Clinchfield & Interstate, June 1952

Model Railroader Layouts and layout building
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Hello all.

This is my first post on what will hopefully be a long and successful build thread. My apologies if this is in the wrong location on the forums. I’m finally embarking on my layout construction after over 20 years of wanting to build, and a few messy false starts along the way.
I’ve always been in love with Appalachian mountain railroading, particularly in east Tennessee and southwest Virginia. In my mind, there are no two railroads that I think better embody this type of railroading than the Clinchfield and the Interstate roads.
I think at this point, I have nailed down the vast bulk of my build constraints. I’m planning on a postcard, semi-prototype build. What I mean by that is I plan on remaining as faithful as possible to the prototypes, except where it’s impractical or unfavorable to do so, and taking “postcard” scenes of famous locales on both lines. There’s also a few technical, construction driven reasons for the postcard approach, which I’ll discuss in more detail below. I’m an engineer by trade, so attention to detail and accuracy are a big deal to me, and while I don’t consider myself to be a “rivet counter” (yet), I’ve been planning meticulously for quite some time in what I want the finished product to look like. I’ll be working in N scale for my build. While I would love to do HO, there are several constraints preventing this:

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Sounds like a very well thought out and detailed plan. Should make for a great layout. Looking forward to following your build.

Ray

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Ok, now that I have the photo hosting/posting/linking thing sorted out… on to some good stuff.

Here are the CAD renderings of the room and the double deck benchwork. I am still working on modeling the helix, and the support legs, but, I have designs in my head for both of those. I’ve modeled both levels of benchwork, as well as a model of myself, which I can move through the model to get an idea of clearances and how things will look. I also modeled a typical perspective view, looking from my viewpoint, with my head tilted downward at a 15 degree angle. Dragging my “humanoid” around the layout will show me exactly what I will see.

Here’s a cutaway section view giving a little better look at the peninsula:

And a cutaway section view to show the persective viewpoint:

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And this is the above models, starting to be translated into something more tangible and visual…

The upper deck backdrop and benchwork plans, 3D printed at a 1"=6" (1/6) scale:

Here is the room that I am working with, looking in the door “full scale”:

And here is looking in the door of the 1/6 scale 3D print and foam board model:

A few more views of the model:

The Clinchfield system map:

And the Interstate map, overlaid with the other roads that worked the area as well:

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I started translating the track plan over to some foam board, where I could do 3 dimensional concepts for the scenery and start planning where to add/hide supports for the upper deck, but I quickly realized that I should probably hold on any more development work on the foam board track plan before I finish the 3D printed parts. As those are based on the room constraints I really need to let those drive the limits on the track plan planning. I have about another 4-6 days worth of printing to do to finish all of the components needed, but, it was a fun exercise, and showed that the approach is going to work, as well as providing some much needed visualization and encouragement. I scaled and photocopied FastTracks templates to use as cutouts for my turnouts to ensure that they were to size.

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First off don’t worry about the walls, very easy to patch sheetrock and touch up paint. Next comes the plan, looks like a duckunder, if so, bad idea unless you have removable sections and even then a pain, only ones I truly ever liked were ones with a bridge, best was a bascle bridge. As far as lighting goes, my entire train room ceiling slopes, put in track lighting and used LED bulbs, can sometimes be picked up cheap on the secondary market, also repair is as few screw holes to fill.

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Thanks for the reply. It would certainly make things easier to attach it to the wall. Im still rolling things around on that front, and the lighting. I fully agree the duckunder is much less than ideal, but, it causes a major disruption to my track plan to split it out into just a simple bridge. Maybe I can figure a way to make it a swing away or something of the like. Still some improvements to be made there.

I’ve made more progress on the model. The last of the 3D printed parts finished, so, I’ve started working on the lower deck track plan and 3D elevations. I’ve made it about half way around the lower level. A note on the real world pictures below: None of them are mine, they were found in an image search, and were not marked with a copyright, so, fair use with no intended financial gain or infringement. I have some that are marked, but will not be posting those they will be for my own private use reference.

The 3D printed base:

The track plan taking shape:

Elkhorn City, KY:

Looking south/Southeast, through the Elkhorn City Yard. That’s a quick and dirty mockup of the US-80 Bridge over the Russel Fork.

The real US 80 bridge, built in 1912. Abondoned now, used as a foot bridge. I’m not sure when it was taken out of service.

Interesting riveted footing details:

The real Elkhorn City yard, in the 70’s:

[img]https://i.ibb

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Hello all…

Well, its been a bit. My apologies for vanishing into thin air for a while, life threw a few curveballs along the way that brought progress to a complete standstill for quite a while.

I do have some major updates, however!

I took the past feedback to heart (thank you to those that replied), and started looking at methods of attaching the deck directly to the walls in the room, however, a few issues came up with this. The wife still wasn’t too keen on me poking a ton of holes in the wall, and, when I started looking at how structural the walls were in the room (it’s a bonus room over our garage) I didn’t get a warm and fuzzy about having a bunch of weight cantilevered off the studs, so, I reverted back to my original plan of self supporting benchwork. This turned out to be a huge benefit for a few reasons that I’ll go into as I move forward with more posts as I share actual construction progress.

The above delay in my timing was actually a blessing in disguise as well, as it gave me time to sit down and really critique my benchwork design as I still wasn’t sold on it, and I ended up making a major change. It occured to me that I was wasting a ton of space by having one central peninsula down the middle of the room. Not only did that waste a bunch of space creating aisles, it also made for very long, straight scenes, which, for anyone that has visited southwestern VA/eastern TN and followed a rail line, that is nowhere near prototypical.

To that end, it dawned on me I could do 2 peninsulas sideways, and be much more efficient with my space, so, I went back to the virtual drawing board, and came up with the below:

Npt only does this fit great in the room, it breaks the layout up into distinct short scenes that i can is

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On to design details!

Self supporting benchwork…sort of. I broke the layout up into what I called benchwork modules. Originally, I had planned to actually make the layout in sections, so if we moved (something we have had a habit of doing a lot of) I could in theory take it apart and take it with us. In reality, this hasn’t panned out, and I quickly gave up on that once I realized just how difficult that would be to do in reality. We also have been where we are at for almost 3 years now and love it here, so, I don’t forsee a move in our future.

In the below 3D, each module has a backer board, made out of .703" thick furniture grade plyood, and you can see the seams between each module. this backer board is the “spine” of the railroad, and supports each module. The modules all interlock together and are bolted to one another, so that when everything is fully assembled, it is all pressed tightly to the walls of the room, without a single screw being driven into the walls, providing tremedous rigidity without attaching anything to the house itself, much like a keystone arch becoming self supporting once all the components are together.

All the benchwork with the exception of the peninsula support structure got made from plywood. I went with plywood for a few reasons. 1, its very dimensionally stable. 2, it’s flexible, as long as you don’t need a piece bigger than 48" x 96" you can make pretty much whatever shape you want. 3. It’s cheap… Kind of. When I started adding up the cost of individual 1x4 boards vs the cost of sheets of .703 thick furniture grade plywood and then ripping them down to dimensional lumber (3.5" wide) the plywood actually came out cheaper.

I went through each module, designing each part and assigning it a part number, building a bill of materials, cut list, and ma

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The next step was to figure out just how to attach all these boards together. One of my requirements was that I did not want any sort of supports blocking the view of the railroad, so all of the support of the shelving had to come from the attachment of the benchwork lumber to the backing boards, so the layout was floating, essentially. I initially loooked at using metal shelving brackets, but, didn’t like the astronomical cost or lack of flexibility for locating them where I wanted them, so, I determined that the wood would need to be the primary material. One big drawback of making plywood boards is that because it is laminated together, it doesn’t have a high tolerance for screws run into it on the “end grain”.

I bought a small 2’x4’ sheet of the .703" thick plywood and started playing around with some concepts, both for ripping the boards out of the sheet, as well as for different methods of attaching the benchwork boards to the backer boards.

My first test was to confirm that the end grain would split when a screw was run into it… Yup. No good:

Then, I thought about doing a pocket of sorts, where I could use a large headed fastener to clamp the board directly to the backer board. I used my 3D printer to create some fixture tooling to help me make the geometry:

In the end, this was a ton of work, and didn’t provide any better support than what I ultimately settled on…

My next attempt was to simply drill a hole through the board, and use a small section of pipe to act as a clamp, with T nuts sunk into the back side of the backer board to thread the retaining bolts into. This was very strong, but was difficult to put together cleanly and square, as well

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Once I had a good plan for how to assemble, I whipped out the credit card and plunked down, making the first major investment into the railroad. Getting serous now! I ordered the plywood, as well as the foam for the scenery, and the tempered hardboard for the backdrop and fascia panels.

I knew that A) this was going to be a process, turning 13 sheets of plywood into a 12’x17’ room full of double decker benchwork, and B) that the wife would want the garage back ASAP, so, I organized everything as best as I could before I began to make it as efficient as possible:

I knew that the key to cutting and assembling all the benchwork and get it to fit precise in the room so that the backboard-module assembly approach would work would be to fixture as much as possible. One big hurdle I had was that I did not have a table saw to rip the sheets of plywood into the boards, so, I devised a jig out of 3D printed clamps bolted onto a piece of 1" square aluminum tubing that acted as a fence to guide my circular saw and allow me to repeatably rip 3.5" wide “boards”. The four 3D printed clamps fit around the edge of the sheet, were clamped tightly with screw clamps, and created a fence exactly 3.5" wide that my saw shoe would ride against as I made my cut.

I used the stack of foam as my work surface, putting a piece on top that got beat up in transit, so I could cut through the plywood into the foam and not have to worry about damaging another sheet of plywood underneath while supporting both the sheet and the part being cut off securely. I ripped several 3.5" x 8’ long “boards” off my first sheet and lined them up to see how well my fixtu

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I worked through the lumber module by module, building them as I went, starting at the back of the room and working my way towards the door. The first one, althought one of the simplest, was also one of the most challenging, as I was figuring out how well my plan would actually work:

One thing I unfortunately didnt think to take good pictures of was how the boards interlock. In the above picture, the boards on the floor you can see where I notched them, with some notches facing upwards, and some downwards. Each board was notched half way through, with the cross board carrying a mating opposit notch, so, they would interlock. The joint was then drilled and glued/screwed, creating a super strong intersection.

The weight of each module is supported by the legs under it, the height fine tuned with the threaded knob at the bottom of the leg, and then the benchwork boards clamped together, holes drilled, and bolted to one another using 1/4-20 bolts and T nuts.

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As I mentioned in my introductory post, the intent is for the upper deck to be the Interstate railroad, running from Appalachia, VA to St. Paul, VA, where it interchanged with the Clinchfield.

My room has a closet in it, which is where I’ve hidden the Helix that will interchange the levels, and represent St. Paul, VA. Im not a fan of Helixes, at least in the traditional sense. As I see it, round stacked helixes have two inherent flaws which causes two issues, 1: a significant amount of drag, as the train is always turning as it is climbing, so you have a lot of side force in the wheels which translates to load on the loco, which means short trains, and 2:since the levels are stacked directly on top of one another, there is a minimum physical radius and rise per rotation of the helix.

My closet is 47" wide by almost 60" deep, so, using a traditional helix, I would have had a radius of around 23", depending on design, and would have had to rise at 2.25% per loop in order to provide sufficient clearance for the locomotive, the track, the plywood, and any supporting structure. 2.25% was quite a bit more than what I was wanting, so, back to the virtual drawing board, I devised this, what I am calling: “the rectangular, double decker behive helix”:

As I see it, there are lots of advantages to this design:

  • I was able to follow the shape of the closet, drastically increasing the length of track between the levels.
  • It allows for a significant amount of the climbing to be done in a straight line, only turning when I have to.
  • It allows each set of t
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And all of this brings me to the final post for now, where I am at today.

I have all the foam base rough cut, with about 75 percent of it glued down, with 95% of the backdrop installed. Once it is all glued down, I will go back and trim the front edge to the final shape and profile.

One big advantage of having plywood backer boards is that it does a great job supporting the backdrop hardboard, and I can run screws into it literally anywhere I need to to get the perfect backdrop shape.

I installed the foam in two different ways between the levels, and the lower level was somewhat of a mistake. I installed the backdrop board on that level first, then realized I had to meticulously trim each piece of foam with a knife edged blade in a jigsaw to fit the foam to the curve of the backdrop. I use a circular template while installing the backdrop boards to try to keep the radius of the corners in the backdrop the same, but, there are a few that ended up needing to be larger or smaller to fit correctly, and those ended up being a real pain to cut the foam for, as I had to basically hand fit the foam piece with no jig.

For the upper deck, I did a little better and installed the foam first, then for the backdrop, I simply set the board on top of the foam, effectively elevating the backdrop 2" above the plywood backer board.

In the end, this is going to be a happy accident, as, one of the big problems I need to tackle quickly is the poor lighting in the room. The lower deck will be illuminated by lighting mounted to the underside of the upper deck, so, it will not be too much trouble to light well, but, illuminating the upper deck was going to be a challenge, as installing a hanging fascia above for lights with no support from the walls, and the angled sides where the walls meet the roof line of the house would be tough.

Luckily, with the stepped backdrop on top sticking up 2" above the plywood supporting it, I

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Wow! Just… wow!
I’m gobsmacked at what you’ve put together in the time that it took me to assemble my simple, unscenicked kidney bean of a layout. Amazing. Can hardly wait to see this with track on it.

-Matt