Author Archives: Capt.Brigg

Pacific Coast Railroad 1916-1970

I recently discovered in my NPRHA calendar the past existence of the PCR (Pacific Coast Railroad) which shares the initials with my PCRy (Pacific Cascade Railway) and merged into Burlington Northern at the same time, March 3rd 1970, on my railroad history timeline. I have sent an email request to the NPRHA for more information on this line. We may be sister lines. We may even have joint operating rights.

Under layout chair

I just finished building an under layout rolling chair. This allows me to roll under the layout to do wiring and make changes to the “L” girder structure. I had been looking for an old style kitchen table chair with the tubular frame, but they don’t seem to exist any more.2016-02-22 chair (2) The chair works well except when I run into things stored on the floor.

Digitrax decoders a problem

Today I returned three Digitrax DH123D decoders that I had bought in January from the Hobby Smith in Portland. After installing them into new engines, I had recently purchased, they would not retain their long address. I coded their long address using my Digitrax Zephyr, unsuccessfully tried to run them and then found that they had changed to a completely different address. Happily (sort of) I was able to take them back to Hobby Smith for a refund. I will now be looking into identifying a more reliable decoder.

Adding DCC to my engines

I’ve started adding DCC decoders to my engines. This can be a challenge as older engines frequently have very little room inside the shell for new equipment. 2016-01-09 engines (1) 2016-01-09 engines (2) 2016-01-09 engines (3)  As you can see these NP “F” units have a large weight over the motor, so I had to run the wire from the front truck and light to the decoder inside the weight and tape it to the inside top.

Search engine errors

I just recently discovered that all, or most, of the search engine errors are in reference to the Pacific Cascade Railway web site that I built in 2012, using Dreamweaver and before finding WordPress to run the site. Those links are gone and I now need to somehow tell the Mozella spiders to stop searching for them. This web building is interesting, but I want to get back to railroad building.

I did add a page to my site about Grandpa Jefferson Clark Franklin and his work on the Spokane Portland and Seattle railroad.