Kiha66

Some examples of the spoil heaps that helped inspire the name. https://photo1.ganref.jp/photo/0/58d905540c212213377648e1e3003967/thumb5.jpg https://kariud.exblog.jp/5873913/ https://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/br1216er/33592284.html

My progress so far, I have most of the track but I may need to get a few more pieces to properly align everything. I also will need a few more workers houses and some industrial structures to make up the mining district.

Hello all, I am once again embarking on a new project. A small portable layout I'm entitling Kotayama. This will be a rural coal mining themed layout, in about 3 by 6 feet roughly following on of the plans kato has published online. Kotayama mean something like "spoil heap mountain" a very distinctive feature of the landscape around many coal mining operations in japan, many of which grew to enormous heights and still tower over the landscape today. I hope to learn a lot from building this layout, I'm trying to keep this a learning layout so I expect to make many mistakes to learn from along the way. This evening I got all the track together, and hopefully sometime this week I can start to cut the wood for the base of the layout. The track plan for the layout: http://www.katomodels.com/unitrackplan/plan/plan03-9.pdf

Thanks squid, very informative graph and chart. I didnt realize Nagasaki had almost as much km of private lines as it does JR, although with the transfer of the matsuuren I suppose it shouldn't have been that surprising.

I love the weathering on the viaducts. I'm excited to follow the progress on this one.

As far as I can tell, every prefecture in the home islands has more than one rail line. Okinawa, with its single monorail, would be prefecture with the absolute fewest with one remaining (monorail) line and three defunct rail lines. Hokkaido would have the fewest per area most likely, but as its a very large prefecture it still has a fair number of lines. My guess for the prefecture with the fewest lines in the home islands would be Miyazaki with five, but there may be somewhere with fewer.

Wow, what a haul Paul! Glad to see everything arrived safely, looks like you should be set with trains for a while now!

Beautiful photo mark, believe me I am very tempted. How hard would it be to add dcc to the model? It would be a shame to have it confined to the kitchen table and not be able to run it on a larger club layout.

Great setup Junior! Its funny how those tiny containers start to seem big compared to the tank cars or C12 behind them.

Not layout, but I completely disamebeled and scrubbed a used Kato dd51 today. It had been covered in a overly enthusastic weathering attempt, luckily most of it came off with a little elbow grease. Now I just need to find some replacement parts for the ones that are missing or broken.

I was weak, and Paul (railtunes) was offering such a good deal I just couldn't say no. They took a bit of work to spruce up but man kato ho stuff is amazing! Now I'm worryingly looking at getting some DMUs, or a C59...

Clear coat also smooths the surface before you add decals, ideally you should clear coat first and then either matte or clear coat after to get the desired finish. Clear coating before ensures minimal tiny airbubbles trapped under the surface (which is responsible for the "silvery" look poorly applied decals sometimes get). The coat after applying decals protects the artwork, as well as ensuring the car is evenly shiny or dull as desired.

Welcome to the forum drake! I only got to take the shinkansen myself for a very short trip, but it was a great experience! Be sure to share any other train photos from your trip with the forum.

Found at a small hobby shop in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula. Behold the only micro reamer set I've ever seen in the US. Now I can finally finish the running gear on the Pensy K4s I was building! (As soon as I return to sunny California of course).

That wiring looks pretty good gavin! Much better than some "professional" jobs I've seen.