#model railroads

First of all, it's 2025. If your locomotive (which came out this year) doesn't have a DCC plug, it's not DCC Ready. It just isn't. I can almost forgive Kato because I'm fairly certain they've never heard of Next18 and E24 (and even NEM 651) over in Japan, but you guys? I know you know what a Next18 plug looks like, I own your ALP-45PD. And the associated cab car, and why only of the two has ditch lights wired up is… besides the point here, I'm talking about a GP60 now, but also get on that.

Anyway, you market it as DCC ready, and it does have space for a speaker (personally I don't see the point in sound for model railroad locomotives, but apparently that's a me thing). What decoder do I need? You say it's Decoder ready, surely you have some decoder in mind? One of those board replacement thingies from Digitrax or whatever that other one is called, right? What is it?

Oh, of course Atlas won't tell me. Neither will Digitrax, apparently, because nobody told them Atlas makes a GP60. Just great.

Anyway, for the record, if you have an Atlas N scale "Master Line" GP60 locomotive, in my case #40 004 898 (that's Southern Pacific #9776):

To open the locomotive, remove the tank (plastic piece at the bottom, just pull gently), then gently insert a small flathead screwdriver between where the tank was and the underside of the walkway; towards the rear. Twist it; this will start lifting off the body (walkways and all) from the rear. You can mostly just pull it off but be really careful at the front, the fibre optics towards the lower ditch lights will catch and you don't want to rip them off. To reassemble… I don't know, haven't gotten that far, but my gut feeling is to do the same in reverse, making sure to keep the fibre optics out of the way, and then reinsert them in their holes in the body with really thin tweezers. Unscrewing the front coupler first may help with seeing what you're doing.

Inside the locomotive is a PCB that reads 1660-E003, which is 66mm long and 8.3 mm wide. The fibre-optics for the ditch-lights are held by a plastic piece leading to LEDs on the underside of that board (not glued on as I said initially, I just misunderstood things at first). At least my locomotive only has ditch lights in front, not rear, but there are rear ditch light LEDs fitted presumably for other variants.

From the pure dimensions, there are a number of boards that seem like they might fit, e.g. Digitrax DN166I3 (yes, I), ESU "LokPilot 5 micro DCC Direct Atlas Legacy" as well as the associated LokSound, the TCS AMD4 appears to be a bit too short but I'm not sure that'll be a problem, but none of them feature ditch lights. The ESU one would be my favourite, but it doesn't appear to have any directional LEDs at all and it's also not currently available.

Hat tip to @kourumi for showing me this - it has some pretty hefty TOW vibes.  I can imagine myself doing something like this but won’t.  Still, I have to wonder: has anyone come up with .STLs for TOW buildings (e.g., an OSI church) yet?

Answer: not that I can find; however, there is a file for sale on Etsy for the Shrink Ray: https://www.etsy.com/in-en/listing/814070462/digital-file-outer-worlds-shrink-ray-stl

Vintage Comic - Panic #02

That's not a short key smash, but my newest model railroad locomotive. Well, sort of.

ASF stands for "Akkuschleppfahrzeug", "Battery tractor vehicle". More than 500 of these little guys were built in the GDR as shunting tools between 1966 and 1990, both for the railroads there and industry, plus quite a few got sold to other eastern bloc countries (in particular Poland) as well. Nowadays they've spread around more, with some even appearing in Italy and Sweden.

The ASF is designed to push and pull single rail cars or sometimes entire locomotives within workshops and industrial sites, a job that it has been doing well for decades now. The diminutive size (about 3 meters long, wide and tall) means it'll fit anywhere, and in places where daily journeys are often measured in hundreds of meters at most, its 6 kilometres per hour top speed (4 mph) is not really an issue.

Technically, it's not a locomotive but a "device", which means it's subject to far less strict requirements for maintenance and for operator training. With all of that, it should be no surprise that it will never be seen on the mainline; even shunting in stations is an extreme rarity. The job is more to pull something into or out of a workshop. Modern devices for that are typically all remote controlled, but plenty of places also just use an old ASF.

And now it's also available in N scale. And it's just incomprehensibly tiny.

This is produced by Arnold, a brand name of Hornby's, and it actually came with DCC preinstalled. It's adorable and I love it.

But how does it run? Actually way better than you'd think.

The loop of track is a "JokeTrack", hand-made from Japan, that I want to use for something eventually one of these days. As you can see, minimum radius is not really a concern for this locomotive.

Two axles really close together and almost no weight means that electricity pickup isn't great; it'll basically only run on freshly cleaned tracks. But it's way better than it has any right to be, since the decoder comes with two relatively beefy buffer capacitors that are stored in the top of the cab. Still, it's really great at finding whatever particles you have on your tracks and stopping for them.

The top with factory decoder settings is really, really low. Probably exactly the 6 km/h walking pace translated to 1:160 scale. I may bump that up, because realism is one thing, but it takes forever to get anywhere.

The weird hooks are the end are what Arnold has given it instead of normal N scale couplings. They look horrible against a white background, but visually disappear entirely once you're on the actual layout.

If you don't like them, purely decorative replacements that look like the original weird coupler thingies are included in the tiny box. I suppose you could install one of them on one end, and have the other end to haul a car if you want. For me that's too much planning.

Speaking of, it can haul more cars than you'd think in a straight line, but once you get to a curve, it quickly drops down to just one, if at all (also heavily dependent on the car). Sadly the tiny coreless motor in it can and will stall at times, which can damage it if you keep it going for too long, so it's better to keep an eye on it while in motion.

There is no sound, the only function is the marker light. Historically locomotives engaged in shunting were supposed to only turn on the right headlight in every direction as a marker. Nowadays mainline locomotives will turn on all three lights on both ends while shunting, but the ASF was built before that, and since all it can do is shunt, it just received the marker light. F0 turns it on in the direction travel, F1 turns on the opposite end.