Whoa... almost missed my chance to put one more post in this blog before 2015 ended!


Now I can see how I kept letting the previous blog attempts on trains slowly fade out to nothing. Oh, I know the holiday's are busy, but really, how long does it take to knock out a few lines, paragraphs or pages?

Well, I had reached the conclusion that modeling the Western Pacific and one of its subsidiaries was the route for me.  To be honest, I hadn't really been exposed much to the Tidewater Southern in my life, either before or after I was a WP train dispatcher.  I'd of course dispatch it (what there was involved in doing that!) when I worked the WP Valley Job, and I kept saying I was going to go down and do a road trip over it sometime.  But never did.  I think the only pictures I have something on the TS is when I rode a passenger excursion in 1967 or 1968 over the WP and TS from Oakland to some winery near Escalon, I think.  Have to dig those out some time.

Sacramento Northern? Knew a bit more about them.  Saw them a few times out along the ATSF / SP / SN corridor between Port Chicago and Pittsburg, but again, not THAT much exposure.  I knew that I liked the various little branches that the SN had in the area north of Sacramento...seemed we saw evidence of the better days of the Sac Northern when we'd be going up Highway 70 to Oroville to play in the Canyon!

Thankfully, other railfans / modelers kept track of things on the SN better than I did, and so there's a treasure trove of stuff out there.  I learned so much about all those abandoned rights of way we saw in the 60's and 70's.  But even dispatching the WP Valley, working with the SN jobs was almost an afterthought, and more or less run by the terminals and trainmasters.  I would go months between talking to a real SN train on the lines north of Sacto - even though they ran almost daily.  Real Railroaders didn't need no stinkin' dispatcher...

So, I pretty much made a quick and easy decision that it would be the WP and the SN for my "retirement" layout.  I really got enthralled with the idea of the WP/SN when I went to Winterail in 2014.  After landing at SMF, I drove north and east to intercept the WP main, and of course, came across Sankey.  The old classic concrete team track platform and trailer loading ramp was still there!Even as a WP/UP dispatcher in the 1980's, we still had absolute signals at Sankey, though they served next to nothing in purpose.  The diamond was LONG gone, and revenue moves on the two stubs that came off the WP there were next to nothing.  I recall playing with the signals and switches there once on a slow night - I reversed the two switches, and set up an eastward (northward geographically) signal off the SN's Rio Linda spur to the west side of Sankey, once the main towards Marysville / Yuba City - just to see if they'd still work.  They did. 

I flirted at first with concept of modeling the WP as it passed thru an interchange point with the SN, complete with switching on both railroads and swapping of cars between the two.  The WP would end in a double-ended staging yard, and the SN would have a reasonable length "branch" coming down the middle of the room lengthwise.  Drew up some neat plans.  I was thinking that making it about 1970 would be a great time to model on such a layout.  The CZ, second generation power as well as plenty of F's and early GP's, and pooled power from UP and the BN merger people.  WOW!

But, once again, I'd be placing a staging yard (big deal, the main and perhaps two or three long parallel tracks) UNDER some part of the surface of the layout, given the parameters that I had set for the size and design of the room I'd likely to have in retirement. Or, more precisely, the smaller SIZE of layout I wanted to work on in retirement!  

Nope.  That staging track area that would be barely 4 inches below the main level would still be a nightmare.  And I'd have to disguise the exit/entry of the WP somehow, which in the valley, would be a bit more than just hiding it behind a building or under an overpass. 

The solution?  A much simpler to design, construct, operate and maintain shelf style layout.  Along two, maybe three walls of the "layout room."  There could be no WP main, but heck, why not "proto-freelance" a sort of junction between the WP and SN, involving branch lines of both?  Not like I was designing a layout for operating session with a big crew. Lights went on in my head.  I could still have lots of WP/SN gems...mostly non-turbo'ed Geeps, switchers, and maybe even a pair of F units to haul (OF COURSE!) the US Steel unit train.  Yeah, boy.  No "long" cars to require a really large radius, and, maybe throw in some street running.  Oh, I'd have to create an exit/entry point on the layout so that the main layout and the staging yard would meet up, but I figured one such "interface" would not be terribly difficult to do convincingly.

I think I was onto something.

(More later)

 

 When the obvious answer is right in front of your modeling nose.  Duh.

Yes, there's the answer. 

I think it was that I was so damned close to retirement, and with the slippery slide that my employer had been on over the past several years as far as knowing or caring about how to run a railroad, my thoughts returned me to a much simpler time.  Simpler in terms of getting things done by having the tools needed for the job, and having a group of people around that knew what the hell they were doing!  Getting hired right "off the street" as a train dispatcher with WP was NOT simple, and more than once I was ready to give up and stay in radio. But I was still young and full of piss and vinegar in 1979, and I kept at it.  It worked.  There it was....my very first railroad employer, Western Pacific! The WP had circled around after decades of my other dalliances in model railroading, and headed me right back where I really should have been all along.

But how to model the WP?  Of course I had been kitbashing WP stuff in HO scale since the late 1960's / early 1970's and featured at least WP run-thru power on my first really big layout in high school, that being the joint BN-SP Line between Klamath Falls and Chemult OR.  I still had some of the leftovers, a bit rough by today's standards of course. But the fever had been reignited. Within a feew weeks, I really got back into the Father River Route feeling, acquiring an A-B-B set of Athearn Genesis F's, and the needed Broadway Limited California Zephyr cars to make up a twelve car train. I wanted to grab them now, when they were plentiful and priced low. But what could I do in my envisioned future space in our retirement house (still undetermined in terms of location and size) and what would it be?

I guess I "wanted it all."  The colorful pooled power from the BN (and all its component companies at the 1970 merger time), UP, and of course, plenty of orange and silver WP power, and maybe an early McLeod Green unit or two.  Oh, the canyon would be great, and of course, EVERY Western Pacific modeler dreams of Keddie.  In practical terms, perhaps concentrating on Keddie yard as the featured spot on the layout, along with the "Wye," and staging tracks leading off to the west, north and east. 

Hmm.  No matter how selectively compressed, Keddie would take space, not to mention being able to work the Wye in.  Creating staging (obviously shared staging for all three directions was the answer to conserve track needed) would be a nightmare.  Maybe I could hope for a slightly larger room than a spare bedroom dimensioned space. Maybe a basement?  Not likely, since we'd be wanting to leave the part of the country where basements were practical and prevalent for our retirement.  And besides, I had just spent well over a decade working on a mid-sized layout, double decked and helixed, and had a sour taste in my mouth from the process and lack of progress on such a "monster."

So, I thought, "How about someplace in the Sacramento Valley?"  No Keddie Wye, but perhaps a more usable and practical town could be modeled in a smaller area, just like the SP's Santa Barbara Sub Div had been envisioned.  Wide curves, staging below and just enough scenery change to make it flow into a decent sized mainline run.  Hmm.  To me, the WP in the Valley meant the Wobbly and one of their subsidiary lines, the Sacramento Northern or Tidewater Southern.  Maybe I could work out an "interchange" scenario in this space, with Marysville as an example.  Not to be modeled directly, but use the design elements of that place. 

Drawings followed, and then more precise Word.Doc designs.  I came up with some rather inventive designs, but they all had one thing in common....staging tracks that would be under the main layout, and with limited square footage and minimal mainline run distance in order to change elevation for access to such staging without making it look like a mountain railroad.  Yep, that WAS possible in say, a 10x12 room. But that damned staging level so tightly tucked (4 inches or so under the top level) under the main portion.  No matter how good the standards and tolerances I would throw into building those subterranean tracks, I could see nothing but problems.  I would NOT be getting younger, and the thought of having to do much in that "height-challenged" space wasn't too terribly appealing. 

I thought briefing of visible staging down the center line of the room, but then the mainline run around the four sides of the room would be shortened to nearly nothing more than the town, a few yard tracks, and run-off on both ends to staging.  Maybe a double ended staging design with two walls (one long, one short) devoted to two separate "locales."  Short trains would be fine, but what about that CZ, and pig and autorack and hycube box car trains?  The engines would be heading into the "hidden" entrances to staging when the rear of the train was just coming into view from the "hidden" staging.  I tried all sorts of ideas, but the ability to place that staging someone really shut possibilities down.

Another factor-  geez, I'd be starting this layout in my early 60's, and I wanted to be able to have it "finished to a certain extent" that it was an operational and scenic delight.  I looked at my options with modeling a mainline portion of the WP (and maybe either the SN or TS), counted up the track required, and engineering and said, "WHOA, we've been down this road before."  I did not want to squander my retirement years muddling along with something that would never rise to any sort of advanced level of appearance.  Let's face it, my wife and I would have plenty of other things to occupy our time in retirement, I didn't envision me settling down to a locale where a "round-robin" group of model rails could by once a week and help me out, and any effort, even the smallest effort as put forth in my designs for such a layout, would likely end up "just taking floor space." 

Well, by 2012, I KNEW that the WP (and maybe the SN or TS) would be the focal point of the layout.  And so the great purge began of all that Midwest equipment.  I sold off and shipped over 900 pounds of railroad books, and parcels of model stuff (rolling stock, engines, detail parts and decals, scenery and buildings) to over 600 different folks via EBay.

Now what?

By 2011, I had removed all the old layout. 

And I was thinking about trying the Iain Rice method of "shadowbox" model railroading. So I constructed an small L-shaped test module(s) using his methods for construction as outlined in his book about Shelf Layouts.  And I liked it. 

I did change things up a bit... added a box frame of 1x3's in which the foam sat. It was all very solid.  I was using the 1/4" heavy steel L angle shapes left over from the previous layout instead of the two prong bracket / wall mounted support strips as he outlined.  I basically wanted to see how the thing looked with the fascia and overhead lighting set up and fascia.

It was very very satisfying.  I went ahead and put up a small amount of track (prefab) over that Homabed stuff, and was pleased with the results.  I had hoped to get around to do some hand-laid track on the bench work to test the strength, but never got to that. I had also wanted to experiment with some of the many newer methods of scenery.  Never got to that.

Basically, I had covered everything I wanted to experiment with on this type of layout construction.  Use of two-inch foam, couple of types of roadbed (cork and Homabed), laying down pre-fab track including super elevation, and wiring up and playing with that Digitrax system.  Even adding decoders to a couple of units.

At this point in time, I was still looking ahead to a layout in a spare room location in a future retirement house, like about 11x13 feet. 

Shelf style with perhaps a two foot wide peninsula down the long way middle.  SP Coast line with the best features of the Seacliff / Oceano section based in about 1967.  Those hard mud cliffs, oil pipeline land bases and of course walking horse wells here and there, a beach, a couple of those great SP Coast Line steel bridges over arroyos, leftover of old Highway 101 and the businesses of that era, and a small town with plenty of industry and a base for a yard engine and local, with thru trains picking up and setting out blocks of cars. So, visible main line would be about 80 to 90 feet, and staging below, which would make it a "continuous run" design, i.e. double ended staging to serve either direction, or to store passenger trains.  Oh, I was drooling about modeling the Lark, Coast Daylight and "Sad Sam" mail train.  had a few pretty detailed layout designs produced, and was pretty well satisfied with the concept. Minimum 30 inch radius for those passenger trains and piggyback.

And, being the pre-planner person that I can be at times, I started buying all sorts of SP stuff to get ready for the modeling.  Engines, cars, passenger equipment, etc.  More and more boxes of stuff.  Right there along all the Midwest prototype stuff left over from my Milwaukee Road designs of the previous 20 years. It was starting to overflow to the garage and even one side of the laundry room for storage.  God only knew what all I had in there!  I sure as hell didn't. 

Yes, I was getting ready for retirement.  I think I even had blog on this site that started talking about the layout and including a track plan or two and design "points." By now, it was getting close to 2012, and I had dreams of getting lots of that SP stuff kitbashed, or painted and decaled and detailed in advance of retirement (planned for 1-1-14) and relocation.  But of course, following all that pre-planning (and expenditures on rolling stock), there was no follow thru.  Just not enough time, or poor time management.  Did so much on-line research for the time period and equipment.  But didn't get to the models. Maybe I just wasn't ready for it.

And then, I realized what my true calling in model railroading had been all along, and what I wanted in the future.  It was so obvious.

(to be continued...)

I just can't seem to get motivated to keep a blog going. Have started one on my model railroading exploits and my infrequent jaunts trackside several times in the past decade.  But I always slack way off and then it becomes just another dusty bytesite. Maybe it's because I basically dislike spending more time at the computer than needed, even on my big old desk top, than I have to.  I thought maybe that will change now that I'm retired and we've finished the move to North Carolina and are settling into a truly relaxed "taking things as they come" attitude.

WELL, let's give it another shot. 

For those of you that haven't been email or Facebook pals of mine (Facebook...where I do 95 percent of my electronic connection anymore), let me give you a little background. My previous model railroad was a double-deck effort. After moving to Kansas City in 2000 and having all that room downstairs, I let my dreams run wild and had grand dreams of my "last" layout. I was so impressed with what Jim Providenza was (has) been able to do in a relatively small area with two levels on his Santa Cruz Northern,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XESsJzhXfEY     and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOJDVRjn4Cg
<if you care to click or cut and paste and see a really fine railroad>
that I read all I could on helixes (remember this was almost 16 years ago when the decision on the merits of double decking layouts was still vague and debated) and picked Jims' brain clean.  And the double deck bug bit. 

The first few years, I really buzzed along on the work.  I hand-lay all my own track - even turnouts - in Codes 83-70-55-40, but even that didn't slow me down much. I was working 3-11pm at my railroad job, and Patty was working the usual 8 to 5 routine, and so I could spend a whole morning downstairs and not feel guilty!  And on Monday and Tuesdays (my rest days from the BNSF), it was ALL DAY on the HO!

Then came the privileges of seniority and shifting to having weekends off. And then a nice third trick (11pm-7am) job on a district I truly loved.  There went the ability to devote full mornings or days off on the layout progress.  When I'd be getting up about 2 in the afternoon, it was time for outside yard chores and house stuff, and that took me to supper time and then enjoying the evening with Patty. Oh don't get me wrong....my work situation was great, and I loved that we had weekends off together after eighteen years of marriage.

Looking back, the change in available time for work on the layout was a blessing, as I realized SOONER than LATER that my grandiose layout would never stand the chance of getting completed to a reasonable state of completion, like model railroads are ever "finished," right? And by 2009, I got the jolt that retirement wasn't THAT far away.  And we certainly weren't going to stay in our present house, let alone Kansas City. I thought lots about what I could do, and even pared back the layout to get rid of the lower level and the helix, and thought I might get my butt in gear on that slimmed down design.  But, no.

And so about 2010 it ALL came down.  1-800-GOT JUNK was upset that I had a "half price" coupon.  What a garage full of stuff they had to haul away.  What a mess in the two months or so it took to pull it all down and get ready for it to be hauled away! But the elephant in the lower level was now gone, and my mind started grinding away on other thoughts for a model railroad. 

What size? Oh, MUCH smaller.

Where ? No clue yet, just started looking at retirement destinations, and that would obviously decide on layout space and design depending on a basement, a spare room, or whatever situation.

When? At least three or four years down the road. 

And with what? Holy Cow - did I have WAAAAY too much rolling stock, engines and other stuff than I'd need on this future layout.

By 2011, I had a plan, or so I thought.


MORE ABOUT THAT in the NEXT BLOG ENTRY.  If I keep doing this, this time...