Things are bigger and better in TEXAS !!! Clearwater and the Milwaukee Road Changes again...

Now it's late 1997 and we've been moved to Texas by order of the BNSF Railway.  I was able to latch onto a spare bedroom again at our new place.  About 11'x12' or so.  And so the layout design team went to work again.  Me, my trusty pen and pencil, protractor, compass and and paper.

Living in Chicago the previous three plus years, I had been able to explore the REAL Milwaukee Road leftovers along the Chi to Omaha main, and the line along the Mississippi River.  Oh, it was easy for me to change from modeling the Montana lands to the Midwest.  Fell hard for the great interaction between the railroad and the big river. 

This "version three" of Clearwater was somewhere along the Mississippi, probably between the Quad Cities and La Crosse WI. And it was the autumn color season.  I had to have a swing bridge and some interlocking. Lots of grain cars.  A brewery kinda like the Heileman plant in la Crosse.  And some rail to river transfer points like I had found in Marquette and McGregor Iowa, and Prairie DuChien WI.  And maybe another railroad or two. 

So I ended up this time with an interpretation of the Milwaukee's River Sub main, up the east side of the states of Iowa and Minnestota, crossing over a large tributary of the Mississippi and the need for a swing bridge. The CNW having a branch line that served the town, as well as interchanging with MILW Road.  And then I threw in a middle peninsula that had a large complex of grain elevators and such that would typically be found along the water, with a large area to be modeled of the river including a barge or two and a push boat. This trackage was supposed to be originally CNW, the end of a branch that crossed the MILW at grade at the south end of the swing bridge, but was washed out in a major flood somewhere past the crossing and never rebuilt.  The CNW then accessed the river terminal via trackage rights, but eventually gave those up and sold the track to Farmrail.

This little industrial area was served by "Farmrail," an upper Midwest division of the real Farmrail / Grainbelt operation in OK.  I had written an article for MODEL RAILROADER about it along with a track plan, and had gotten around to building an GP9 to represent a Farmrail unit - gave it a number and a name that was just beyond the top end of the actual Farmrail numbering.  And so I started buying grain cars.  And more grain cars. And more...

Both the MILW and CNW had staging tracks at each end of their visible runs (the MILW formed a continuous loop), and I also added a diamond at the MILW / CNW xing for fun.  Here are some pictures of this "Texas Version of Clearwater..."

Here's a Milwaukee Road Extra West coming out of the staging yard that would represent Savanna IL, as this train heads northwest along the west side of the Mississippi River enroute the Twin Cities.  That's an SD7 leading, with a freight F7B, passenger F7A and freight F7A (all Athearns). The lead unit is on the junction switch to the "river district," that was switched by Farmrail. Scribbled out on the plaster towel scenery is the location of the riverfront bar/restaurant, and a wharf that would jut into the backwater.  That mammoth truck is sitting up on the ledge that the highway was going to be placed on, which would slowly narrow and merge into the background.  The layout made a 90 degree corner behind the coved Masonite used for the backdrop.  Coving makes all the difference! That hole in the bluff behind the first B unit was going to be the former CNWs' tunnel portal, representing the earlier days when the CNW crossed the MILW at grade and then followed that tributary river off to the west.

 

The train is just about to cross the swing bridge that crossed a tributary of the Big River that theoretically was navigable aways into Iowa.  For those of you familiar with the upper Mississippi region, you know that having that scenario would be rather challenging with the bluffs! Oh well.  It's MY layout. The highway too would have crossed the bridge on a sleek concrete span.  The swing bridge was scratchbuilt, using some plans that I drew up using the MILW's bridge at Sabula IA as an inspiration. The bridge tenders' shanty was built a while later.  Obviously the backdrop behind the bridges would need more work on it to represent a waterway carving into those bluffs and wiggling out of sight around a bend. 3D trees would help the switch from layout to backdrop all along the ridge lines.

 

 

A view of the train crossing the span, taken from the river.

This is the "river switching district," under the control of the Farmrail.  The large rail-to-river transfer elevator complex took up this end of the area.  There was a dump shed on the far track, between the office building and the tall narrow machine shed.  Grain would arrive by rail here and be loaded in the eight silos for holding. The main track stub (this side of the switch stand) held an engine and one long car, and next to that were a couple of storage tracks for the grain reload.  Eventually, overhead concrete and steel conveyors in enclosed sheds would connect the silos, the under-track dumper and the riverside.  The flat area at right was going to have three barges and a push boat tied to the river piling wall, with one of the barges being loaded and tipped at an angle to the river surface. This whole transload was patterned after the one at MacGregor IA. The building in the distance at right was Sethness Products, a corn syrup processor that's really in Clinton IA.  Moorman's Soybean Processing Plant (from Quincy IL) is along the backdrop in the distance past the tall silos.  All three industries were scratchbuilt.  I went thru a pretty good amount of styrene plastic sheeting. 

 

A wider side view of the rail to river transloading facility. The clouds on the backdrop were done by my wife, after months of pleading to give it a try. Looked lots better than my efforts on the previous layout!

 

The Farmrail operation had a small house track and service facility / yard office at the far end of this stretch.  They used some leftover iron ore ballast that they scored real cheap from the DM&IR when they build the river tracks. 

 

 

There's Farmrail GP9 290, the "Kickapoo"  with a hand-me-down RI caboose, with a better view of the Moormans Soybean complex.

Here's Clearwater itself.  Like many towns along the river bluffs, the main  street and businesses / residences were a bit up the sides of the bluffs above the flat portion of land that the railroad used for their purposes.  That's pretty easy to spot here.  Yep, there would be a KFC.  The Milwaukee had a small yard of two long tracks next to the main and siding, and also a spur for MofW equipment and two tracks serving the smaller rail to river transfer facility at the distant left. Minimal fuel and sand facilities would be located here as well, you can see where. The aisle here would be the river, with just the narrowest sliver of river rock/water lining the fascia's top.  My workbench was "in the hole" below the layout.   By the way, that rectangular "hole" in the bluff slope a ways back was the lead into an underground "cold storage" cave that's a regular site in the Midwest.  I figured the bluffs here provided the perfect setting for such a site.

 

 

This rail to river transfer was based on one down at the edge of the Big Muddy in Prairie DuChien WI.  The outer track would handle grain box cars, and the adjacent track on the other side of the silos worked covered hoppers.  Scratchbuilt buildings, but those silos were still those contact lenses solution bottles from the 1980's! MILW 618 was a modified Athearn.

The showcase industry on the layout was the G. Heileman Brewery.  A few visits to the tasting room and taking the tours of the plant in La Crosse convinced me that I had to have the birthplace of Old Style beer in HO, greatly condensed.  However, as you can see, I followed the prototypes' lead and made it up of several different building materials and design, all thrown together along over three feet of the backdrop.  Since I didn't have room for the "World's Largest Sixpack" on ground level, I figured that I'd have the upper portion of the unloading structure be decorated in the Old Style regalia.  Room for about five covered hoppers to bring in product and ship out the leftovers, and room for many insulated boxcars to be packed with the brew along those loading doors.  Those pictures were of a real billboard and plaque at the plant that I was going to work into the model.  As far as the track goes, the stuff curving in from the lower left is the MILW RD's main (far) and sdg (near), and the CNW escape to one end of their staging - the track with the "Pink Lady" ballast.  There was a connection between the MILW and the CNW.  I built the diamond crossing myself using code 83 rail I think.  The rest of the layout was the usual Code 70 and 55. 

 

Looks like we have a standoff at the diamonds!  The MILW SW is out of the way at the beer brewery, while the MILW 280 is apparently taking the signal ahead of the CNW MP15 on a cab hop. The CNW line crossed the MILW, passed the south end of the interchange track, and then went into the bluff and single track staging. The line behind the CNW caboose swung around and led to the single track staging on the north end.  The MILW GP9 is heading RR west (north) and eventually to the twin staging tracks that were behind the river terminal district. I had kitbashed that MP15 and caboose to go along with a MR "Railroad You can Model" article about Janesville WI that I had put together from my days of living in suburban Chicago. 

Here's a view of the Celotex Plant (foreground) and their coal fired powerhouse against the backdrop.  Served by MILW, this was patterned after an industry in Quincy IL.  When I was on that CNW kick in the mid 90's, I did GP9 4556 from a good old Athearn Blue Box, painted it in the Zito Yellow.  GP7 4127 likewise was an Athearn, but in the traditional CNW yellow.  Both represented former Rock Island Geeps that the CNW bought when RI went under in 1980.  4556 was especially sentimental to me as I got a picture of it at Proviso Yard in Chicago, and then discovered I had a picture of the same unit from 1975, as a Rock Island, in Ft Worth Texas - prior to rebuilding! Likewise with the 4127...who would have thought two decades difference would still let me see those fine first generation units in a "before and after" scenario.

Here's where a removable duck-under took the CNW and MILW from the layout to their staging tracks.  Since the horizon was pretty much a bit under eye level, I'm guessing the track on this layout was basically about 55 inches above floor. At the extreme lower left, you can glimpse a homebuilt transistorized tethered throttle that I made from an article in a old MR.  I ended up doing three of them and really liked their control matched with the Ernst gearing in my Athearns.

This blog entry concludes the versions of Clearwater from the 1980's and 1990's. The year 2000 would bring another BNSF move and another MILW Road themed layout.  Unfortunately, I had lots of room in our new home of Kansas City, and I let myself get big dreams of a double deck layout.  I think my second version of Clearwater was the best, most complete layout that I have ever done.  This version in Texas of the "River Region" of MILW was a great concept, had LOTS of operational potential, but less than two full years of construction wasn't enough.  However, I did take three sections of this layout to KC and incorporated them into the "BIG" layout.  However, at this point, I think we'll swerve back towards TODAY'S model railroading taking place here in coastal North Carolina and leave the discussion and pictures of that KC behemoth for another time.  Next blog will be back "on track" with the saga of the WP/SN/maybe SP in the northern Sacramento Valley. 
 

More pictures....another recreation of "Clearwater"

The first Milwaukee Road "Clearwater MT" layout lasted about eight years, and then it was succeeded by version number two.  This covered three walls of a spare bedroom.  I had staging tracks at each end of the layout, so this was even more "proto-freelanced."  Let me explain.

It was sometime in the 1980's that TRAINS magazine ran an article about the Milwaukee Road's possible connection between the end of the Clearwater Branch and I believe Great Falls.  The two page spread went into some detail about the feasibility studies and included a map of the proposed "cut-off."  At least I think it was TRAINS...

Anyway, by now I had LOTS of Milwaukee rolling stock, and I wanted to have a layout that was an "intermediate placeholder" on a more or less "through" route.  Not the main line between CHI and TAC mind you, just a bit more "heavy duty" than the old branch that the first layout had represented.  And so just about everything was recycled, rebuilt, repainted or improved upon for this version.  I ran six axle second generation power on some trains, and I had a siding that was long enough to stage a "meet" and have two or three units and a twelve car train and caboose get in the clear. So, with staging at both ends, the train orders now included "meet" orders.  Oh, I still have those sets of "fulfilled" clearance cards and orders from both of these layouts stashed away today.   Enjoy the views!

 Once again, a highway coming into Clearwater served as a focal point and meandered its way from one end of the twelve- or thirteen-foot long wall.  Looks like that DC driver has cleared the tracks and is no doubt looking at "the hooker" that is standing out in front of "Hoopey's Bar." But it looks like she already has a potential client.  Couple of trucks are parked over at the Triangle Café (Suydam), eating that awful food.  Is that a "hippie kitbash" on that pick-up truck there?  Gas station at the extreme left center.  The road sign I showing the way to Great Falls (straight ahead), and to Missoula (hang a left!).  The scratchbuilt corner grocery store with apartments above has been reworked a bit from the previous layout.  Up against the backdrop is the Farmer's Co-Op, that old Suydam kit from the previous layout, updated and detailed (note the radio antennas) and three grain bins.  What are they made out of? Contact lens wetting and soaking solution plastic bottles with the flip top opening cut off, and seam lines scribed into them! Easy to see that now, right? 

Oops, this should have been the first picture in this group. In the foreground, the highway to Missoula from downtown Clearwater takes off and is used as a disguise for the escape to the left side staging track.  Purina Chows has been updated and changed a bit, and that radio station is still begging for listeners. You can see the "west siding switch" striped stand and target next to the "Smoky Bear" sign.

 

Here's a closer view of Purina.  It's a different day with a grain box car spotted.  Since the previous layout, it added a gas / diesel pump out front, and took the Chevron business with it.  Gas prices are higher, too. 1989-ish.  The track inspector has cleared onto the spur - maybe a train is due?



Here's an even closer view of Purina. The backdrop looked much better when you didn't see those awful clouds I tried. They found some better looking numbers for the pump prices. 

Someone must be returning from a day at one of the great fishing locations, and some local yokel has parked their car facing the wrong way while they grab some overpriced goods at the A-1 Market.  Looks like the Co-Op has a little business with a station wagon getting a few bags of something.  At the right is the church.  Never got a sign.

Told ya last time that the station got re-roofed.  Here 'tis.  Still loading that station wagon at the Co-Op.  As you probably surmised, I once again handlaid all the track and custom built each switch for the situation.  I think Code 70 on the main, and then 55 on the siding and on the auxiliary tracks here too.  

 

 

Extra 5601 East is pulling to a stop at the depot, betting it's the local.  And there's a few cars to move around. There's the old barite building from the previous pike, now is known as "Al's Aggregates." That chip hopper predated the Walthers' models, just added extensions to an MDC Roundhouse gondola.  It worked. Notice that the railroad has a nice sign for the re-roofed depot.  I wonder how many times speeding cars missed that jiggle in the road and ended up "on company property?"

 

 The larger space in the spare bedroom allowed me to really stretch the railroad out thru town. The road that ducks behind the depot comes out to that gravel parking lot at Union Ice.  Yep, another vintage Suydam kit that was new since the first Clearwater layout.  In the upper right is the local Chevron Bulk Plant.  The building itself was scratchbuilt, and the old orange juice cans from the earlier layout got worked over and two more added for storage tanks.  The old metal buildings that had been a "sawmill" on the older layout were repurposed into a larger business, "Devlin Builder's Supply."  They handled just about everything and was the Sunoco dealer too.  Unloading that coal hopper will be fun.   



Close up of the Ice House and Ollie Svengaard and Sons. 

 

Looks as if Ollie and one of his sons are straightening out the loading dock, probably killing time until that tank car is pumped dry and they're supplied again.  Ollie's building is somewhere else now, sold on EBay a couple of years ago. At the lower right you can see the start of a long curved wooden trestle that took the track towards staging on the "east" end of the layout, i.e., towards Bonner Jct.  I never got around to working much on the "canyon" that it spanned (it was an actual three foot long scratchbuilt bridge), and it proved to be as close to mainline MILW ROAD modeling as I got, with the track going directly into a tunnel after the bridge, my attempt at that famous "steel bridge to tunnel on flat rock outcropping" location in the electrified zone that I can't recall the name of right now.   

 

 The next layout was built when BNSF moved us to Fort Worth TX in 1997, and reflected a change in Milwaukee Road location for the setting.  Pictures and story to follow later on.

 

Hey- Time for pictures of my old layouts..........!

These ought to be good for a laugh at how far things have come since these were taken in the mid 1980's. 

This was a roughly 9 or 10 foot long shelf layout that represented the Milwaukee Road in perhaps Clearwater MT.  Just picked that town and that branch out of the employees' timetable.  No rhyme or reason.  There was a four foot long "staging track" that came off one end, over my workbench.  This was located in a spare bedroom of the house I owned in Orangevale CA whilst I worked for the Western Pacific / Union Pacific. It had the customary twin-tube fluorescent fixture (I think two of them end to end) over the layout, and of course, I hadn't thought about the color matching with the "Kelvin heat numbers," and so with Kodachrome 64 slide film in my Canon AE1, pictures were always a frustration.  Long exposures at high F-stops became the norm.

I hadn't had a "real" layout for about eight years when I started this one, and it was after I entered into my "Milwaukee Road" phase.  I had some Little Joes and BoxCabs and had planned for a layout of the Rocky Mountain Div, but I just didn't have the room in that house.  So, I built some MILW stuff and did this little layout to try new techniques that had come along since my SP Donner Pass pike of the late 60's and early 70's.  It still featured handlaid track (Code 70 and 55 and a little 40) and turnouts. I used the usual 1x4's for making a box frame, and then plywood for sub-roadbed supported by risers.  For the roadbed, I think this was just before Homasote became the rage, or maybe couldn't find any in NorCal.  I used ceiling tile instead.  I took the same precautions and painted it so the sides were sealed.  Never had a problem with warping or anything after ballasting or after years of being in place. I found you had to be very careful when butting the ends of the ceiling tile up to each other and assure it was a level joint.  It does not sand well, and using patching paste or wood putty does not allow must spike penetration from the ties glued on top of it. But I was very happy with the layout.  Used train order operation, switch lists and such.

This is looking towards the branch as it "left" the town, heading back to the Milwaukee Main at Bonner Jct.  I figured that the locals ("Patrols" on the MILW in most areas) came out of Missoula.  Here comes the 299 inbound from the Jct. with today's train.  The highway bridge at the upper left kinda hid the escape from the layout to the staging track.  Narrow lanes! No shoulder. I had two storage tracks in the weeds and dirt, but decided to keep only one, where that Co-oP Fertilizers center flow is parked.  The other track (these were both laid in Code 40!) got partially ripped up and MofW road replaced it.  That's some die-cast generator truck from "Lesney(?)" that had to go back to the late 1950's you see on the gravel. The Clearwater siding's east switch is between the hopper and the box cars, and there are two industries on that far spur, "north side" of the main.  The far one was from a Suydam metal mine kit, and was supposedly a small barite mine head house to load the stuff to ship out to oil fields.  And there was also a small lumber mill, with another Suydam metal kit at the extreme right, middle. Those two Suydam kits dated from the 1960's. I recall swearing off building kits that required soldering after that.  But learning about flux changed my mind... The backdrop was coved, and those trees were leftovers from the Donner layout, made of wooden dowels with asparagus fern branches.  TEDIOUS.  The shrubs and trees were enhanced with the early type of ground foams that were just coming on the market.

 





Here's a more head-on view of the Barite plant and the lumber mill. Geep is an Athearn (GP7!) painted and detailed more or less for MILW 299, and equipped with Ernst slow speed gears that made it a dream for switching.  Boxcars are MDC/Roundhouse with new lettering added or old stuff removed to represent different car series.  You can see the problem with trying to "sand down" and blend the coved portion of the backdrop to the flat portions - that darker vertical line in the sky.  Actually, thinking back, those coves might have been heavy paperboard...  I did the backdrop, using the color mixes from the Model Railroader article on their project layout for the ATSF Pauls Valley OK area.
I used Caboose Industries hand-throws, with the ones off the main track the "tall" ones with the MILW striped targets, white paint and red decals.  This was the first layout that I combined hand-laid track and switches with hand-throws, and they worked just fine. I believe I made added little springs (Kadee?) that rubbed the closure rails against the points to ensure better electrical continuity.

 Another day on the Clearwater Branch, and SD7 504 is in charge.  Basic Athearn SD9 shell that for some reason ended up on an Atlas 6 wheel power chassis, from I think an SD24.  This unit went into the shops in the 1990's, got an Athearn power chassis with Ernst gears, and the fuel tank corrected to just the single saddle variety, creating that big hole down there that Milwaukee seemed to like for keeping the locomotive weights down. The conifers in this shot hadn't been given the "ground foam" leaf treatment yet. That helped hide the overly thick trunks of these, built in the later 1960's I think from a Jack Work article in MR.  I believe the 504's crew has just spotted that bulkhead flat and is running around their outbound train.

Another view of the "west end" of Clearwater with the local out of the way. That's code 70 rail on the main, 55 on the sdg and far spur, and itty bitty code 40 on the storage track in the foreground with bleached out ties.

 

 

MILW Work Extra 299 is pulling up to the depot to chat with the agent and see what other work they have in town.  Depot was scratchbuilt from plans in RMC in the 70's, and I got an unintended Milwaukee-style run down structure atmosphere with that roof.  Actually, I had made my own shingling, and went a little heavy on the glue.  It didn't curl up right away, but it sure played havoc with the framing under the roof.  I almost died when I saw it the morning after adding the roofing.  But a couple of years later, and I re-roofed it with some styrene roofing material, and the depot served on a couple more layouts thru to the mid 2000's in Kansas City!

Broadside view of the 299 and the Clearwater depot.



299 pulls on down to block Main Street, but looks like the semi driver has already got things plugged up as he backs into the Farmers' Supply.  The "church" started out as an Alexander Scale Models "school" kit and repurposed.  Suydam Feed Mill in that chequered paint at right, and the fuel pumps in front are another English "Lesney" prop, with a "Hot Wheels" hot rod gassing up at those NICE prices! The Chevron sign and lettering came off an actual Chevron road map.

 

Here's a view looking to the "west," and the end of the branch. The KLAC billboard was something that I got as a listener prize for a contest back when I was at USC in the early seventies.  If you aren't in radio, you probably wouldn't know that it was out of place, and "out of the sound of my voice."  Suydam kits provided the Purina Chows' Farmers Supply Company and the tall grain elevator against the wall.  I scratchbuilt the shorter elevator with the white loading hose from styrene  to fir in with the complex.  Wershila Fuels building was an early modular kit from ?, and those fuel tanks are from old orange juice containers that dated back to the sixties, and had served at Chiloquin on my SP/BN Oregon layout! The small tavern is a metal Woodland Scenics, and later got a sign proclaiming it "Hoopey's Tavern."  A rather shapely blonde (I think the Preiser name for the figure was "The Hooker") was added at the front door too.  Maybe she drove the TBird.  The corner grocery store with upstairs apartments is scratchbuilt from scale wood. 

 

 

299 sitting at the depot, crew at beans before heading back to Bonner Jct and Missoula.  Looks like I had recently "planted" that telephone pole judging by the white plaster piled around the base.  That track inspector is gonna hate dragging that speeder over that ballast to set it on and ride.

 



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...