Daniel E. Markle's Blog

Made this video in the layout room at the East Coast Large Scale Train Show this spring.



Also, took some pictures of the train show. The CN car in the diorama was my favorite static display. This Interstate locomotive led my favorite running train; as shown in the video the selection of cars reminded me of various trains I've enjoyed. These distinctive passenger cars in the live stream display intrigued me, if anyone knows what country they are modeled from, please let me know.

Video and photos were taken with my G1 phone, which did not turn out as nicely as I hoped. The halls were not as well lit as expected, which my phone is very sensitive to. Unfortunately I didn't have better equipment handy.

Perhaps the biggest plus of this show; I didn't buy anything. It was refreshing to just wander around a show enjoying the sights without being tempted to buy (although if I'm into G gauge by next year it may never happen again).

When using the run trains feature of xtrkcad, the tutorial is misleading where it directs dragging the engine and cars to the track. Instead, these items are placed just like track elements; click on the item to place in the toolbar, then click within the drawing area and drag the item where you want it.

First select the engine to place in the toolbar (shown selected here in blue and black):



Then move your cursor down into the drawing area, click and hold, dragging the engine into place on the track (shown here in orange just below the brown wall):

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

Although technically not a holiday car, this O gauge MTH Shamrock Pale Ale Car was exactly what I was looking for to add some green spirit to my layout today.

Upgrading an old Java Swing application using Substance LAF to 5.3, the old method of instantiating org.jvnet.substance.SubstanceLookAndFeel fails as this class is now abstract. This is documented in the release notes; however instantiating a concrete skin using:

UIManager.setLookAndFeel(new SubstanceBusinessBlueSteelLookAndFeel());

Causes the following error for most of them on OS X:

Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.ClassCastException: com.apple.laf.AquaRootPaneUI cannot be cast to org.jvnet.substance.SubstanceRootPaneUI

Use the third recommended option instead:

SubstanceLookAndFeel.setSkin(new SubstanceBusinessBlueSteelSkin());

This usage resolves the issue for every skin I've tested.

This DT&I (Detroit Toledo and Ironton) work crane and boom car set by K-Line caught my eye, it's the first set of this type I've acquired in O gauge.

These road name labeled versions are an interesting staple of model railroading that were rare in real life. Actual railroad lines didn't want work cars cleaning up derailments, etc. to have their names on the side (they didn't want to be associated with train disasters) so these actually came in either plain colors or if marked were marked with the manufacturer's name. The 'work caboose' was also rare, these were usually just plain flat cars.

With the Super Bowl approaching and the impending commercials associated with it, I've just seen a commercial setting the standard by which their strength will be compared.



With the weakness most of these commercials have had over the past few years, this is going to be one tough little guy to defeat.

While working on permanent layouts for trains, we couldn't resist setting up a couple in the living room to run in the meantime.



These O gauge trains include the Lionel Polar Express, which Joyce purchased before Christmas and the extra cars to which she received as Christmas gifts. Also running in this video on the second loop is an MTH AEM-7 pulling the Amfleet passenger cars from the Lionel HHP-8 set; this consist matches the Keystone service trains which run from Harrisburg through Philadelphia to New York.

Last week I took some photographs of the Mifflin County Model Railroad Club's layout as of Christmas 2009.

I picked up this K-Line Pennsylvania Railroad MP 15 Diesel Switcher at Ed's Train Repair and Sales. He often has an interesting selection of used trains, and this one caught my eye for the price.

I've always liked the look of trains with weathering and although this one is clearly unintentionally weathered (i.e. rust, dents, and such), with a little bit of strategic spraying it will do its job in an old turnout somewhere on the line; pushing cars out to the mainline for pickup occasionally, most of the time collecting rust while fancy new engines like the one in the background zip by on the mainline.

When working with automatic id's in Grails, sequence generation uses a less than useful default sequence name of hibernate_sequence. Use the following syntax as part of the GORM mapping to set the sequence name to something sane:

static mapping = {
    id generator:sequence,params:[name:'mytable_id_seq']
}

Working on a Spring application using Hibernate recently I encountered the dreaded org.hibernate.HibernateException: Illegal attempt to associate a collection with two open sessions error. Fixes for this vary widely; it can be caused by problems ranging from bad session handling in your framework configuration, bad cascade settings, incorrect persistence settings, to forgetting initialization of an array stored in a @ManyToOne database relation.

Make sure to check thoroughly for the latter before wasting hours changing the transaction handling, trying various cascade settings, or mucking with persistence annotations.

Happy Halloween!

I don't normally purchase holiday cars, but Doris at The Station talked me into this one. She said to think of her as the witch on the left side of the car, so I suppose Dick would be the vampire on the right.

This one is made by MTH.

Saw this O gauge model of a Jet Snow Blower in the Lionel catalog and found one in stock at The Station.



Interesting that it has to move to ramp up. In actual use these aren't used to clear long lengths of track, but to clear switches, which is impossible to simulate with the action of this model. A Legacy command control model with remote control of the smoke, noise, and nozzle would be ideal.

After finding a 2009 Bloomsburg Fair Car and searching the internet to see what else was in the series, I found this one on eBay. It is an O gauge milk tanker car. This one was made for the fair by Weaver Models and is very nicely detailed.

When using the FCKeditor plugin for Grails, if the data is loaded into the view this way:

<fckeditor:editor name="detail">
  ${fieldValue(bean:itemInstance,field:'detail')}
</fckeditor:editor>

The raw html being retrieved from the data source will not be parsed as expected. This will display as html source in the editor, and if saved will result in the html tags being placed into the data source as escaped text. For correct handling, add .decodeHTML() to the JSTL retrieval:

<fckeditor:editor name="detail">
  ${fieldValue(bean:itemInstance,field:'detail').decodeHTML()}
</fckeditor:editor>