 I'm Ron Perry and the December 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 December 2017. I'm your host Ken Patterson, and this month it's Turban Month. We look at the new ScaleTrains.com turbine, two different types. We also look at all the other turbines available on the market, made by Atherin, both the Vranda and the SlabTurban. And we also listen to the new sound systems that are available on the market, the low-sound turbine sound system, and also the SoundTrack tsunami 2 turbine sound system. They both sound absolutely magnificent. We discuss making freight car loads from wrecked broken up freight cars and put this onto a flat car, and Daniel Coombs comes over and shares with us the process of installing the new Digitrax LNWI system. This is the Wi-Fi system that works with apps that are available on your cell phone, and Daniel takes us through the entire process of how to set this up on our layout. We also study and look at the magic of making a Christmas card using our model trains and then sending this out to our friends for season greetings. Also we got brand new drone footage starting a new segment again this year, and it'll run into 2018 with drone footage from Steven M. Conroy from beautiful California. And we open this December drone footage segment with some magnificent Cliff California Ocean. It is just eye candy, and this is all the answers to our modeling questions. If you want to model Southern California, the information can be seen in these drone videos. Also, we look at the scale trains Tier 4 locomotive. This is brand new on the market, and we do a quick expose and photographic presentation of that model. Now 2017 has been a fantastic year for the What's Neat shows. We're up to about show number 70, and also this year we've started the What's Neat this week weekly podcast to keep you updated on model railroad information through the week. And you can find a link to this in model railroad hobbyist magazine just down on the bottom of each page of my column. Also I've tried a lot of new ventures this year, now I haven't made any new videos this year for KenPatterson.com, but in 2018 I hope to finally have that tree video and Craftsman Structure Volume 2 up, and who knows where else I can go after that. Also we've done extremely well with the Fine Arts America website that I set up, and I've got about 60 or 70 photographs on that which would make absolutely perfect Christmas gifts. And these come framed, you can have them framed, there's all sorts of thousands of choices of cups, towels, frames that are available on this website. And I also want to thank the wonderful folks out at Caboose for sponsoring this show. If you're doing any Christmas shopping and you're in the Denver area, check them out and tell them that you've heard about their name on the What's Neat show. And also they will be launching a brand new website by the time you see this video, and it should be absolutely fantastic and extremely easy to make your purchases and have them shipped directly to your home. And with that, let's start the rest of the December 2017 What's Neat. Now I just found Chris Palomarra's in my backyard. Chris, what are you doing? Well, we've got some new lighting features on these locomotives, including class lights, number boards, and you can see a little bit of light right above the locomotives line. This is the new Amtrak STP-40F, and we're trying to frame up a shot that we're using in the video replacing a prototype shot for a model. I can't wait to see how that turns out. You know me too. It's kind of dark out here. Let's see what happens next. All right, let the fireworks begin. For this segment of What's Neat, let's discuss taking a beat-up old freight car as if it's been in a derailment and making a freight car load for it. There's a lot of ways to do it, and I just happen to know in the trash here we can find a nice tank car for just such a project. Now this tank car is a tank train tank car from Athern, and you can even rough it up more and make it look more wrecked by taking a heat gun to it and then pressing in the plastic sides as it starts to get soft from the heat, or you can do what Mike Buddy has shown us how to do in previous What's Neat videos, where he took the box car that he did and made a wreck out of it using aluminum foil. So in this case you would take the aluminum foil, put it along the side of this tank car, and then push it in, paint it, and treat it as if it's just the side of the tank car itself. Also take some silver paint and make some gash marks on the freight car. Then what you want to do is you've got to come up with a way to mount the freight car to your flat car. Now you're going to use railroad wooden ties here as the cribbing work to add a bit of cushion between the decking of the flat car and the wrecked freight car load, similarly to what I've got here. Now if you look in some of these other photographs that we've got, I've got videotape of one of Jeff Meyer's freight car load wrecks that he did, where he put the freight car's trucks on the flat car right next to the load and it made for a pretty convincing load on this box car. Joe Steinman did the same thing with his hopper car that he created a wreck load with, but he used chain to tie it down, which also works very well. Now if you go back to December 2011, model railroad hobbyist magazine, you will find an article that I did on how to take a sausage stuffing tube, part of an apparatus for making sausage, and I created a freight car load out of this, making it look like some sort of a industrial turbine type of a device. But in order to create the load, I took scratch built brass stock and built a framework that would then have the wooden ties set inside of that. That would be another way that you could approach a wreck load like this. In order to tie down the sausage stuffing load, I used fishing string. And in order to do that, I simply drilled holes in the flat car and it represented the tie downs that would then be bolted from underneath on the outside frame of the flat car. When I put it all together, set the tube on top of the wooden ties, strapped everything in place with a fishing line and glued it with super glue, I ended up with what was a rather convincing looking freight car load. You can see it from both sides here in these photographs, and it's another way that you can handle the situation for loading up a wrecked car onto a flat car. One other thing that I really like doing is I like using these inner-mountain ties that they've created and it comes with inner-mountain flat cars. I used them for these Volvo shots where I have equipment on top of flat cars, but I'm using the inner-mountain ties, these plastic castings that come with the cars, as tie downs. So as I've bought inner-mountain cars, I've saved these and used them for various loads. So it's just something to think about. If you've got an old wrecked up freight car in your collection and you want to give it new life, think about making a wreck load on a flat car. And that's this segment of What's Neat. This segment of What's Neat, I've got two ScaleTrains.com turbines here. And this is turbine month here in December, so later in the show we're going to go over all of the plastic turbines that are available on the market, describe a little bit of history on each one, and just kind of show the models and how they look and the ones that have sound in them will run those with sound. But for this demonstration, I have got two ScaleTrains.com turbines. One of them is number nine, which is from the museum quality that they offer with all of the details and full, low-sound sound in it. The other turbine that I have is number 26. This is a rivet counter series turbine from ScaleTrains.com, and this turbine comes without sound. So SoundTracks has installed their sound decoder, brand new, which is the Sonami 2 turbine sound decoder for this three-piece set turbine from ScaleTrains.com, so you can add that to your rivet counter series model if you prefer that type of sound. Now, what I want to do today is give a simple demonstration of each locomotive powering up, moving forward just a few inches, and then shutting down. I don't want to give any commentary or opinions on this segment. I just simply want to allow each model to start up and shut down by themselves with the throttle here as we go through this process. I will start with the low-sound decoder because it's set for number three and that's just what my throttle happens to be set for. And I've also got a professional microphone here. I'm not sure which camera what I'm going to take sound from, either this or that, so that I can get the best quality sound in this demonstration. So with that, let me hit the block switch and we'll power up the low-sound decoder. Now, if I hit F3, I can start the turbine. Now I'm going to kill the block switch to kill the power to this. It has a form of a current keeper in it, so it will remain powered for a few seconds. Okay, now I'm going to turn on the block switch for the Sonami 2 turbine sound system. Yeah, I've got to set my throttle. Bear with me here. I've got to set my throttle up for number 26. My mistake is going to cost us an extra 10 seconds here of video while I do this. And now I've got number 26 here. Let me see if I can turn on the headlights. Okay, good. And turn on the turbine. Right now it's just being powered by Desmond's motor and the lead-lock motor. And now you hear the turbine starting. It flamed out. That was neat. The decoder is set up with a lot of belay. I've got the throttle off and it's just slowing down now. And I want to shut this one down too. Next. I've got to shut this one to power itself down without hitting any buttons on the throttle as it's stopped. So that's the Scale Trains turbine with the Sonami 2 decoder in it and the loop sound decoder. And that's this segment for What's Neat. Merry cats and you're watching What's Neat with Ken Patterson. Merry Christmas. For this next segment of What's Neat, I've got these beautiful Tier 4 locomotives from Scaltrains.com. I've been out shooting them today. We talked about these once before on the podcast, but the photography that I had was on a cloudy day and today I wanted absolutely beautiful shots of these. So the first model I want to talk about is, actually I've got two here. The operator series is the less detailed model. It doesn't have its, if you look at the nose of the locomotive, it's grab irons and what have you. And that's because Scaltrains.com has offered this model to the modelers that like to add their own details to the locomotive. It's a lesser priced locomotive in the range of around $150 as opposed to the other locomotive that we've got is the Rivet Counter Series locomotive here. And that one's about $229 on the street price. They're both beautiful models. This model's got full sound in it. The Rivet Counter Series has got all the detail on it. If you look at these photos that I shot today in the sun, just absolutely magnificent detail on the tops, on the sides, just all the way around, no matter where you go in this model, it is just loaded with detail. And I also shot this model with the sunrise. You can see that the screens are in fact see-through screens and the wheels, the roller bearing, spin on these wheels. So it's a pretty neat model. The other model is just nicely detailed and it runs just like a Cattle locomotive. So don't discount the Operator Series. This is a great opportunity for the modelers that want to save money and add their own detail parts. Both of the models run fantastic. They run together. The loke sound in the Rivet Counter model sounds absolutely fantastic. So check these out. I wanted to show them to you first on this What's Neat Show. They're very nice models. Thank you, Scale Trains, for sending these to us so we can show them to all the folks out there. And we're quite frankly, honestly, after the podcast every night, we've enjoyed running these on the layout. So that's this segment of What's Neat. Booms. And in this What's Neat segment, we're going to basically take the Digitrax LNY device and hook it up to our Digitrax local net port for the layout here. What this is, Digitrax recently announced Wi-Fi connection. This module allows you to use your phone, whether it be an Apple or i-Android device, that you can use the Wi-Throttle app to run your trains on your layout. So now let's go ahead and get this mounted, get the app downloaded, and we'll demonstrate on what this does. So, all right. We do have to mount it right up here. As you see from my two screw holes, we're just going to use one of them because we've got all four corners of the module. Screw that up there. So now we're going to take our local net cable. After we got it mounted, we're going to plug it into either of the two ports. It doesn't matter which. Plug one into the cable, into one of the ports. Now we'll come up here to you. Let's come up here to UP5 and plug it in. Now the next step, take our power supply and get this plugged into an outlet. So you just take this, plug the barrel jack into the top of LNY, and then take the plug and plug it into an outlet. All right, Ken. So now we're going to install the Y-Throttle device here in the iPhone 6 Plus. I think that's what it is. The Android device will work the same way. You'll have some different apps, but if you have an Apple iPhone, go to the App Store icon. All right. You'll then go to the search. All right. Now type in YWI Throttle. And then you've got two choices. Y-Throttle light doesn't matter which one. But we want Y-Throttle light because that's the free version. There's a more expensive version for $10. That gives you other features, but we'll just fur it now. We're just going to do the Y-Throttle light. So you just hit get. And it should download right to the phone. And then you just install. And you need a password for this. We're going to have to cut it because I don't know what my password is. All right. So now we'll just click this icon, download the app. And I take it. Oh, never mind. So we're going to put in a password. All right. That just tells you the app was downloading. And bam, just like that, you're ready to go. Really? Hit Y-Throttle light. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to try to find some servers. I might have to back out. All right. All right. Let's go back to Wi-Fi. Now, the Digitrax LNY has its own dedicated server with the prefix of DTX and then random numbers. You hit that. We can go into throttle now. So we can now get to run some trains. All right. Select the DCC address. Hit the select button. Type in, for example, address three or whatever numeric address you need for your decoder. You hit set. When it shows green, you're ready to go. Go to your throttle. Now, this is a full 28 function throttle app. So you get all the 28 functions. All right. So now we're going to take the phone here. We're going to run the ScaleTrain's three-piece turbine. So it's simple. Just going to, you can hit the buttons, do several things, then increase the throttle and you're running some trains. It's that easy. So that was just basically how to install the LNY. Well, I mean, with this case, the LNY and then the Wi-Throttle app on your iPhone or Android device. So I guess that's this segment on DCC installations on What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, it's December. Merry Christmas. And this day, I'm setting up a photo shoot to shoot Joe Fugate over at model railroad hobbyist magazine, a Christmas card. And that's what I want to talk about in this segment of What's Neat. Why don't you take some of your trains and make a Christmas card to mail out to your friends? Not only do you get to share the season, but you also get to share your wonderful hobby through the experience. Last year at this time, I was shooting this photograph for Bachman using a trolley and some beautiful glass buildings. They was just supposed to be a happy, fun, colorful shot. Nothing prototypical. And this was a really nice little trolley set with lights and buildings, not prototypical. Today, I'm using prototype standards to create a Christmas card of the California Zephyr running through the Midwest on its way to the West Coast. And here you see a shot that I've got set up using a diorama with code 70 microengineering track on it. It's about eight feet long. I've got a couple of Walthers grain elevator set up in the background and lots of trees to fill out the scene so that as the camera goes down into position, you can see the type of photograph that I was trying to capture in this shot. I've got the locomotives powered so that the headlights could be lit in order to create a good effect for the photograph. I had to pick a gray sky, which is exactly what I've got today, so it would look nice and cloudy. And now through the magic of video, I can show you exactly how this Christmas card has come out for model railroad hobbyist magazine. Pretty neat shot. It feels very cold. That's exactly what I was trying to capture for that winter cold feeling, which is part of the magic of trains. It might be cold and it might be winter, but you know it's warm and happy inside those passenger cars. So that's this segment of What's Neat. Go ahead and try it yourself. Create a Christmas card this year or next year and send it out to your friends and season greetings to all. And that's this segment of What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I had a beautiful sunny day going on here, but now I've got clouds. Today I'm shooting some beautiful super turbines from ScaleTrains.com. Now the super turbine, these are an HO scale and this is a three piece unit, whereas I've got two different models here. I've got number nine, which is represented in the ScaleTrains.com line as the museum quality locomotive. And then I've got number 26 here. And this is a rivet counter series locomotive in the ScaleTrains.com line of products. And the differences are two. Well, there are differences, but they're very subtle. Let's take a look at the boxes that these models come in. The ScaleTrains.com museum quality model comes as this fantastic leather box, which is a really nice packaging, all wrapped in leather and hardwood. The rivet counter series turbine comes in this box, which is equivalent to any type of quality brass box that we've ever seen in the past. Very large box, very good. So very interesting in how they've chosen these units. Now let's go back to the models here. Number 26 in the rivet counter series has got tons of detail. Both units in fact have got tons of detail. The differentiation between the museum quality and the rivet counter series is going to be on the inner workings of the model, whereas the museum quality model has got just more special effects, which I'm going to go into that in a few minutes. Both of the units have got just magnificent roof detail on the tops. As you see from number 9 right here, this one's got dynamic brakes and an H-H-H-I pattern, which is different from the number 26, which has got the H-I-I pattern. And it's just amazing that a manufacturer would get all of the different variations of these turbines correct. How much research, how much work went into doing something like that. If you look at the tenders here, this is a C23 tender, which is a smaller tender. It's riveted and non-insulated. But as we go on to the museum quality model here, it's got the larger C24 tender on it, which is smooth side, because this tender had insulation wrapped around it to keep the fuel oil on the inside warm. As it had to be at a certain temperature in order to feed through the units. On the museum quality model, you'll notice there are just tons of hoses in between the locomotive here. The rivet counter doesn't have all of that. The doors open on the museum quality model so that you can actually see the turbines inner workings on the inside, which is kind of cool. The museum quality model also has the rear turbine blades that spin when you turn the unit on. It comes with full sound from low sound. It's got three different color lights. It's got green. It's got white and red classification lights on the front. If you hit F5, it gives you the option of something called nighttime mode, where the internal dashboard will light up with all the gauges. You've got lights that come on underneath the unit right at the wheels. And a light also turns on between the units. So that's called nighttime mode and you access that on the museum quality model by hitting F5. There's just been so much amazing detail that went into the museum quality model. Again, the rivet counter model looks beautiful. It doesn't have sound. It doesn't have the doors slide and open on the sides and it doesn't have the motor, the spinning turbine on the rear. Just a few different details that I've got to tell you what, if you bought number 26 and you didn't know the difference, you'd be just happy as can be because it's just absolutely magnificent. The lesser price model isn't that short when it comes to the details. It's really quite frankly loaded to the bare with details, as is number nine here. Now also one other thing that I wanted to say about this is that the museum quality tender, or locomotive, when you start it up, you will hear the Bessemer 8-cylinder motor which simply powers the lead unit to shuffle things around. Because they didn't want to leave the turbine spinning or idling all the time, because it actually burned about 300 gallons of fuel per hour as it sat there and idled. So they shut down the turbine when it's sitting in a yard scenario and they just jockey it around with the 8-cylinder locomotive motor that's in there. And both sound effects are represented. So this has got the 8-cylinder Bessemer sound effects, and this has got the full-blown jet engine of the turbine sound effects when you turn them on. Just an absolutely amazing series of locomotives. Union Pacific had 30 of these super tenders on their railroad. And I got to tell you what, ScaleTrains.com put a lot of research and a lot of effort in giving us and providing us with a really cool model to play with. The check them out. Great for Christmas. Buy somebody this gift. They'll love you forever. This is a Super Turbines from ScaleTrains.com, and that's this segment of What's Neat. So I've brought the ScaleTrains.com turbine inside to run it on the layout, because there's a feature about the sound system that I want to show you this truly magic. First of all, let me turn off the turbine just so I can hear what I'm thinking right now in the room. But this model has got sensors in the wheels. And what the sensors do is they pick up the frogs and your turnouts. And then the model gives the appropriate sound that correlates with the sound you'd hear of a train going through frogs and turnouts. And this is not automatic. This is all due to a sensor in the wheel that actually senses where the locomotive is on the layout and then gives you the sound effect. So let me show you how to do that. Now that the turbine is off we can just run the locomotive with the 8-cylinder Bessemer motor which is the sound you hear right now. Here are some turnouts right here on the layout. So let's listen to what happens when the model gets right over those turnouts. Both units do that, each unit. Here's another turnout right here and listen to that. It's like magic. So just another cool feature on this model that I couldn't show you outside. I wanted to show it to you inside on the layout. Sensors with corresponding sound effects. That's pretty neat. And I think that wraps up the super turbines. And the next part of the show we're going to look at all of the athern, slab, and veranda turbines next. Continuing now with our turbine segment I've got the ScaleTrains.com turbine in here and I've also got the other turbines that are available in the market. But before I go into the turbines, other ones, I want to talk about the ScaleTrains.com One more detail that I really want to emphasize is, again, how much research went into building this model. The first 15 of these units of the 30 were different from the second 30 units. So the first 15 and the second 15 that were delivered each were different. They had different tenders, different types of dynamic brakes and variations in the models and ScaleTrains represented this very well in these models, including number 30. Number 30 had different air intakes on it, experimental air intakes and ScaleTrains.com represented these on number 30 just like the prototype. So now let's talk about the other turbines that are available on the market and these are made by athern. I've got two models here, two variations of the standard turbine. And the standard turbines were also known as slabs. They were built between 1952 and 1953. Union Pacific had 10 of these models in their inventory at the time. Number 57 here in fact was the first Union Pacific locomotive to receive silver trucks on it, which is kind of of historical reference. It's kind of a neat little thing that I discovered in doing the research. All of these turbines took in their air to supply the jet engine through the sides of the locomotive, as you can see. Five of the units had these far grills on them. That's those metal grills that you can see on this athern unit. And these lasted for about, I want to say just a few years as they were an experiment, but most of them were removed by the mid-1950s. UP added fuel tenders to all of these turbines which are represented right here by these models that also come with the athern turbines. And these fuel tenders were essentially a way to give the turbines more long range. They were added around 1955 to all of the turbines, and in July of 1958, for six months, Union Pacific ran a set of turbines back to back. How cool would it be if you could actually double head turbines? I'd put three of them in a row, but that's not how they ran them. But Union Pacific ran a consist like this where they were a two a units and the tender in the middle. And this produced 9000 horsepower, but they only did a consist like this for about six months. And turbine number 59 and number 60 were used to do that consist. And pretty much all of these standard turbines were retired by 1964. After Union Pacific created the standard turbine they then introduced, with all the research they learned from the prior turbines, they introduced this veranda turbine. Now this turbine had all of the research and everything done which made for almost the perfect unit for them at the time. These were all rated at around 4500 horsepower and were numbered 61 through 75. Around 1956 these turbines also received fuel tenders, constructed from retired steam locomotive tenders, and the air takes were then also moved from the side of the unit to the roof of the unit so that they could get cleaner air. And they also added walkways to the veranda turbine so that they would have easier access to the inner workings of this turbine. All of these verandas were essentially retired by about June of 1964. Now you've got to ask yourself as most modelers do, what if I want to be able to run all of these turbines together on my layout at the same time? What year or what era would I have to run these for? And after doing a little research I've came to the conclusion that between 1958 and mid 1964 all three different types of turbines, the standard turbine, the veranda, and the three piece super turbines were of course all run together in that period of time. So if you're a modeler that wants to be able to run all of these or play with all of these on your layout, that would be the era that you would want to depict. Now of course when these were retired they sent the units to GED and they created these beautiful or ugly, however you look at it, these U50 locomotives, by taking the trucks off of the tenders, off of the veranda turbines, and then creating these models right here. So that's essentially a real quick history on all of the turbines that are available on the market, and that ends this segment of What's Need. I have one additional thing to say about the turbines. I've just received two of the brand new tsunami 2 decoders that are designed for the veranda and for the athern slab turbine. Now the athern turbine, the slab comes with a standard tsunami 1 decoder in it, factory, and these are still on the athern website, and there's plenty of these available on ebay. These verandas are no longer in production and these units did not come out with sound in them. But it's very easy, this decoder's got a plug on it, where you can just take the screws out of your turbine, take the top off of it, and where I've got this digitrex plug here, you plug in the tsunami 2 turbine decoder right into that, and then wire your speakers into the floor of the turbine, and you can add sound to your veranda, or you can upgrade your athern slab turbines from tsunami 1 to the new tsunami 2. We just got all the new features that tsunami 2 offers. So I had to add this additional segment real quick to What's Neat, because I think it's pertinent and new information to tell you about a new product from soundtracks that's only going to enhance and make our turbine experience that much better. So this truly is the end of the turbine segment for What's Neat for December. All of the model railroad products seen in this episode of What's Neat are available through Caboose in Denver, Colorado, or order online at MyCaboose.com