Holiday Display

 When last we spoke (?) I had found what appeared to be roughly HO sized holiday buildings and purchased a triplet of C&O steam locos with the insane idea of perhaps making a Christmas layout around the trees.

A quick trip back to the dollar store with my HO ruler verified that yes, the buildings in question were in fact roughly HO size (a bit large, but not overmuch) so a full set was purchased. Later on, at the Mart of Wal, I found some ceramic buildings that were about the same size. I went ahead and obtained a few of them as well.

While perusing my new MicroMark catalog I found some cheap-cheap Digitrax SDH166D sound decoders with the speakers and keep-alive caps installed on sale, so I decided to go DCC and ordered them. I also ordered a set of 6 pin micro-connectors with multi-colored wiring harness from TCS to wire them up with. The wires were red, orange, blue, white, gray and black; just the right colors for the power pickup, motor and headlight connections. 

The pin side of the harnesses were wired into the locos and the socket sides wired to two of the decoders (the third was back-ordered) and the tender of the last loco. The decoders were then wired into the trucks of the tender and the speaker and cap mounted in the tender shell. A set of holes in the coal load lets the sound through without being overly obvious.

The sound quality is about what you could expect from a cheap-cheap 8 bit decoder with limited sound library (less than 50 bucks, has one steam loco library and one diesel, a GP-38, library; I should have gone another 11 and get the SDXH166D which is a 16 bit decoder and more locomotive options but I didn't see them in time), but it is sound in a complete package and for a pretty good price so I'm OK with it. I'm using a Bachmann Dynamis for control and it works fine for the application.

Next I pulled out some old Life Like Power-Loc track (yes it's junk and Unitrack is better, but this is for a holiday display so I'm OK with that) and set up a couple of configurations. I settled on a 90 degree curve followed by a 9" straight for each section and drew up plans for the tables. Once built they were draped with some cheesy white felt cloth to simulate snow and the buildings placed on it. 

 

Last but not least, there must be Christmas cars. I picked up a set of three on Ebay - a boxcar that I put some wrapped packages in, a hopper that I filled with silver bells, and a caboose - and bought some cheap ones to repaint to fill out the consist. I made my own decals with the Testors decal sheets and an inkjet printer. I think they turned out pretty well.

 When the tree was set up it was surrounded by the newly built tables and all the pieces put on. With everything lit up it makes a festive holiday scene.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.