Building the Cascade Branch

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
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With the main layout fully formed, if far from completely detailed, I’ve been getting the itch for new horizons. And the storage room that held my standard gauge staging and lone 3’ of track that previously represented the HOn3 Cascade Branch off of my Silverton Branch line needed cleaning. There was already a hole in the wall, so why not?[swg]

A week or so later, it’s time for a tour. I did have a vague idea of what I wanted in terms of a general track plan, constrained by the location where the branch entered the room, etc, so sketched out a plan. Something like this…

Once underway, I received authorization from the Finance Minister to go ahead, make another hole in the wall, a big one…

So the trackplan on paper doesn’t quite cover things. With the charter extended, I managed to add about 50 feet of branchline, 3 stations, 3 logging camps, 2 wyes, etc, etc before the grading of roadbed was complete. Want to fidn it on a map? Get your Colorado DeLorme Atlas out. At the right bottom of page 76, you can see Tacoma on the D&S noted. Follow the RR north, past the gaging station. The Animas curves east here and it says “TR 675” on the map at the location of Tefft. However, Tefft itself is not labeled on the Delorme, but it is on the maps sold by the D&S, etc.

Going northwest from the river, Cascade Creek goes uphill. Whatever the maps may say, my surveying crews discovered a great access for a line into an area rich in lumber, limestone, and hard metals. It’s been feeding the lumber mill at Rockwood for several years now, so it’s about time to invest in this lucrative route. It’ll be a joint venture between the Silverton Union RR and the Rio Grande. The SURR adopted Mears’ railroa

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Mike,

Very impressive concept for your addition. Your thorough research adds another dimension. I am looking forward to your progress reports. Thanks for sharing.

Wilton.

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Awesome Mike, thats really cool what you’ve done on this expansion. Oh we like holes in the wall. If you remember, thats where my expansion room goes through. Hehehe

That must have cost you some from your finance minister to get that approved.

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I often wonder how many members of the “hole in the wall” gang there are out there.[(-D] If I ever get to the point of expansion on my layout I may choose to join the group rather than the “remove the wall altogether” gang.

Thanks for the tour Mike and keep posting updates. I will be following with interest.[:)]

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[:-^]

Great work there Mike, I shall be following your progress as well.

But count me in too. I have a hole in the wall in the right back corner of my layout. It goes to a four track staging yard that all tracks are about 14 feet long in a storage area. It connects in that corner to my Mainline…

Long live Holes-in the-Walls.

Johnboy out…

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Thanks for the enthusiasm, guys [8D]. This project is scratching a long-held itch to go logging, plus address some needs for more operating space. Having staging is OK, but it’s a lot more fun to send a car somewhere, then just to a generic track[:-^]

Lots of the materials so far are recycled or leftover. My stock of track and components is laid out here at the location of Purgatory. This town started as the end of track in the early days of logging on the branch, but is now a local supply point for more diverse occupations.

As the branch continues, there’s a good spot for that ME bridge that has been sitting in a box partially complete for over 20 years. I’m going to cut the supporting tower down to 2 bays, which should give a deep enough canyon to look impressive.

As the RR continues to climb, it reaches the site of Camp 10, the first still active logging camp along the branch. I’m not quite sure what I have planned here yet, most like just a spur or siding.

Our party next views the site of Potato Hill, where Mears’ Logging RR operations are centered. There’s a wye, and there will be sidings to store excess rolling stock MTs before it heads back uphill and a enginehouse, along with supply warehouses.

You can see my minimalist backdrop in the overview of Potato Hill. It is made of 14" wide aluminum flashing, primered and spray painted with a can.

The railroad get twistier as it heads uphill. Potato Hill is at 62" above the floor, so most of the lay

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I got most of the track I had available laid over the weekend, then worked on the fascia and a drop down section to hold the canyon the Lime Creek bridge crosses leaving Purgatory. Still a lot of raw plywood and pink foam, but it’s coming along.

I’ve also decided to locate the mill for the stone quarry that is at the end of the line at Crater Lake in Purgatory. It’s a lot easier to keep help at lower elevations and helps add a quarry run to the branch to add some more interesting traffic to the logging traffic that dominates the Cascade Branch. The mill will sit on this siding, where the pink foam places the site ideally level with the top of the deck of the HOn3 cars serving the facility.

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OK, let’s head for the mountains!

This edition of the Cascade Branch story involves building the scenery base. I like good solid benchwork, so I still stick to standard L-girder construction for the supporting structure. But I use foam for my scenery base for its ease of working, strength, ability to hold trees, powerlines, fenceposts, etc. The result is some additional costs, but a very versatile system that is robust and easy to alter.

Another advantage of foam over L-girder construction is the way it makes pop-ups and lift-outs so easy. In fact, I had to go back just now and count how many I made-- seven! This also allows scenery to go forward if you’re waiting on track to make it’s way through the Purchasing Dept on your railroad. The long term advantages for maintenance are obvious.

Here’s a peek at a couple of the lift-outs. First of all, using foam provides a neat way to have pieces of the scenery appear to meet, but also remain removable, as the layers it falls into form a ready way to accomplish this. The foam also provides the structure needed to stand up to being removed and even scenicked away from the layout. Here’s the base for the big mountain that looms over Purgatory, fitted in place so it’s supported by the girders underneath.

Then you start building the mountain on top. I use foam-safe adhesive and bamboo skewers to attach everything together.

The longest popup is 6’. Here’s a pic showing the cut and fitted base propped up, then a pic of the partially built up backdrop mountain range.

[URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/690/99d6.jpg/][IMG]h

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This installment cover the bridge and canyon area, plus slapping on the Sculptamold to blend everything and add a good scenery base. Finally, the first buildings are already going up! This is boomtown railroading at its best.

My canyon isn’t very wide, although once I work a little forced perspective magic on it that will not be so apparent. The first piece of the puzzle is getting the tower for the bridge spans to help us some. In this pic, you can see the standard build of the ME viaduct tower. It’s meant to have an entire 30’ truss section to span the top. Having two 15’ end trusses would look even weirder. So I hacked the second tower I built so that it tapers.

Looks pretty good.

And once you have a bridge in, there are places to go, as the train ducks around the mountain/lift-out covered with early winter snows…err, Sculptamold.

The train has just emerged from the cut that leads to the hidden tunnel to the rest of the layoput and stopped at a spot on the hill i made for a water tank. The pink area on the other/right side of the tracks will probably be the location of the Purgatory station.

Now that almost all the Sculptamold is on, here’s a pic showing the stone mill and a look at most of the Purgatory trackage. The water tank/station area from the previous pic is off to the right.

[URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-imag

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Gidday Mike, you certainly appear to have captured the small train in BIG COUNTRY look.

In WPF you make the comment, " With the new bridge in place, the canyon looks a little small, but it’s a matter of perspective, forced that is, so I think it’ll be OK once I get things painted and scenicked behind it". Now there is the saying “Only fools and children comment on jobs half done” and as I’m far too old to be a child, I guess I must fit into the first category, so my initial thoughts were that a Truss Bridge would look more appropriate over that span. On reflection, however, I think that the current contrast between the black bridge and the surrounding snow exacerbates the perspective problem, so as I concur with Chads sentiments “You are doing incredibly nice work, quickly!!!” I am looking forward to next weeks WPF to see how your finished scenery ties the scene together. [:-^].

Thanks for sharing.

Cheers, the Bear.

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Bear,

Thanks for commenting. Yeah, the white wipes out any detail. Once I shoot it with some stains, it’ll start popping out. Didn’t quite get that far today.

Here’s some more pics, starting with a trick I’ll be using to represent distant mountains. I don’t apply Sculptamold to them, they’re just silhouettes that will be paint in dark grays to represent distant ridges. You don’t want texture on them, although I may shape them a little more around the edges. The first is where the track goes after leaving the bridge to disappear around the mountain. About as far as you can see I have thinner and thinner scenery, except for some embankment next to the track.

This one is looking back at Camp 10. Some of this is fixed here, some on the back of one end of the long liftout.

Here’s a shot of the main use of this technique on the back of the long liftout.

Next up is one of the Xmas tree light clips I used this time to hang and direct my line voltage LED string. It’s got a gentle pressure that allows a grip on the light strip to hold it in place. Here I used it like an array of tiny floodlights.

I’ll close with some more shots of the mill site.

[URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/407/xti

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Really Mega Awesome work! Mike!!!

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Thanks, Chad! My occasional insomnia is giving me extra time to work on things, but I’m not sure it’s getting anymore accomplished.

Serving up some more right now. Basically, here I’ve taken Woodland Scenics Earth and Ochre Yellow scenery color base stain and sprayed it judiciously around. I did do some oversprays of gray and tan tints on the rocks in the canyon and a few other places. Then I went over everything with the WS stains, trying to make the color distribution about right.

This is just the first pass, but the canyon looks better already.

The mill complex at Purgatory is shaping up nicely, too.

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Mike:

[bow][bow][bow]

I think if I were your neighbor,I’d be checking my basement to make sure you haven’t tunneled over and started laying track!

Mike

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Mike,

That would give me ideas, except I’ve been in that basement and wouldn’t gain much, although if the tunnel was big enough to let people walk through, then I could run tracks down either side and put a big loop in the neighbor’s basement…hmmm, hmmm.[^o)]

Let me think on that one.[:)]

Thanks for your comments!

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I can’t believe this thread hasn’t made it to Page 2. Well, that’s gonna change…[Y]

Had some great compliments, thanks Chad, et al. Here’s some more pics showing how I did the scenery base around the Crater Lake Quarry. It’s the end of the line, stacked in above the throat of my staging yard. There will be a wye, a warehouse for bagged lime, a loader for bulk lime in gons, and the track to the quarry hole.

I’m going to throw up some pics of how the sections of the quarry wall behind the hole nest together. The whole thing then sits in a C-shape, with the quarry hole spur on the fourth side where the plywood is. I’ve got three derricks (from the walthers 933-3073 kit) to build, so something will be there soon to give a better idea of scale.

More pics soon of the profile backdrop boards.

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These are the profile backdrop boards I’ve been making for the Cascade Branch. I’ve done similar things in Sculptamold and on Masonite for elbow board/backdrops on the loop around Durango. These are in plain old pink board. Virtually every section of scenery is a liftout. I’ll be able to go ahead with scenery while I work on the track later, still with full access. I’m gonna put the pics up and will come back later and add more text.

The first shot shows the roadbed curving down to Crater Lake wye in the distance, with the town site beyond it. To the left is the track directly to the quarry for handling cut stone. There will be facilities located around the wye to load boxcars and gons, as well as handle general freight.

The next two general views show the area without the backdrop silhouette boards, then with . The backdrop itself is 12" wide aluminum primed, then free-hand painted with Krylon Satin Island Splash (yep, that’s a blue). I rolled it into place, the tacked the ends in as far as I could reach with a staple gun. The natural springiness helps it roll through the corner where it hides support post. The wye itself isn’t fastened down yet. I’ll have to lay the track, test it, then drop it into place. It’ll be dicey, but removeable to service. I build them good enough elsewhere, it’ll work here.

In the next four with the profile board itself, I plan to just paint it, while the terrain in front will receive some treatment, with Scupltamold forming a shell in many places.

[URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/827/hvrg.jpg/][IMG]http://imageshack.us/a/img827/4750/hvrg.j

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Mike,

It’s Rabbi from NarrowGaugeChat. Looking really good, like the mountain idea using pink foam. 2 questions:

  1. What are lighting plans especially on the low ceiling area?

  2. On one shot it looked like sky was almost backlite behind Mtns, have you ever tried that? I wonder what it would look like.

Thanks and keep posting.

Cameron (aka Rabbi) DGCCRR.Blogspot.com

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Hey Rabbi,

Good to see one of the hard-core outlaw HOn3ers visiting! Proud to show you around here in my little hall of narrowgauge proselytization.[8D]

  1. On the first page toward the bottom are pics taken with the line voltage LED strip lights I now have up that give a better idea about how things look with them than the pics here on this page. Facing in from the entry, the deeper area with the big mountain behind the stone mill will likely get another strip further back in the scene. I also need to get some of the clips supplied with the strip lights up and adjust them exactly right. Basically, the plastic casing of the lights will hold a position if gently clamped. The funny shaped Xmas light clips do this well, but I can’t find any yet, although stores are stocking that stuff right now. The J clips just hold up, they won’t hold position.

The low area under the duct, which just last night got renamed Crater Lake Junction, is actually well lit by the strip lights. I need to get more pics up to illustrate that better.

  1. I think you’re talking about where I’m sliding the lift-out at Crater Lake Junction and tilting it for clearance. Naw, not intentionally there, it’s the lighting from the quarry area showing through. I have thought about it for the silhouette backdrops, since some do have space between them and the wall. That would be a good use of color-variable LED light strips.

I’ll have some more shots of the area behind what I know call Black Cat Junction (named after the local Wobblie tracklayers and our recently deceased black cat, Kuro) later this evening.

I’ll also send my best wishes for your continuing recovery, too. Gotta go see my cardiologist for a check up next week, and there’s just been too much of this wrong kind of “operations” stuff going around this bunch of RRers, so I’m a little nervous.

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Rabbi and other Readers,

Here are some things I worked on this evening. First, my new roadbed for the Crater Lake wye.

The old stuff was pieced together from too many pieces. This makes everything neat and smoother for the track. The light here is from a fluorescent that used to light the staging area below. Most of the light in the rest of the pics is from the strip lights only.

A nice shot of the derricks on the edge of the quarry pit now that I’ve built up the side they sit on.

This next two are an example for Cam of the light in the narrowest, lowest spot on the layout at Crater Lake Junction from my LED strip lights.

Here’s an overall shot of the main part of the Cascade Branch lit only by the strip lights. You can see some of tonight’s super easy finished mountains in the background

This is the Black Cat Junction townsite, with some more silhouette mountains i made still in the pink.

Here you can see the pine tree stickers I added.

Construction is super easy. Paint the styrofoam with a good water-based primer. This protects the styrofoam against spray paint eating the foam s