What can you do with the Plasticville Coaling Station?

How about going from this:



to this:



This has been an interesting project and is still underway.

I recently got a Digitrax Zephyr and I need to know if I can use it with the Bachmann 5 amp booster.

6:20 pm


I've been doing some light layout work today. The evil 'S' curve at the front of the layout is fixing to go away. As the photo below shows I've already got the deck that'll hold the new track section in place.



After I've marked off the areas where the ends of the new section will marry into the existing track I'll cut out the offending section, trim the ends, put a piece of half inch foam down on the new deck and install the new track section. Here's a photo showing the new section set in to show what I'm going to do.

Any lovers of 'S' curves speak now or forever hold your peace.




Edit: 8:45 pm


The new track section is in place. Now for the ticklish part. The areas where the rails were cut is fairly difficult to get at to cut under the rail ends. So I'm having a spot of bother getting rail joiners in there. What I'm going to do is simply this. I'll clamp the rail ends in place so they line up precisely with each other and solder a piece of iron wire across each rail joint on the outside edge of the rail. After the area is ballasted it'll hardly be noticeable. Have I done this before? Yes. How many times? Twice, and that was many years ago.

BTW, all the track on my layout is Bachmann EZ-Track.

I'm getting ready to wire a Bachmann decoder to a pair of specially prepared P2K locos. The decoder will collect power from the wheels of both units and will drive the motors of both units. Obviously this means the units will be permanently tethered to each other. The units are a FA-1 with a Bachmann FT-A shell and a FB-1 with an Athearn F7-B shell. I've heard of this being done on a couple other forums. I'm about to put it to the test.