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)