My wife and kids went to the beach yesterday, so I stayed up way too late railfanning on the layout…
I followed the work of the Penn Central turn as it worked the interchange at North Jct.
If you open up the album, you can read the captions.
Lee
Wow. That was really nice to see! I really liked it. Keep up the good work. [tup]
[#ditto]
Looks like a neat “shelf-around-the-room” set-up!
How about a track plan or a couple of overall pics![8D]
Very nice series! Is that HO?
Let’s see… a turn goes out to the interchange, interchanges cars and returns to the yard with the new train from the interchange point. It had to work around other trains during this operation.
Is that the way it played out?
The Photo work was marvelous, a video would be MUCH better… but this was very well done.
You might wanna clear some of that stuff out from under that single track…=)
That was great! I am need of a cyber fix of train modeling since its too hot out in my gagrage. That helped! Very cool lay out indeed. I really liked that interchange point, nicely done. [tup]
Thanks for the feedback. The layout is N scale, and you can see all the track plans and photos you can eat at my website.
The single track bit is a temporary connection between the staging yard and the rest of the layout. As soon as I finish renovating a couple of bedrooms, my son (and his junk) will move out of the train room, and work can commence on the finished product.
As a point of reference, here’s the track plan that’s in service right now…
Most of the action in the slide show takes place at North Junction, at the bottom of the image.
The red lines indicate temporary trackage that allows the layout to be operated until the final system plan can be implemented. The grey area and lines behind the red lines aren’t in place at this point.
Here’s an overview of what’s built so far…
This is North Junction
The track running off to the rear connects to a one-turn helix that goes down to an 8 track staging yard.
This is the bulk of the layout, with the Luke Paper Mill and Maryland Jct. as the high lights. The loop to staging is directly below this.
The following scene is located just to the right of the paper mill complex, where the railroad crosses the river. It’s at the base of the peninsula, and is the extent of the permanent scenery.
This is the temporary yard. Using this in operations sessions is very instructive as to what elements to include in the final yard design.
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Lee, very nice slide show and nice track plan.
What struct me as interesting here was how we all approach the modeling “tasks”.
Some of us work up a general plan. We have an idea in mind and even on paper how the overall will work when done.
Some of us take that plan and start on task 1, benchwork and do not go to the next task until all the benchwork is completed.
I like how you have some areas that are “finsihed” with scenery etc. and some that are still in work and on the drawing board so to speak.
I tend to be in the camp of task orientated individuals - do task 1, then task 2 etc. Seeing yours and other layouts has convinced me that this method is not necessarily the best and can lead to burnout and slow periods (aka I’m just too tired/bored with dropping feeders etc).
Thanks for the post and inspiration.
Regards,
It’s interesting you should draw a temporary yard as a means to learn what you want to do with the final yard.
I myself have specific plans but like to “Throw track” until I know the plan will or will not work.
That junction is a tricky one.
Do you physically remove the cars by hand and replace them with new cars “Inbound”?
Tom, I guess I work the way I do because my favorite “Task” is scenery design and construction. I build chunks of the layout in the garage, where messy smelly things don’t bother the wife, then tote them upstairs to install.
You can see in this shot, the garage workbench in the background, raw track on the layout, but dammit! There’s ground foam on them thar hills… It’s never too soon to start scenery. Sometimes you can discover potential clearance problems or other modifications you’ll need to make by starting your scenery rough in early. The advent of foam base scenery really makes this a very flexible process.
Here’s North Junction in it’s raw state. It was built on a piece of 1x attached with shelf brackets to the wall.
As for staging this particular segment, once the outbound car are pushed back onto the PC staging track, I can either turn the waybills and they come right back on, or I can pull them by hand and set new ones on from the storage box.
I was just goofing off while I staged all the photos. There wasn’t a set schedule for the passing thru trains, but that line comes right out of the 8 track staging yard, so the WM traffic can really tie up the Penn Central switcher. In real time, (and with no photo run by’s!) it can take about an hour for the crew to run this job from start to finish.
Lee
Very nice! I would do one of my New Poland Turn, but I only have 1 town that has finished scenery.
Dont worry about the unfinished scenery, let’s see more of these operations. Im just glad we dont need film.
Look at my slide show again… you’ll notice unpainted roads, a highway bridge with no piers holding it up, building fronts just stuck to a wall… One of the reasons I took these was to look carefully at the scenery “to do” list that remains.
Mostly they’re little 15 minute to an hour projects. There just seems to be a lot of them!
Lee
Nice work, really enjoyed your story. I did something vaguely similar with mine ~ a year ago, I was amazed at how long it takes to stage each photo (lighting, etc).
Taking a lot of photos is so much easier with a digital. I can set the exposure time and the aperture, then fire off as many variables as I like until I get to the good one. Also, lighting adjustments are very easy in my layout room. I have track lighting with heads that pivot almost the full 360. I basically set up the scene, make the adjustments to the camera settings, then reach up to adjust the lighting. The lamps are also on a dimmer, so the exposure time can be reaaaally long to take care of those pesky depth of fireld situations.
Lee
Great looking layout. I love how you showed the mountians before and after. Kinda gives me a idea of were I need to start on mine. Very realistic !!!
Boy was that interesting! I enjoyed it all including the info and remarks by everyone![#ditto]
Walter in Columbia, TN