Brickley's
Words

Well another train show appears to have ended up ok. We were hoping to break even, but as it was the first show at that venue, maybe our expectations were too high. But anyway, the layout worked well modularized (mostly), so we will probably stick with that concept.

But man, we need some more members with cars. I guess that means me…

Some other things to look at (in no particular order):

1. Remote controlled points
2. Backdrop
3. More coherent “zones”
4. Switchable “dead” track zone for more control

Also looking at reducing the size, I think we all agreed this layout was bigger than we really need. TD suggested 2 2×3 module “end sections”, with bridges connecting them. That way we can adjust the size a bit by changing the length of the bridge section, and we still have a fair bit of space at each end. Maybe limit to 1 loop though.

But all in all, a pretty good show. Here’s hoping the Morwell show is even better!

Well, I guess it’s not important to most people, but it’s important to me, so I apologise in advance for the long post.
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My LDraw text generator, txt2dat has been updated. The new version can be found here.

Changes in this version:

1. Added “notdef” glyph to brick.ttf to fix problem with space being ignored.
2. Added $(MATH) to link flags in Makefile for Linux build.

Enjoy!

My LDraw text generator, txt2dat has been updated. The new version can be found here.

Changes in this version:

1. Font file now optional – will use the internal font from LDraw 1×1 bricks.
2. Fixed bug in checking for non-existent characters.

Also, the font file used for the default internal font is included in the source distribution as a TrueType font file. The font was created from the LDraw 1×1 bricks with letters, originally authored by Tore Eriksson. It only contains space, digits 0-9 and upper case A-Z. Lower case a-z are mapped to their upper case equivalent, all other characters will be ignored.

Duane Collicott is progressing on a nice looking cable-stayed bridge, you can read more about it here.

One day I should probably try a proper big suspension bridge, but I want to be able to use it in our train layout, so it will require a fair amount of planning, and probably multi-level tracks. Oh well, one day…