 And July's 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 July 2019. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this week, this month, we've got a great show. First of all, I take you out into the yard and I show you how roots from bushes and various types of plant material make some of the most incredible scenery material for realism on our layouts. Michelle Kempema on the road with Michelle Kaye. She shares with us this beautiful museum, Gulliver's Gate out in Times Square in New York. It's an absolutely amazing 50,000 square foot museum, 187 scale, airports, trains, five continents are represented with 25 different cities and a lot of buildings that you're very familiar with. They've even built the Panama Canal and it operates. It's an amazing layout to witness this month on What's Neat. Steven M. Conroy shares with us some great drone footage of a Union Pacific business train in all of its glory, even including the power cars. It's fun to study this train, but also check out all the beautiful shades of green in the farmland surrounding the whole consist. Soundtracks, George Bugatuck and Daniel Coombs both together explain to us consisting of our locomotive fleets. There's three types of consisting that they explain this month. Total consists, basic consisting and advanced consisting. They do it all in 12 minutes and it's quite an education where I actually took notes during this one. So with that, that's the lineup for the show this month. I do want to thank Caboose out in Lakewood, Colorado for sponsoring the What's Neat show over at Model Road Hobbyist magazine. When you're out in the Lakewood area, be sure to check it out. It's one of the biggest, most amazing train stores that I have ever seen. And so with that, let's continue on with the rest of this month's show. For this segment of What's Neat, we're going to talk about scenery. Now I'm outside moving around some bushes out here in the yard and there's one thing that you get off of bushes that's the most amazing modeling that we can do and that's using the root structure from a bush. The root structure makes great armatures for sagebrush or smaller weed structures on the layout. But the best thing that I found using roots like this is when you're modeling a creek where the creek curves around a curve and it cuts into the earth, you always have tree roots hanging out of the side of the bank of the creek. And that's exactly what these roots are perfect for. It's a great modeling material, costs absolutely nothing to do. It's out in your yard to be had. So check it out. Think about this. Next time you're doing yard work, using the roots from your bushes as a modeling device to make your scenery that much better. And that's this technique for model building on What's Neat. Hi, this is Michelle Kempema with What's Neat and I am in New York City in Manhattan and I'm here with Bill Woodward and we are at Gulliver's Miniature World. This place is amazing and it has an entire world in one building, much like Miniature of Wonderland, like inspiration maybe, but very, very professionally done. And so Bill, tell us your title and what you do here. Okay, so I'm the head of model making and I just recently got that position. But I've been a model maker here since 2017. Yeah. So you've been open for it since 2017, so just a couple of years. There's been a lot of change here I think over that time too. But tell us the history of how all these different models came to be. Okay, so we're privately funded and the idea of it, well I should say the ball really got rolling in 2014 and 2015 as far as securing all the funds that would be needed and this location and then in 2016 all of the teams were found to build the models and that was all happening in 2016 and so it took roughly a year, a little more, a little less in some cases for all the models to get built and then in the beginning of 2017 the model started arriving here on site to be assembled. So I mean it's pretty amazing just that feat alone having these massive models built in other countries and shipped here. And that's an amazing short amount of time to build a layout. Some take a lifetime, ours took five years. Wow. So at the Colorado Model Road Museum, five years to build what we have. So that's it. Now tell us about some of the countries they were in. Well, let's see. Well, I'll just go around to all the models. So the first model that you go into is the airport and that was 100% designed and produced here by us. Right in the back, in the shops in the back, which I'll take you into later. So now we then come into the Great Hall, which has three separate continents basically. We've got Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. So Asia was built in China, in Beijing. Latin America was built by a family in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Of course, that family hired up to 50 people at various points to come in and help them out to build it. And the Middle East was built in Israel. So then we have Russia, the model for Russia that was built in St. Petersburg. Europe and the UK was built by Italians. And then we've got the New England model was built in Massachusetts and the model from Manhattan was built in Brooklyn. Wow. It's a worldwide attraction built around the world. And these models are beautiful. You said just mostly scratch built? I would say so for sure, because they're representing unique things. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of the kits that you can buy are, you know, well, obviously they're site specific, but as far as like the ones that you might buy here in the States, I mean they're going to be representing like American things, you know, Americana and whatnot. So maybe we'll buy a kit, but we'll, you know, we'll bash it and or repaint it. I was looking at the Buenos Aires section and there is the section where the houses are built on the houses, built on the houses, built on the houses, and they just keep going up the hillside. There's no kit for that. So that was really neat. There's so many working parts here. So let's talk about the behind the scenes stuff underneath it. Well, so actually, even though I'm the head of model making now, I started out as a model maker and then after a few months, they promoted me to supervisor of maintenance. So I ended up spending a lot of my time on my hands and knees underneath the models. So all of the models, the teams that built the models were required to, you know, to have access so we can crawl under them. We can go behind them and I'll show that to you also. And we have hatches we can come up in the middle of the model for, you know, fixing and maintenance and adding things. So there's, you know, there's a lot of things going on that the public doesn't see and sometimes we end up having to go into the models during opening hours too and they love that. They love to see us working in the models. I got to crawl underneath when it can come up and slide under the volcano. That was really neat. Access is important. Every modeler knows if you don't create access you have a big problem and you use real water here. That's big. One of the models has real water. That's where I end up spending most of my time is making sure that it's operating. Probably the most prominent feature in that is a functioning Panama Canal. So we have two locks and we have two boats that go around all day long, seven days a week. So it's a real challenge. It's a feat of engineering to be honest. So the airport model has a tremendous amount of engineering in it and that Latin America model for sure. Yeah. When we were down underneath I got to see basically a turntable for a boat. The ship goes in and literally a turntable in the water turns day. That's amazing technology. There's digitrax underneath the railroads. I did notice that under there. A lot of arduinos, a lot of programming. The camera person holding the camera today is actually an electrical engineer who specializes in micro-mechanics. So it's super intense underneath this place. You actually bring up another issue. Because the models were built by teams in other countries there was the issue of standardization. They were given certain guidelines of course. Everything had to be HO scale. But outside of that there are a lot of variations as far as wiring and the control systems. The Italians used Panasonic PLCs to control their animations. Other models are using the arduinos. So it's been a learning process and we're slowly switching some things out just to make everything standard. A little more standard. I always have to be a master of all of it. Tell me about the 3D printing that goes on here. Okay, well, yes. One of the most common questions we get asked is for the people asking this question it's almost a rhetorical question for them because they're sure they know the answer right away. Which is, the question is, everything's 3D printed, right? The answer is actually a very small fraction of what you see is 3D printed. When I tell them that they look at me, well, it's not the answer that they wanted or expected. We have a really amazing 3D printer. It's actually a carbon printer. So the level of detail is incredible. But we're very selective with how we apply it. I mean I can certainly, later I'll show you some of the examples. I guess some beer all of this. But I'll definitely show you some of the things we've used it for. I would love to have a special exhibit where we do a layout and one of the, something small and it will be 3D printed, right? And then we'll say to a guest, can you pick out the thing that's 3D printed? Again, it'll be this small little part of the model. I think a lot of people think that you can just 3D print anything and just throw it out there. Well behind us is your control center. I was told earlier how this works. Everything in the building here actually is, you can see it here. Pretty much. We can monitor. The models are all turned on and off through software. All accessible here. I mean obviously there are a lot of things that we still have to go under the models to do. Quite a few things in the Latin America model have to be done underneath that model. But yeah, I mean definitely I've been learning that myself. Christian of course is the expert. She's the camera woman. I'm just so impressed with the detail. You keep it clean. It looks fabulous. There's so much maintenance. Modellers can appreciate that. That's a lot of work. So basically we have a small crew essentially and so we spend a portion of our day, a small portion of our day maintaining. We come in at least an hour early in the morning and so each model maker, we have four model makers and each one is assigned a room essentially, a set of models and they just take care of that model. Mostly just doing light cleaning around the front of the model in the morning. But that's important because they get to know the model really well and if something's out of place or missing, they absolutely will know that. That's awesome. Just like people take care of their home layouts. You've got to maintain it. At the Colorado Model Road Museum, we do that too. We have a crew that comes in and they, yeah, same thing. Maintenance is huge. I've been told that miniature wonderland has a huge clean crew. I bet they do. I don't know if that's true or not. I probably shouldn't even say that. I bet they do. We're real jealous. They have like, you know, a dozen people that's just what they do is they clean. Yeah. But you know, I mean they're the number one tourist attraction in Germany. I want to say this though. This is miniature wonderland for America. It's in this building. It's here and if you're in New York City, you need to come see this. Even if you're a prototype modeler and their trains might not be extremely prototype yet. But there is amazing detail in every scene in this building. The winter, the Russian winter area. Modeling snow is not easy. There's so many details like that that are hard. It's an art in modeling to capture that. And there's so much movement going on here too. And everywhere, there's a huge faller car system here everywhere. We have just a little bit of that on our layouts. So that's in its detail. Ours is very complicated. I cannot imagine, well, this is her job to maintain those running on all the layouts. So what's your future look like here? What are your plans? What are you building next? Well, I mean we're always adding things into the models. So for example, definitely go back and get some footage of how we're revising Berlin. That's a whole team effort. We've got model making going on there, some structural things happening and engineering. Lighting of course. We added a new animation into that also. So that's ongoing. We have two model makers in the back who are hand painting, obviously in scale, the graffiti that was on the Berlin wall. Oh, the exact graffiti on the wall. That's awesome. I mean I just stand there just gawking at that. It's amazing. So you can actually see that going on in the back right now. We've got a lot of floor space here and we can have a lot more models. A lot of them will probably be freestanding, which is perfectly good. So a lot of the models we have now, with the exception of the Latin America model and the airport model, they're up against the wall. So that's something that definitely I'd like to see. We want to start building Africa. So we have a piece of Africa now and we've been in the design stage of that for a while and hopefully that will move into the next stage soon and that's going to be really spectacular. We'll be doing that. We hope to do that ourselves. Yeah, and so I'd like to get some more special exhibits in here too. I imagine modeling the jungle is not easy. No, but that's what's going to make it even more impressive. It will. Yeah, you'll tackle it. Well, thanks for your time today. All I can say is I was blown away when I walked in here. It's very alive. It's an experience to see all these different places around the world and the model making is fabulous. Just the buildings, every single building, the detail on each and every building. I don't suppose you have a number of buildings. Do you know how many you have? Thousands and thousands of buildings here. At least. At least. Yeah, maybe you could count your trees someday too. Well, it's a project, maybe for a volunteer. But I mean we have different, you know, also a variety of scenery too. We have urban centers and rural areas. And a desert scene and a winter scene and you have everything. And a Loch Ness monster. I found the Loch Ness monster too and it's interactive. You get a key when you come here. I should have had it in my hand. But you get a key and it does a lot of different active things. So instead of just push button, you actually are putting a key in and turning a lock. It's really neat. I really like that concept. I thought that was neat. So open every day, right? Yeah. Let's talk about how to visit here. So right now, 10 to 8, 7 days a week. So we know we, certainly we want that tourist business but we want locals too, you know. So everyone should come. All ages, absolutely. Yeah. Well it's nice to have an attraction for real fans in Times Square, you know. And so this is definitely a place, if you come to New York City, make sure you come here. So thank you. Nice to meet you today. One is me, Daniel Coombs from What's Neat This Week Podcast and I got next to me, George Bogatuck from Soundtracks. And today, George is actually going to educate me on how to consist and advance consist of locomotives. So George, go ahead and take it away. Thanks Daniel. Now one of the things that as a model railroader, I really enjoy is operation and running multiple locomotives. Well with DCC you can do that and I think over the years it's one of those concepts that never really got properly explained on what's going on behind the scenes to help make sure that we all run our locomotives the way we want to. We're spending a lot of time and money putting these sound and extra lights and all these locomotives to make sure they look as realistic as they and sound as realistic as they look. And so we want to make sure these bring these to life. But with the different types of consisting, there's certain sort cuts that you either have to make or certain sacrifices you have to do. And so what I want to do is kind of get out the information on what's going on the different types of consists and how to set it up so you can get the most out of your locomotive. Okay. So first off let's talk about the three different types of consisting and how they work. The first one is what's called a simple consist. And a simple consist takes our two locomotives and we run them elephant style. They're all set to the same address. So when I grab my throttle here and I grab, well for arguments sake say address three the Ken Patterson method is we'll grab address three. When I move those locomotives forward, they're all going to move forward. They're all going to move at the same speed step. But what happens when I blow the horn? They're all going to blow the horn. They're all going to ring the bell. And you'll have that annoying echo. And you have that annoying echo. And the other side of it is when I turn on the lights, guess what? All the lights come on on every unit in the real world. They don't have that. They don't turn on the trailing unit's headlights. And so a simple consist, how do we fix that? We take the volume levels of the horn and bell on our trailing unit and set it to zero so it doesn't make that sound. We say, well, we've got the headlight on there, so I'll just live with it. And like I said, you've got all these efforts and put into the realistic operation. But now you're shortcoming because that's an easy way to do it. It's down and dirty? Yes. Your command station sends out one command to your train? Yes. It's easy. And it's transferable. So it's really good. But then what happens if I want to run this second unit by itself? I have to go back and set those volumes for the horn and bell back to whatever volume level I want. And so therefore, I'm changing CVs back and forth every time I take it in and out of a consist. So it becomes cumbersome. Okay? The second type of consist is what's called a basic consist. And the basic consist uses the command station to determine which locomotives are in the consist. And the command is basically coming out as locomotive 5807, move forward, speed step 10, turn on F0, turn on F1, turn on F4. The command to the second unit is 8248. We'll go ahead and flip the direction here. Okay. And we'll say the command to the second unit now is going to be 8248, move reverse, speed step 10. Now you didn't hear me say any function commands, did you? Nope. And that's because the, oh, there we go. That's because when we're doing the basic style consist, all of the commands are sent to the lead unit. Okay. The basic type of consist was developed when all we had were motor decoders. And so the only thing we had to care about were lights. Right. And so what happens is that if we send the light commands to the lead unit, the second unit is just a motor control, so it doesn't matter. And that's why that works that way. Now the problem with this is let's say, for example, we go to a club setting. Okay. And we have four or five people running three to four locomotive consists. Well, that's 20, 25 commands that are being sent through the command station. And those are the active locomotives. Right. Those don't count the ones that are sitting still. And so they're still getting a DCC command. They're still, even the command is locomotive 5807, no speed, no functions. It's still a command. We went to a club somewhere in the United States, and I won't disclose where, but we pressed the horn button. It took three seconds for that horn to blow. And that's because they had so much DCC traffic because they were using this basic style consist. Right. So it results in delays. The other problem is, let's say I come over to your place to run trains. Okay. I have to build this consist in your command station now, too. If I leave, it's stuck in your command station unless I clear it. And that's assuming it's properly cleared. And so because of that, it's cumbersome. And I sacrifice because if I use, let's say, for example, my breaks on my trailing units, or if I use my breaks, I hit the F11. My lead locomotive gets the command. So it comes to a stop. The trailing unit never gets that command. So it just sits there and keeps pushing that locomotive down the track because the trailing unit never gets the function command. So it's not very good. It's not very realistic. Can you get it to work pretty easy? Yeah. Everybody can understand, okay, I'll select this locomotive and add it to the consist. It's pretty easy to understand, but we're short changing ourselves. Again, we're spending all this money and time on these sound decoders and lights, and we want to make sure it looks realistic. Right. So the best way to solve this, and it's universal with every DCC system is what's called an advanced consist. An advanced consist uses the memory of the decoder because the decoder is smart. It is very intelligent once it gets that command. So we're telling the decoder that you're in a consist, and then the best part is, is we tell the decoder which functions to respond to when it's in a consist. So this is where we tell our lead locomotive to turn on the headlight, turn on the bell, blow the horn, and we tell our trailing unit and the lead unit both to turn on the breaks. And what really is cool about it is that now we can take any number of locomotives and we can build this consist using an advanced consist. And I take it to your place, I put it on the track, and it's going to run exactly the same way, and your DCC system is no smarter. That it doesn't have any idea what my locomotive addresses are because I've built this alias in an advanced consist. So understanding how this works, the best part is, is our command station again sends one command and my decoder intelligently interprets how to do all of that, okay? So let's quickly review. We've got the simple, everything set to the same address. We're changing CVs. Patterson way. The Patterson way. We have the basic system or the basic consist, which uses memory space. And you also don't get function commands to any of your trailing units. The other way is advanced consist. Now advanced consist to set it up. Yes, it is setting a couple of CVs. But remember in the simple consist, we're doing that anyway. So now what we're going to do is we're going to go in and our consist address is stored in CV 19. This is a number between 1 and 127. It's basically a secondary address that the decoder says, I'm part of a consist. This can be the lead two numbers of the first unit. The second two numbers of the first unit. It can be a club member ID number. It can be a train number. Whatever the case is, you set that in CV 19 when it's facing forward. If the locomotive is facing reverse, you add 128. And that tells the decoder you're part of that consist, but you're actually moving in reverse. So when we do this, I'm building this consist. This will be consist number 20. So in this lead unit, I'm going to set address or CV 19 to a value of 20. On the second unit, I'm going to set CV 19 to a value of 148. That's 20 plus 128. And that 128 again tells the decoder you're facing rearward. So when you get a forward command, you're actually going to move in reverse. With me so far, it makes sense. It's making sense. So the second part of this is then we tell the decoder in CVs 21, 22. And then for the higher functions, 13 through 28 uses CV 246. I'm sorry, 245 and 246. Okay. And we tell the decoder each of those functions we want it to respond to. So we can tell this locomotive, you're the lead unit. So you're going to respond to the horn, the bell, the headlight, and we'll say the brakes. Okay. Okay. The trailing unit is not going to blow the horn. It's not going to ring the bell. It's not going to turn on the headlight, but it is going to respond to the brakes. So by setting those CVs, we tell the decoders how to respond. So now just to kind of illustrate this for you and really show how this comes to life, I've got these two locomotives already set up in an advanced consist. Okay. And right now they're consisted at address 20. So the first thing we need to do is we need to start it up. Well, on the Sonomi 2, F5 is my RPM plus or my startup sequence. So when I press F5, you're going to hear both of these locomotives start up. Because I've told these decoders to respond to the F5 command. So as they start up, we'll get them going. So now let's say we're about to run our train. We have to do a few things. So first, we have to turn on the headlight, which I believe is on. Not yet. There we go. So now we have our headlight on. Now we're going to turn on the ditch lights. And now we're also going to turn on our number boards. We're going to turn on our truck lights. And if you notice, all the step lights are on. But if you look closely, you'll notice that the trailing unit also has the step lights on. And the reason is because those are courtesy lights for the crew. The lead locomotive is going to be the only one with the number boards and the truck lights. So that the ground lights, whatever you want to call them. And the trailing unit here is going to have all the courtesy lights. So the crew can, when they walk from locomotive to locomotive, they can see where they're going. They can see where they're going. And so I've set that up so that my decoders will respond. Now, when I send a moving forward command, you're going to see that the two locomotives are running together in tandem. OK. And this one's running in reverse. And that's because I've told it, you're facing reverse. Now, when I set the brakes using F11, you're going to see that they both come to a stop. Right. I can change direction. And I'm going to go ahead and crank the throttle up here a little bit. We'll release our brakes. And you see that those two locomotives are working together as if they are a single locomotive. Cut the throttle and set the brakes. I may have gone a little far there. But you can see how those two locomotives are working together. And that's the benefit of an advanced consist. OK. Now, when I want to take this locomotive out of a consist, we're going to uncouple them really quickly here. I'm going to take this trailing locomotive, number 8248, and using mainline programming, whoops, I'm going to take it out by setting CV 19 to 0. And 19 being your address, now it's disabled to say you're out of the consist. Absolutely. And the locomotive is on its own. Correct. So this locomotive is now independent. So now, when I start to run it, you see that the locomotive runs on its own. And look, I can have full control of the locomotive. OK. Because I've told it now it's no longer part of a consist. And so what happens is when CV 19 is set to 0, the decoder doesn't know or care what's in CV 21 and 22 and 245 and 246 because they're not being referenced anymore. So to take it out of a consist, you just simply set CV 19 to 0. This is fantastic for helper service because once you get to the top of the grade, you just take the trailing unit or the pusher, set CV 19 to 0, pull it away. And now it's own locomotive and the rest of the train goes on its own way. So this gives you that extra element of realism while still maintaining the offerability and all use of all the sounds throughout the entire train. And this can be one unit. It can be 15 units. You can decide how you want to do it. And here's one of the best parts. If we want to do distributed power, we still set it up the same way. We just put a train in between them because it's still receiving the DCC signal. So that really gives you the extra element. And my goal here is to show you what you can do with it. And so with all of this, at soundtracks.com, we have our user's guide. And it will explain and show the CVs how they work so that you can go through and try this out. The great thing is you cannot break the soundtracks decoders by changing CVs. That's something that we do to make sure that you can't do it. So you can't set it to the wrong value and break it. So use that confidence. Try it out, learn it, figure out how it works. And suddenly you'll have that aha moment. And once you do, you're going to realize how much better your trains can run because now we're running these locomotives as if they're real locomotives. And that's the goal of ultimately of what we're trying to do. So I hope I've showed some light on this for you. You know what? You've educated me, and this is going to be a backup in case my jammer eye decides it wants to poop out. But guess what? I got my command station that I go to and did the simple programming track and I'm set to go. Awesome. Well, thanks for that. I appreciate it. Yeah, no problem. You educated me a lot. And I know for those of you who watch me on What's Neat, know that I'm a DCC guru. But again, I like to thank George for educating me a little bit on the CV changes. And I guess this wraps up this DCC segment for What's Neat. 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.