in the decoders, you don't know it because you've got to activate it, again by adjusting CVs 177 through 188, 3 and 4 with a little delay. And what you end up with is as the engines are going up the hill, they're lugging, they're chugging, they're making heavy exhaust sounds, and then as a crest to come over the other side of the hill, you hear a little rod clank, the chuff subsides, and it's all automatic because inside the decoder and inside the locomotive, it senses the load. And as you're going downhill, or you're coming to a stop, you get the brake squeal, you get the rod clank, it's an incredibly effective feature and I want to demonstrate it in this What's Neat this week with this upcoming video clip that really kind of shows you all the features. Sure can also be demonstrated on a short level track on your layout. As I give the locomotive some power with the throttle, you'll hear the locomotives labor with a deep chuff. Then as I back off the throttle, they'll get quieter and you'll hear the rod clank. Experiment with this, I think you'll find that this is going to make your locomotives brand new all over again. Hey, Ken, what are you doing? Well, I'm going to tell you, if you ever get into model railroad photography, you're going to find that you need photo props, you can set your dioramas on top of. Now for the last 15 years now, I've been using these wooden props that fit real well into my automobile. I can put anybody's diorama on top of them and then shoot their models live on location or shoot them here in my backyard. Today I'm refinishing them. You've got to do that about every two years, put a nice fresh coat of polyurethane on it just to keep the wood from rotting. This is one that I just finished yesterday. And as you can see, she's shiny, waterproof, and it's going to be good for another two years of use. So I suggest to you guys that you build something like this, because in the last 10 or 15 years, I've perfected the fact of taking these out, putting my models on them and shooting them. It works really well for me and it's going to work really good for you too. What are you shooting today, Jeff? Illinois Central, Illinois Central Golf, tangent hoppers that I finished a while back. Oh, these are tangent. These are very nice, aren't they? Yes, probably some of the best freight cars out there. I can see your oil paint weathering effects here. Yep. Weathering's pretty nice on this car. How did you get this darkened effect like this? Most of it started out with some oil paint washes and filters and then for some of the wavy panel grime effect, dry brushed on just a little bit of oil paint on your brush and kind of feather it out and blend it in to give it kind of where it's got the wavy panel, where the grime collects and the waves of the sheet panel on the hopper. It looks really good, man. Thanks for sharing it with us. Thank you. A segment of What's Neat this week, I want to discuss a new video that I have available at KenPatterson.com. It's building trestles and bridges and in this video, I discuss and show you the process of how I built Leitner trestle on the Rio Grande Southern, mile post 159, bridge 168. And this is the famous bridge where Bob Richardson shot number 464 running across it on one of its final runs plowing snow. So I will show you from start to finish how I built the bridge, went about building the diorama, building the road, scenery construction, talking about creeks, pouring creeks out of envirotex, talking about girder structure building and overall complete scenery. And then we go further and discuss how to wrap the diorama in black oak to make a flexible, movable section of your layout that's completely safe because you know if something like this flexes, the bridge is going to break into pieces. So watch this, look forward at KenPatterson.com, a video on building trestles. In large scale and HO scale, we cover an awful lot in an hour and five minutes on this new exciting video. So go check it out. For this portion of What's Neat, I want to bring you in from the very bottom floor of designing a photograph from the very start. That's the design, the concept, and then the final product. And I want to walk you through the construction. For this assignment, this is an athern project. Chris Palomeras at athern found this really cool photograph on the internet by Steve Patterson. And what it is, is it's a blur shot where somebody in a vehicle driving pacing alongside a DD-40 shot this incredible photograph, Steve Patterson shot this photograph, and it exemplifies power, it exemplifies, it shows speed, it shows movement. So how could we design a photograph like this for athern in the HO scale dimensions that we need in order to create the shot? We could use Photoshop and maybe go with the blur effect to get the blur of the grass effects. But that still means that we've got to design a scene that matches the prototype location exactly. That's easy because all the answers are in the photograph right before our eyes. My theory on designing something like this would simply to be design a double track mainline, put the locomotives on the back track, have the front track and the whole front foreground scene be movable. Maybe we can design it, spray some pledge on the foam, slide it while I shoot the photo and create the same movement effect. So let me think about this for a few hours and see if I can come up with a design concept and show you how it progresses. And this is the design of what I've come up with. What I've created here is a scene where the front portion like I said will slide. So while I'm shooting the photograph, I can take long exposures. It's a cloudy day shot that'll help me with the sliding movement to show it on film. So I'll slide this at various speeds and go through the photographs. But let me bring you up to what I did to get to this point to create this scene. First, I experimented with foam and sliding sections just to see if the feasibility was doable. And then what I did was I glued everything down with the commercial grade hot foaming glue. The foam glue, they come out with a really nice nozzle to putting it down. And I glued all the sections down and then I weighted them. I put a lot of heavy weights on. This foam doesn't expand very much and it glued, the glue sets up in about two hours. So after all the weights set on it, I then started gluing down the track, experimenting with the sliding just to make sure everything worked out the way it was supposed to work out. Then I started carving the foam. I used a Stanley Schurf planer, the small handheld planer, and I used a large rasp to go through the contours and match the topography that was in the photograph and started and carved through the foam. Then what I wanted to do is create the grass effect. Use a good old fashioned fake fur. So I put the fake fur down and then what I did was I came along with hair clippers and I shaved and I broke up the fake fur so that it looked like individual weed tufts so that it would look really good for the blur shot. Then what I did was I sprayed it with some green paint. I used hunter green paint, just sprayed it out of the can, which works really well. Set it to dry for about three hours. And then what I did, I needed to build a road. I needed the road with the line in it. So I took patching cement and what I did was using a four inch trowel, I built, I formed on each side and poured the road about an eighth of an inch thick and then pulled it smooth with water and the putty knife, which makes for a great cement road using this latex cement patch mix. Then what I did was of course I had to go and spray the whole scene with woodland scenic scenic cement so that everything would stay in place and then be ready to do the shot. And so this is the reels results that I've come up with. So let's see what happens next during the photo shoot. Here we are at shoot day. This is when all the efforts come down to just one moment. This is where it all counts. So we've got our scene setup that I designed out of foam. It's all set up now so that while I'm shooting the photograph, this is going to slide and allow me to create the effect of blur, which is what we're after. Plus the benefit is the prototype shot was shot during a cloudy day. I've got great clouds today. I never imagined the time that I would call clouds great. I always want sunshine for my shots. But in this case, in order to create the mood and atmosphere for the photograph, and one other thing is because it's cloudy and it's a little bit darker, I can shoot longer exposures. So I'm going to be shooting exposures of exactly one second, and then I'm going to try one and a quarter second long exposures while I'm moving this. So that means I'll just move it about a sixteenth of an inch to an eighth of an inch while the shutter is open, which should give me just the right amount of blur to look good in the photograph. So let's see how this turns out. Okay, what I'm doing is I'm sliding this, like I said, and I'm shooting one half to 1.3 second exposures on this. And let's just see how this turns out right now. Let's do this for real. I didn't move it that time. Here we go. We're sliding it. I'm shooting shots while it's moving. Everything's set up. This should work out really well. Not very complicated. The telephone pole right there should look good. The rarotide should look blurred. The grass should look blurred. And I've got plenty, plenty of shots here. All right, one more time and I think we're done. And that's it. I figure I'm going to give this to Chris Palomar. Is it athern? He'll add a little bit of smoke, maybe a little bit of lighting effects, and we should have one really interesting photograph to share with everybody. So let me show you now this is how the photograph came out. See the shot? It matches the prototype shot. It's got the blur effect in it. I'm very satisfied with the results on this. Chris Palomar is, in fact, did add the smoke. He did add the running lights to the truck and just kind of tweak the color a little bit in the photograph to add a little bit more yellow to the gray skies that I've got right now. So thank you very much for watching this. What's neat this week? Photographic tip for this month of January. It's nothing like a great storm for the grass in the summertime to help cool things down. But one time, there was an area where it rained just over an area of, I want to say, from where I live, maybe a mile and a half in all directions, and it rained, and it rained, and the storms kept training and building right above where I lived. And what ended up happening was, even though I live on the very top of the hill, somehow with about six inches of rain that we got within that hour and a half period of time, railroad tracks washed out down below, the cliff washed out in 33 places between here and Peaveley, Missouri, just down to the Soto sub, and my layout inside was absolutely unindated with water. Let me show you a video clip of the scenario and sort of how it went down. I know that looks crazy, and that was a lot of water coming in here, but I'm happy to say it didn't do any damage to the layout, partially I believe because everything's sealed with polyurethane, and underneath everything's held up with metal studs, so no damage from that little episode of water, and it's never happened again. One thing that I do remember was another weather event, and that's hail. Hail one time, golf ball size, the great big stuff, took out 50% of the railroad ties in the garden railroad in the backyard. Let me show you that real quick clip. Twice real hard. And what hail does to garden railroad track is as it impacts it, it just breaks the spikes right off. So I lost about 200 feet of track outside that afternoon of 400 that's out there, so I lost half of it, and what I say when I lost it, what I mean is the ties were broken off the rail, and what I had to do is get new ties, six inch sections, and just simply re-slide them on to the six foot pieces of track that are flex track that's out there. So not too bad. I appreciate, I apologize for the lack of quality of the weather footage because this is all high eight material that I was able to capture. The hail storm took place in 2003, and in 2009 is when this place flooded out the way it did. So appreciate high definition with this next clip that I'm working on a sunrise shot to end this January's What's Neat This Week. I hope winter is being good to you wherever it is you are.