# newbie question



## tucker (May 27, 2007)

Hey everyone, I kinda new at this haven't played with trains for about 20 or so years. Heres the situation, I have my table set up, purchase some nice brown fellt. Laid the felt down place the bridge where I would like and set all the tressel up and through in the track. What is my next step? Should I nail all the tressel down and lay my road bed down. I would like to build Mountains and maybe a lake. I am planning on having a slot car track setup in the middle. Have to add some lenght to the table at one end. more supports at one endWould like some cool ideas that my 5 year old son would like to work with.

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## Lorne (Jun 7, 2007)

Bear with me on this one Tucker. I haven't built a layout before either but I have done a ton of reading on this. You can take what I mention as adivise or not....it's up to you.

The first thing I noticed was it looks like you have more than a few kinks in the track at the joints. Have you tried to run a train around this track yet? Going by what I've read, if you have any kinks then as your trains runs the track it'll hit these kinks and lose contact and stop moving. You may have to add a few short peices of track to get rid of these kinks. 

That's my 2 cents.....hope it helps.


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## Stan kolak (Dec 4, 2007)

*newbie quest.*

1st of all, why the tressel and elevation? Are you going to run another track under it in the future, or just some auto roads. Make sure the tressels are on the rail joints to avoid disconnects on rail sagging. If it was laid flat, aluminum foil or a mirror under the bridge would give you the same effect. For a 5 year old, accending and decending the tressel would be frustrating as the power would have to be increased and decreased. No doubt he would have fun with the slot racers in the middle. a set of switches with a shortcut would add some logic thinking for the litle guy as he gets older. Looks nice so far.


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## Boston&Maine (Dec 19, 2007)

Stan kolak said:


> For a 5 year old, accending and decending the tressel would be frustrating as the power would have to be increased and decreased.


That is what MTH's Protosound 2.0 is for


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## Stan kolak (Dec 4, 2007)

*tressels*

MTH. sounds like a constant load ;power asupply with a feedback loop that anticipates load change and maintains a constant VA with the loop. The chip would have to allow for shorts, anticipating spikes due to shorts, and not burn out, while maintaining thiks constant load. I hope the newbie has all this in mind.


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## Boston&Maine (Dec 19, 2007)

Stan kolak said:


> MTH. sounds like a constant load ;power asupply with a feedback loop that anticipates load change and maintains a constant VA with the loop. The chip would have to allow for shorts, anticipating spikes due to shorts, and not burn out, while maintaining thiks constant load. I hope the newbie has all this in mind.


It is as simple as a circuit breaker built into the transformer brick... You get a short/derailment and it pops, then you simply just flip it back and are good to go... Trust me, I had my share of derailments before I got 054 curves, I like to speed with my trains


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