Signal Bridges are up on the auction block again. They are currently on sale at ebay.

The bridges are made from a NJ International Cantilever kit.  The targets are Red/Green 3-wire SMD’s.  The bridges were assembled by Richard @ Custom Signal Systems.  The wiring is common cathode.

I’m also going  put most of my Micro Trains Auto Racks up for sale to fund buying some more signals.  I’ll put a list together up tonight in case any readers are interested before they hit Ebay.

Shaun General

Just had this appear in my inbox. Looks like Model Railroader is jumping on the digital bandwagon.

I believe they were already offering MR in the Kindle or Nook Store but this will push it out to more platforms for subscribers for an additional $10/year.

Currently I scan all my MR magazines to a PDF format for reading on Mac, iPad and iPhone, takes about an hour per issue and it’s so-so quality, so I decided to give it a whirl to test the waters.

After making the purchase at Kalmbach’s site, you’re presented a link to download the issue. They use Zinio.com for their content delivery system.

Once you create an account and login, you are shown your library os issues. Currently I only see the next issue. Would be nice if they offered back issues or something.

Clicking the thumbnail lets you read the magazine online. I then checked out the links for iPad and downloading offline on the right side.

The ipad link says:

             [quote]To read on an iPad, please install the Zinio Magazine Newsstand & Reader app from the App Store here. Once registered to your Zinio account, iPad-compatible publications will appear automatically in the library view.[/quote]

The Download for offline reading link says:

             [quote]You’ll need to install the free Zinio software. Have you installed it or upgraded to Zinio Reader 4?[/quote]

So first I downloaded the Zinio Reader 4 app for my Mac and signed into it.

You’re presented the same screen as above pretty much. There’s options to download new issues automatically if you want, as well as previous issues if you’ve been a zinio user for a while. Reading a magazine works the same was as the online viewer works. You can only print the current page you are looking at it. The option to print all pages (or even more than two) is disabled, making printing articles a time-consuming process. The Mac app saves the pages as two page spread SWF flash files so when you ‘turn the page’ there’s a few seconds of delay while the app loads and renders the SWF file.  I was disappointed that you can’t download an issue as a PDF file, but they do have protect their issues from piracy.

Next I downloaded the free Zinio iPad app. Upon logging in it again automatically downloaded the issue to the iPad. The happy is pleasantly zippy. Flipping through pages is instant. The iPad app downloads pages an individual PDF files, so there’s no rendering to be done here. (And no, you can’t grab those PDF files. They are encrypted.)  The quality of the magazine on my ipad is way better than the scans I do, so I like that aspect of it.

Overall though I’m not super impressed… probably because I already started scanning magazines to PDF format and I was hoping I’d be able to continue to use that format in some way rather than split it between two.

I sent an email with my thoughts to Kalmbach and they kindly cancelled the subscription for me.  It just didn’t met my needs for a “digital copy”, but if you’re looking into adding it to your subscription I hope this information is useful.

Shaun General

This morning I started work on my mountain makeover using some good ideas from the modeler community.

The first thing on the list is to get rid of the cone shape top. I pulled off the masking tape, cut and removed the cardboard strip webbing, and cut down the foam supports.

The 2nd thing was it needed to be more vertical along the tracks, more like a cut was made by the railroad to put in the tracks.  So I removed the tape and webbing from the bottom portion of the mountain as well.

Here’s what it used to look like:

The cardboard webbing is still pretty intact so I placed it on top the hill as I think already it’s beginning to look to better with the shortened, rounded off top:

Shaun General

Shaun General