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The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall project and I maintain a separate blog for all my electronics not directly related to Randall.

2023-02-19 - UP 8330 on the Mainline and Other Updates

Category Randall

A few updates here. The Walthers UP 8749 was struggling a bit recently, and I swapped it with the new Walthers UP 8330 engine:

I got two of these engines a few months ago to place them on the mainline automation, and it had been a little bit of a saga, so it’s nice to have finally completed that task. Integrating UP 8330 in the automation script was fairly easy, that only took me an hour or two.

I’ve also tried to apply a bit of ATF to clean the track used by the UP engine, and now 1072 is struggling in the large curve after T311. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Normally I’d go in there and scrub the track with the cleaning wand but this area is out of reach. I’ll have to create a makeshift extension for the cleaning wand some day. In between, I’ve added one of the cleaning pad cars to the freight train, hoping that will slowly clean the track:

I’ve added this currently static display in front of the Stockton Station, with the engine being a temporary DC one courtesy of Orion:

We’ll see who notices :-) More on that one later.


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