Rail Lynx Infrared Command Control System

My name is Jerry Bellina and I developed the Rail Lynx infrared command control system. Harold's been generous enough to allow me to develop it on his railroad as mine's still on the bench work construction. The biggest feature is that it's cordless. There's a battery pack and the handheld and it's complete walk around. It has 255 channels and handles infrared communication directly from the handheld to the locomotive directly.

The signals do not pass through the track. The Jeeps you see operating right now are under control of Dynatrol. What we wanna demonstrate here is the ability to run both Dynatrol and Rail Lynx simultaneously. You can have your locomotives at speed matching and all of the normal things that you would expect from a command control system. One of the unique features is that it is compatible with most of our command control systems and will run on top of them without interfering.

They won't control each other, but they will not interfere and you can put one on top of the other system. Do people ever get overwhelmed by the size of the layout when they first see it? I think a few of them have. I've also had people walk in and look at it. I had a man from the ministry who walked in, I never even realized he was a model railroader.

He looked at it for a couple of minutes and you're model in the Delaware division of the Erie railroad, aren't you? But the most common expression is when they look at it when they're going out is I'm going home and kick my layout. Or tear it down and start over. Well, what do they generally focus on? Is it the size or is it the fact that you've modeled a specific area or you have a lot of trains or you have a lot of track or what do they generally say when they come in?

The size usually gets them first. Yeah. The magnitude of it. And then they start, you know, different areas singling out like rolling stock. Common question, how many cars have you got on?

I don't know how many cars I got. I know gotta be at least seven or 800, but most of them are mine, but I've been blessed with some help from a few people. What special problems did you have to solve in building a layout this big? I think it's more coordination than anything else. And you acted as the coordinator?

Basically. That's basically I did for a living and getting ready for this presentation. I did not do a tremendous amount of the work myself. Try to coordinate so everything was, in fact we just had a building arrive yesterday. So that was part of the plan.

The only, this is my first experience with scenery was right here in the Port Jervis area. That's the first scenery I did while getting ready for this presentation. It's a joint effort of a lot of folks, not just your layout, it's in your house, but you've got a lot of friends. Right. I hope I still have friends.

And I have to give special credit to my wife too. Bearing up with this, I don't know how many thousand brownies she's cooked. Over the years for you friends, yeah. Yeah, the Friday night operating sessions. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, does that present problems having that many people involved for 14 years in a layout, thereabouts? Not really. I mean, they all get along good together and there's been a turnover, people move away and other people come on the scene. I have people come up here commute up here from College Park, Maryland to operate.

That's a distance. I have one fellow that flies in from up around Newburgh, New York. And it is a local airport. We go over and pick him up. He'll come down and work and go to the operating sessions and they come from quite a distance.

Tell me about the scenery, now, what materials and techniques have been used? I think I've used every scenery technique that exists in the book. I don't think there's any one particular scenery technique alone. The predominant one is the screen wire with the plaster over it and usually give it a coat of brown paint and if it's gonna be an area where it's basically dirt, we'll just sprinkle plain old sifted dirt from the yard over it. And ground cover the natural ground covers nothing unusual.

Well what about the trees? Well, trees again, we started out like most everybody does with these small puff balls, which is characteristic of many of the layouts. They look great when you're looking at it in a slope. Whereas if you're looking at the top of the trees, but we needed a lot of foreground trees and the price of foreground kits was just a little too much so one of our fellows who was doing a great job, as you can see to some large trees and he's basically use twigs from the woods. In fact, he's actually helped me prune some of my shrubs around the house, taking the dead stuff off and he's put the polyfiber balls over them to give it some configuration.

Then he sprayed that with the spray adhesive. Then dropped it into a large container with ground foam and shake it. I think the results are outstanding. Since you've gone to so much trouble to duplicate a lot of the Erie scenes on the railroad, many of those structures have to be scratched built. Now, who does that for you or do you do it or?

I haven't done it yet, but now the things will start to slow down I might start doing a bit. It's been the help from any number of people. We've done a lot of kit bashing there in Port Jervis. There was a raw kit bashed, they don't look like the standard kits. We tried to stay away from that we didn't want to have what was on everybody else.

Right. So you've got a lot of kit bashing and scratch built structures that other people have built. Right.