 I'm Cooper and I'm Sydney and February'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 February 2019. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we've got a really good show. First of all we visit with Intermountain in Longmont, Colorado. We talk briefly with Ron Angstead who shows us around a little bit and tells us some exciting news coming up for 2019. We also look at Art Lortz, beautiful O&3 layout. Now I've modeled in that scale for the last couple of years and it was a breath of fresh air to see Art's completely finished layout running. It was just beautiful. We also go to the Colorado Model Railroad Museum out in Greeley, Colorado and we look at the electronics and the electrical systems and the computers that run that layout. That layout can run itself with up to nine trains on a single track main line and it's absolutely fantastic to listen to Randy Palmer explain how the system works in depth from start to finish. We actually take a few trains out on the layout and I've got to tell you it's fascinating. So with that I want to say thank you to all the folks that watch the What's Neat this week podcast on Saturdays. We've recently won an award from James Wright, the People's Choice Award for the best video podcast. Thank you very much James for that. And also Lionel Strang won top honors for the first place in audio podcasts. I'd also like to thank Caboose in Lakewood, Colorado for sponsoring the What's Neat show. We've recently filmed the What's Neat this week podcast number 60 out there at the store. It was a breath of fresh air to see all the products, trains, wall to wall, everywhere you look. It's a great place to visit. If you haven't checked it out you need to do that. Also you can order online at MyCaboose.com where they've got over 145,000 different items and skews of available model railroad products. So with that I want to say let's start now the February 2019 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat I'm standing with Ron Eggstead in the middle of this beautiful facility here in Colorado. Where are we? We're in Longmont, Colorado, aren't we? Yes sir we are. Ron, now you've been working with your father and inner mountain for a good, I want to say almost 30 years now hasn't it been? Yeah that's correct. I was gone for a while for about 10 years with another full-time opportunity but I've always been a director of inner mountain, I've always been very interested and passionate about what's going on here and we're excited. We're really excited that Ken made it over here to Longmont. I think he endured a massive snowstorm in Kansas last night, is that right? That's more fun than anybody should have. It was great. But you've been here with your father side by side and you're known for some of those magnificent locomotives and freight cars in end scale and H.O. You guys are very diversified plus now you're setting up some new ties in China and you're expecting some of the most exciting stuff to come, isn't that right? Yes it is and thanks for the kind words, we appreciate it. We've always had a high standard, a high bar, we want to keep improving our own product line and helping to improve the hobby and my father and I have had the opportunity to work together for several decades and we have a lot of fun. Ken was asking me, what am I most passionate about and what do I like most about the hobby? It's the people. I love the trains and I love the history and I love seeing and riding on real trains but the research and understanding and learning about the different eras and the different regions of actual prototype trains and modeling has always been exciting to me and I love seeing layouts in different cities when we go to shows and stuff. That's awesome. Now you don't really model anything yourself but are you tempted, are you thinking about it? Well I do have a small secret private collection. I don't run my own layout but we do have test tracks here and I have a lot of friends with layouts so it's been a passion for me and I love the hobby. That's fantastic. It's great to be here and see all these machines. It's like micro-engineering times five from what I've seen in the past and this isn't going to go anywhere, anywhere soon and I want to say that in the next nine months you're going to have new engines and new fray cars and a whole list of things that's going to be new, right? Well that's a great question and a great point and we've talked off camera a little bit about that Ken and you're right. I have personally been to China twice in the last three months. We've qualified and visited a number of factories, we've qualified three of those and we've got nine fray car projects already on the books and purchase orders that have been placed and those will start shipping soon. We've got the Chinese New Year that's going to slow things down a little bit but early in the spring we're going to have a lot of product flowing. That's awesome. I'll tell you what, I say it over and over again and I'm going to say it again. This is the best hobby in the world and it's because of guys just like you that make it good for the rest of us. Thank you for taking this moment for the What's Neat guys. We appreciate it. We appreciate everything you're doing for the hobby too Ken, it's a pleasure. Thank you Ron. Thank you for coming to visit us. Alright and that's this from right here in Inner Mountain. This segment of What's Neat, I'm standing with Art Lort in a beautiful narrow gauge empire. Now this is awesome. This is the same scale that you've watched me model over the last two years on What's Neat trying to work it into my HO layout. But Art has built this from the ground up to be a narrow gauge layout and a standard gauge layout. HO and three beautiful stuff. Art, I am so impressed with this. I don't even know where to start but tell us a little bit about this layout. Kind of what's behind it inspire us. Well it was inspired by being on Marshall Pass when it still had some track on it. And like I said I got hooked on Marshall Pass and I think right then I decided that was what I wanted to model. So over the years there have been many, many books published about Marshall Pass and the Salida area and surrounding areas like Canyon and stuff like that. So there's no lack of material to learn about it. This is so exciting. I'm telling you now you've been doing this for how many years? Well this layout and this location almost exactly 20 years now. Just a few months more than 20 years. Some parts of the layout were built at my old house and moved out here in pieces. This big chunk of Marshall Pass came over in one piece and the area right along the wall over there came out in one piece and one small section of Salida Yard came out in one piece. The rest of it has all been added since. Now I notice you've got standard switches and you've also built stub switches on those. Does it work pretty good for you? Stubs are a bit of a problem. It's hard to get them to work right and it's probably why the prototype quit using them. But yeah if you're careful you can get a stub switch to work okay. Now we're surrounded by layout in front of us and you've got the lower grades here where the creeks and the water is but up here in the mountains behind us this is tall as we both are. So do you operate this layout with a crew? We do. We typically have a crew of 8 to 12 people that come over from time to time to run trains, have an operating session and perhaps you've noticed we have a car-card yes I saw that system and we do operate with NCE DCC system. Now you said in the 70s when you were modeling this type of stuff I guess you were getting that old brass you know the coffee grinders that you would sit there and tweak and try to make work. That's pretty close. And then what happened when I got into it is we had Blackstone models arrive on the scene and kind of changed the world. It did. Made it easy for a lot of people to get into this. Blackstone changed things a lot and yes I did and I still do have some brass models it's hard to keep them tweaked sometimes and I even have a couple of old MDC model diecast models that I've reworked a little bit and one of them is still in operation the other one's kind of been retired. I know there's a couple cheerleaders on the sidelines that want to see the MDC castings and those things come back because those are out there somewhere. This is awesome you are the first narrow gauge HON3 layout that we've had on what's neat other than the stuff that I've shown the viewers. It's a breath of fresh air to see it from your perspective done very professionally. It's awesome. So I want to thank you Art for sharing this gorgeous work with the viewers of What's Neat. You're most welcome. Thanks for coming. Okay. For this segment of What's Neat I'm at the Colorado Monterey Railroad Museum here in Greeley and we're in the nuts and bolts of the operation here with Randy and Randy's going to start up the computer system and make this layout go and I'm going to let him explain what he's about to do. Randy tell us about this. So what we've got here is we've actually got multiple computers but we run the layout on one computer at a time. The other computer is just a safety backup in case something goes wrong with the first one. I can switch to a second computer and get up and running very quickly. What we've got is we've powered up the DCC and the CMRI. I have booted the computer up so now the computer is ready. So now all I need to do is go into what we're going to do right now we need to move a train. So we're going to go into play mode. Okay. So what we're going to do here is I'm just going to go down to our little icon down here for play mode. I got to find which one is first one. When I boot this up the play mode immediately comes up and initialized all the nodes on the layout. It's asking if I want to do a test on each node and for this we don't need to do the test. What the system is doing now is cycling the entire layout five times in a row to make sure everything's up and running everything's happy. Once that's done computer systems up and running. We are now running in play mode. All the switches and everything are controlled out at the fascia. This allows us to move trains around clean track stuff like that. This is what we do when we just we need to move things around. The screen here shows the entire layout all the switches all the signals on the entire layout. It will show occupancy. That's what these reds are down here. Our trains are actually on the track. The screen shows all the boosters that we have. They're all green. If a booster word is short its name would turn to red. We also have a way when we're doing cleaning track and stuff we can mute the sounds on the layout so that we don't have to listen to all the sounds all the time. I also have test modes on this program so that I can turn all the signals to green on the entire layout. I can turn all the signals to yellow. I can turn all the signals to red. Or I can tell the signals I want them to cycle. And in the cycle what it will do is every few seconds it will change it to a different color so we can go out and make sure all the signals are working properly. Randy where did we get a system like this if we wanted it? This was actually a hand. I wrote this entire system. It's written in Microsoft Visual Basic 6. I wrote the entire thing. The reason I used Visual Basic is because I wanted this screen to show everything you want to see. This is fantastic so now what do we got to do to run a train? Right now the system is up and running. We can go move a train. We actually need to move a train to prepare for our docent run this afternoon. So we can just grab a throttle. We can go out there and run them. We can throw the switches out there on the layout right there where they're handy. Or if we want to we can actually throw the switches from in here. Now does the CTC board over there also throw switches? Right now in play mode the CTC machine is not running. Okay. The lights and everything on it are running but for play mode the CTC machine is not used. That's smart so it's a separate system where this can just run the layout. This runs just the layout. This is magnificent. Now how long did it take you to come up with how to do this? This was actually the first program that I wrote and it probably took me five or six months to write it. Get it to see all the occupancies, work with all the switches, work with all the signals. The hardest part was drawing the whole screen out because every switch that you see on the layout is actually consistent of nine different parts that I had to hand lay to the right position on the screen so that when you throw a switch it looks like it's thrown. That's amazing. You said you've got 19 NCE power supplies powering up the layout broken up into segments. Yes. There's 19 around the layout that power up the whole layout. This is a lot to keep track of. I would say that every model railroader needs one of you. We all need a Randy in our layout rooms but what a magnificent system that you can share with us. It's almost something that we can't have but the knowledge that something out there is like that. It's amazing. You made it. Yes. It was a lot of fun to write. It was a lot of excitement the first time I got a signal to turn colors. I was like, yeah, it actually works. You've got a passion for trains and electronics both, don't you? Yes. I love writing computer programs and stuff. That's been my whole career is computer programming, computer databases and so I love to figure out how to get the logic to work and all of it to work. Wow, that's great. So we're going to go run some trains, right? Yes. We got to go move a coal train. Okay, let's do it. This is going to be fun. Yeah. We like that train. 7 is the east A, 1407 UP cattle train. That's what you do. So Randy, we just saw you pull out the Rio Grande train out of that yard back there and that's the switch yard where the computer actually reads those tracks and knows what trains you've got. You've got seven trains. You had to pull out one of them. Now tell us what you're going to do for the last six trains. Okay, what we're going to do is the DOSM program has six parking places. We want to run seven trains today. Okay. So we pre-position the coal train out on the layout. So now what we're going to do is we're actually going to stop the play mode and we're going to actually start the DOSM program and what the DOSM program will do is it will actually read the layout and find all the trains on either its staging tracks or out on the layout. So it'll find seven trains. So we can do that simply by closing the program and then we open and I've got to get my glasses. I want you to get in there. Let me let you get closer in front of the computer. I'll go on the other side of you. Is that right? Okay. So we're going to start the DOSM program and what the DOSM program does, again it initializes all the nodes and then it'll cycle the entire layout five times. I see that. And while it's doing it, it's finding all the trains. So there are the seven trains that it found. Six of the trains are on dedicated parking places for DOSM. So we have this little sheet here where we went and confirmed where they are. So eastbound is and we have to tell it the right locomotive. So this is 1407, let's be up here 1407. And then on the B parking place is train 4811, 4811 and you guys wrote all this down here didn't you? Yeah. So that's what Michelle did. She went back there and found what trains are sitting at what parking places because we have to explain to the computer where the trains are. That's interesting. So west was 1404 and then the Christmas train 1101 and 75776 and then in Klamath Falls is a train we pre-positioned and it is the 5351 coal train and it is eastbound. Now let me ask you, is this a system what you've designed here where you could actually turn it into a product for model rotors to use somehow? Could you box this? We've discussed about this. This is actually custom written for the Colorado Model Railroad Museum but the theory could be applied to other railroads. I mean it's the same theory just you'd have to tell it what the tracks look like. Sounds like you need one of those open source Facebook page websites where you could share this with us and those guys would take it and run with it wouldn't they? Yeah, they probably could. It would take a little bit of work but... Sounds like the next new gadget that we all need. So now that we've told the computers where the trains are, it's all ready to go. All we have to do is tell it to continue. Once we tell it to continue, it starts the layout and what you're going to see is like here it's identified the 5351. It saw that the tracks in front of it are all clear so it's given it a green light to start accelerating. It is now moving. Wow. Wow. Hello. It's also noticed that the train coming eastbound or westbound out of the staging yards has free track in front of it so it's also cleared it to start moving and that would be the train down here at the bottom. So it's been cleared out to Lakeview. As you can see as the train starts to move it will turn red where it's actually occupying the track and as the tracks as it leaves tracks behind it they turn dark red. So you can see where the train's going and where it's been. Up here it lists all the trains and it lists what direction they're going, the train number, the name of the train, where the train currently is, what its current speed is and then what its approved speed is. Like I said, if a train is approved for green speed of 66 it doesn't go to 66. It steps up fourth rattle settings every four seconds to build up to that speed. And then every now and then you can see that all the current speeds go to pink. Every 15 seconds it talks to every train and tells it what speed it's supposed to be going. Nice. So this train's pulling out right here next, right? Yes. This is amazing. I know everybody sitting there looking at this saying I want one. Oh, this is a lot of fun to watch. Oh, this is awesome. This is amazing. We actually have three trains moving right now. This train's been cleared out of staging and he's going to come into Klamath Falls because this guy has gone out of Klamath Falls so it's now available. This train's coming into Lakeview. And so once these get on the main line, will this layout run itself all day? This layout will run itself all day. It also runs the CTC machine to emulate what it's doing because it's acting like it's a real dispatcher. Matter of fact, the subroutine that I wrote, I named dispatcher. And what it does is it does just what a real dispatcher does. It looks at the tracks in front of the train and to see if the train has a place to go and if so, it dispatches that train forward. The trains are watching the signals when they see a green signal, they start to go. I'm taking him home with me. I want this. This is amazing. This is amazing and you came up with this and this is really a big part of your hobby, isn't it? Yes. This is a big part. And I've spent a lot of time writing this program and perfecting it. It's a lot of fun. And now what we need to do is go out on the railroad and watch the trains pass each other because that's the best part. I want to. Yes. That's the best part. Okay. Let's go catch that. But this is absolutely awesome. Wow. So Randy, as I hear a prototype run by outside the building right now, we're watching the models come into a large, long passing siding and they're about to have a meat and your signals are going to help them do this. You want to talk about this? Yes. What he's doing is he's coming up at red speed right now. The computer's controlling the train. He's going to hear pretty quickly. He's going to throttle down to stop because there he goes. He's throttling down. See how he's taking? So this layout's doing this all by itself. The layout, the computer's doing all of this. Now he's going to sit here and wait for the steam engine, which is coming the other direction, to pass him. And once the steam engine passes, then he'll get a green light to proceed on down the mountain. Let's watch. Okay. Randy, I just saw the caboose go past, buddy, and I see these Rio Grande starting up. Tell us what's going on now here. Well, now that the steam engine is passed, the Rio Grande has a clear track in front of it, so the dispatcher has given him a green. He's now accelerating out of Quartz Mountain, going down the mountain. So Randy, coming up on the end of the day, when you shut this layout down, I understand it'll park itself. And I heard about another feature that when the executive director's got to do some business around here, she can push pause or something on this, and they'll park themselves. Tell me about that. Yeah, there's two options. First of all, if Michelle's got a group here that she needs to give a presentation to or something, she can press the button that says stop all trains, and all the trains will be brought to a stop, a gradual stop, and they'll just sit there and wait. Then she can give her presentation. When she's done with her presentation, she comes back, she clicks the button that says resume running. All the trains pick up right where they left off. So these guys are all going to find a sighting by themselves with the help of the computer, slow down and stop. Do the signals change, too? Yes. And the switches all switch? Yes. Signals all switch. The engines are paying attention to the signals, so when they see the red signals, they just kind of go stop and they wait for a green. So four o'clock today, we shut down the museum. What do you do then? Four o'clock today, one of the things we wanted to do was the computer program needs to put the trains back in the parking places. So we'll pick up, we'll click a button that says park in staging. And the computer program will take and capture the trains as they come into the staging and we'll park them in their parking places. So there's three parking places westbound, three parking places eastbound. It will just park the trains back there. When we're done, the trains are all back in staging where they belong. Wow, this is absolutely amazing. This is going to be another one of those videos where I'm going to have to watch it twice. But this is far out, Daniel Coombs. Are you getting all of this? This is the most amazing technical segment I think we ever had on the show. Because this is Cal, right? Oh, yeah, the computer does a lot of thinking for itself. It also has a lot of safety precautions built in to protect both the layout and the trains. If it senses anything it doesn't like, it brings all the trains to a stop and asks for a human to come in and take a look at what's going on before it'll restart the trains. So it protects the trains. This is amazing, Randy. Thank you very much for sharing this with all of our viewers on What's Neat. Well, thanks for coming and seeing it. I really appreciate it. 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.