Southern California Traction Club

COVID-19's impacts on public transit, Bowser Manufacturing's expanding into 3-D printing, and a clarification of the Train control Systems' Trolley Settings.

Thanks to all of you who have liked our page. Stay healthy and safe!

to all top like our pages.....Thanks! we are glad you enjoyed it.

We are set up at the Great Train Show this weekend in Costa Mesa, CA. Come see us!We are set up at the Great Train Show this weekend in Costa Mesa, CA. Come see us!

A place for your model railroad collections and are the PCC-IIs going away in Philadelphia? http://www.trolleyville.com/tv/times/current/index.shtml

Experimenting today with building some motorized axles. We used a lathe to part the plastic axle in some athearn 33 wheelsets, then installed some tiny double shaft motors in place of the axles. Next up is installing the pickup wipers, then experimenting with series and parallel configurations, with adjustments in the decoder settings to fine tune it. Geoff Bunza came up with this idea for motivating a caboose to create a gravity coupling as was done on Cajon Pass. We ar...e testing it’s viability in traction drives. Will it have low speed control with sufficient torque? Stay tuned. See more

Custom Traxx will have their demonstration traction layout (36" by 33") at Arnie's Model Trains on November 23rd and 24th for viewing and operation. Come on down and enjoy.

Come see us all weekend at Arnie’s! There will be a clinic given on hanging overhead wire at 2 pm on Saturday

The club will be at the North Coast Model Railroad Society Fall Swap Meet at Oceanside Heritage Park on October 12. We will be running our San Diego S70s and SD100s along with Los Angeles and Boston light rail models most of which have 3D printed bodies and Bowser traction drives. If you miss that, we will be back at Arnie's Model Trains in Westminster, CA on October 26-27!

We will have a layout set up Saturday and Sunday at Arnie’s trains this weekend! As an added bonus, the club will bring one of our new loop modules, which are under construction, for a clinic on overhead trolley wire installation. The clinic starts at 2pm on Saturday. Now is your chance to learn a craft that borders on being a fine art, from one of the masters of the craft, George Huckaby. http://www.arniesmodeltrains.com/

We are prepped and ready for the Great Train Show in Pomona next weekend! Come see us! Also, our friend at West Coast Traction supply delivered a donated a set of HO LA Metro P3010 shells to be built and used as club-owned equipment. Stay tuned as we begin a YouTube series on the building of this model. Work will commence as we wrap up the building of our new loop modules.

Continued coverage of urban rail transit projects across America, tips on Bowser units, and a trip to Arnie's Model Trains! http://www.trolleyville.com/tv/times/current/index.shtml

A test of the Magnorail system.

Continuing with our Magnorail installation. Today we used a router with a 1 bit to cut the slot for the guideway. Once we fit the whole track in place, we screwed it down and began the process of fitting together the blue plastic chain. Meanwhile, we assembled a bicycle rider which still needs to be painted. Some styrene sheet makes up the roadway which we laid out temporarily for a test. See the next post for a video of the test!