Building the "Grand Imperial Railway"

INTRODUCTION:

About the scale
Photography Notes (early photography)
Photography Notes (current photography)
Photography Notes (optimization methods)
Alternate text in images

About the scale:

All track used in this layout is Hornby code-100 two-rail sectional track at a track gauge of 16.5 millimeters (gauge means the distance between the inner faces of the rails). “Code 100” means that the height of a track rail is 100 thousandths of an inch, or to put it another way, the height of a rail is one-tenth of an inch.

Track with a gauge of 16.5 millimeters is known as “HO gauge”, corresponding to a scale of 3.5 millimeters to the foot. Hornby trains, however, are built to a scale of 4 millimeters to the foot, known as 00 (“double-0”) scale.

Since HO gauge track is constructed to a scale of 3.5 millimeters to the foot, the 4-millimeter-to-the-foot Hornby trains do not precisely correspond to the Hornby track scale. This uniquely British combination of HO-gauge track and 4-millimeter train scale is known as “Double-0 gauge” or “British double-0”.

A 4-millimeter-to-the-foot (00) scale model is 1/76 of the actual size.

A 3.5-millimeter-to-the-foot (HO) scale model is 1/87 of the actual size.

All HO gauge (1/87 scale) two-rail 12-volt direct-current trains (American, German, etc.) will run on this layout.

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Photography Notes (early photography):

All photographs in Plates 1 through 134 were taken with a Canon EOS Rebel X single-lens reflex camera, using autofocus and auto exposure, on Kodak ISO 400 film. The camera is equipped with a 35-80 millimeter zoom lens and a Canon Speedlite 200E flash unit.  The exposed film was delivered to a Wal-Mart Photo Center for development and printing. 

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The Photo Center provided 4-inch by 6-inch glossy prints, which were later scanned into the Keyserkill Studios web files as JPEG images using a Hewlett-Packard 4100C scanner.

The original glossy prints are saved in a conventional photo album as a convenient hard-copy reference to assist in documentation.

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Photography Notes (current photography):

Although the Wal-Mart Photo Center delivered excellent quality prints promptly at a reasonable price, the tight scheduling of the busy staff at Keyserkill Studios compelled the development of an even faster and more flexible method of obtaining photographs for publication on the website. Accordingly, a management decision was made to install 100-percent digital in-house photo-imaging capabilities at the Studios. These capabilities were deemed essential for the variety of imaging requirements that are now rapidly emerging, in business as well as "After Hours" environments. 

Therefore, beginning with Plate 135, all photographs are now being taken with a Sony DSC-P92 Cyber-shot 5.0 megapixel digital still camera, using autofocus and auto exposure on a Sony MSA-64A Memory Stick. The camera is equipped with an optical 3X power zoom lens and a built-in flash.   JPEG images from the Memory Stick are uploaded from the camera through a USB port into the Keyserkill Studios network, where the images are edited using Microsoft Photo Editor or other photo software. After editing, the images are sequenced and classified for the web.

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Whenever it is desired to produce glossy prints for the hard-copy reference album from the Cyber-shot's JPEG images, a Hewlett-Packard HP Photosmart 7760 Color Printer is employed. Using 4-inch by 6-inch photo paper fed from a dedicated paper tray, the HP 7760 can produce glossy prints from JPEG images that are retrievable over the local network at Keyserkill Studios.

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Photography Notes (optimization methods):

In December, 2003, the JPEG images in all the plates, from Plate 1 onward, were "optimized" with Adobe Photoshop (r) software. This "optimization" reduces the file size of the images, thus shortening the download time to a browser. Every new JPEG image is now routinely optimized before being included in this website.

Early JPEG pictures were taken at VGA resolution, the lowest resolution provided by the Cyber-shot camera, in order to minimize the download time for the pictures. Beginning with Plate 298, the resolution of the Cyber-shot pictures has been increased to 1.2 megapixels, because the Adobe Photoshop optimizing software is able to compress these improved images to a size suitable for fast downloading. Whenever possible, older VGA Cyber-shot pictures are being re-taken at 1.2 megapixel resolution. Some examples of such "re-takes" can be seen in the the following plates:

Plate 180 (Picture of one-twelfth scale layout models)
Plate 181 (Picture of one-twelfth scale layout models)
Plate 182 (Picture of one-twelfth scale layout models)
Plate 182 (Picture of one-twelfth scale layout models)
Plate 223 (Picture of soldering tools)
Plate 267 (Picture of reference scrapbook)
Plate 268 (Picture of reference scrapbook)
Plate 269 (Picture of track template)

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Alternate text in images:

All images in the plates are being fitted with text tips. A text tip (known technically as alternate text) is a browser feature that displays additional text information when the mouse pointer is placed upon an image.

The text tips contain the following information about each image:

Subject matter
Camera and/or scanning hardware
Photographic media (film or digital)
Computer file type (usually JPEG)
Principal image-editing software

The following plates have so far been fitted with text tips (as of July 07 2004):

Plates 1 through 45
Plates 388 through 452

The following plates have not yet been fitted with text tips (as of July 07 2004):
Plates 46 through 387

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