My Track Plan: Sacramento Northern Belt Line

Model Railroader Layouts and layout building
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I promised to post this about a year ago but finally got around to downloading XTrkCAD; this is the first track plan I have completed with it. It’s not exact, but I wanted to sketch out a rough approximation of my layout so far and what I haven’t built yet.

The plan below is my under-construction layout.

Givens & druthers:

Scale: HO

Prototpe: Sacramento Northern Railway, formerly an electric interurban turned diesel freight railroad, owned by Western Pacific. Industrial belt line operating around Sacramento, CA.

Era: Approximately 1950-1960

Track: Code 100, primarily Peco “Setrack” sharp-radius turnouts. Minimum radius 15" on mainline, 12" on sidings.

Motive power: General Electric 44 and 70 ton locomotives, S1, SW1, GP-7, SW-7

Main industries: Agricultural products, including canneries, almond packing, dairy, beverages, grain mills, and meat packing. Interchange traffic between Southern Pacific and Western Pacific; function as a “bridge” railroad between SP and WP.

Signaling: None. All trackage on layout is within yard limits.

Wiring: Simple DC. Eventually I may go DCC, and am trying to make wiring robust enough to do so. Turnouts are power-routing.

So far I have the upper wall pretty much complete: a double-ended, four-track yard (Haggin Yard) with a capacity of 42 cars if I don’t block the mainline (56 if I do), not counting RIP and caboose tracks. The 17th & D area is a three-track locomotive storage yard and freight house, with industrial trackage to reach a cannery, almond packing plant, dairy and beverage bottling plant, with a runaround track. Libby Cannery is a large cannery with one track for incoming refrigerator cars and another for boxcars carrying out canned goods.

The area marked “West Sacramento” is not yet planned…there will be eith

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It sure looks as if you’ve made good use of your ‘givens and druthers’ to capture the essence of the Sacramento Northern. I especially like the use of cassettes to develop live interchange - the “world beyond the railroad” concept that’s the difference between a simple loop and a believable model of a railroad. (I also use cassettes - in a slightly different manner - so I’m probably biased.)

I lived in the Sacramento area for several years, and I don’t see any problem with tracks that are perfectly straight (like the streets that determined their location) or interurban curves (SN was, after all, an interurban!) I gather that your basic scenery will be urban industrial. Are you planning to model the West Sacramento area of your benchwork as drawn, or are you thinking of adding a peninsula or two? Either way, you have a potential prizewinner.

Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)

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The basic scenery will be a mix of urban industrial and downtown Sacramento residential. SN’s belt line ran down several streets that were primarily residential (C Street and X Street) so there will be rows of little Victorian homes, heavily interspersed with trees, in between the industrial areas. If you know downtown Sacramento you know how dense that urban forest gets! I have posted some pictures of this before: in between the engine yard and the industries on X Street are three old houses and about half a dozen trees, although it’s still looking a bit sparse in the tree department.

I may add another peninsula in West Sacramento to represent the wye leading to the Woodland Branch: that may end up growing into an extension into the middle of the room. And yeah, the idea with the interchanges is to show the world beyond the railroad. That, and because the SN did so much interchange traffic!

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Wow, thats quite a layout, lucky you…

I like that theres still room for expasion off X street or the Front St areas, but you’ve got plenty to keep you busy as it is without thinking about expansion yet.

Look forward to seeing this get built, dont go blind doing the catenary wiring!

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This is a great idea for a layout! I’m a little biased since I’m partial to shelf style layouts and I lived in Sacramento in the early eighties and go out there frequently to visit my kids. Small world, too, since I lived on X St at 24th for a short time. I never knew that lines used to run down X St.

Keep up the good work and keep everyone posted. If I decide to do something other than my Northern Pacific layout in the future the Sacramento Northern may be the ticket.

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I like it. It isn’t too different from my previous layout. Relatively simple to build and maintain. Uses the prototype well and should be interesting to operate. What kind of engine will you use and will there be more than one at a time?- Nevin

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I just realized that I never put down the dimensions of the layout room: 11 by 24 feet. It runs around the edge of the room.

Nevin: My locomotives are currently all small diesels. A pair of General Electric 44 tonners make up the most commonly used power. I also have an S1, an SW7 and a GP-7, although I don’t use the Geep much, and a Walthers SW1 that I’ll start using if I ever get up the gumption to repaint it in WP California Zephyr colors. It’s the largest locomotive I expect to use on the layout (the biggest locos the prototype ever owned were some F3s, which they later traded for a pair of Geeps.) I run locos by myself so I run them one at a time, except sometimes I run both the 44 tonners together as an MU’d pair.

If I ever get up the gumption to install electric overhead, I’ll have to work up some electrics. I have a brass Baldwin-Westinghouse steeplecab I could use, but it needs remotoring, and a half-built General Electric steeplecab freight motor that will need quite a bit of work. The other locomotives I’d want to use I would have to scratchbuild: Sacramento Northern used a very unique home-brewed boxcab freight motor, Suydam made a model of its early form but I want to run the cut-down version. Planning on just building a shell for it out of brass or styrene and putting it on top of an F-unit chassis, which is about the right length. I also have some trolleys I want to run (little single-truck and double-truck Birneys) even though I’m not planning on running them often: the idea is to represent railfans using the overhead to run fan trips under electric wire (something actual railfans did around here in the early fifties.)

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I would have thought that traction would have been the major player.

Not much to comment on. It’s come a long way since that first module.

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Traction will be the major player…once I get up the gumption to hang trolley wire. That may take a while. My first love was always small diesels, and I’m having too much fun playing with them. Once my skills at re-motoring locomotives improve, the traction equipment will play a larger role. The long-range goal is to model the era when diesels and electrics shared the tracks on the SN (roughly 1945-1953) so I can get maximum variety, including streetcars and possibly interurbans.

But, as I have mentioned before, all this research and writing and the return to grad school kinda cut into my modeling time. So when I do have time, I either run the diesels I do have or work on benchwork and track.

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Back to school grad school. Been there-done that. It’s good you have trains to run at all.

BTW: I finally got a copy of The Railroad–What it is, What it does this morning. This was on your recommendation about 3 years ago.

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Great job, I too have a similar design in mind, in S scale with active catanery, unlike you I can’t settle on one prototype, several aspects of the PE and SN intrigue me, so my 12 X 19 Citrus Belt will incorporate a quasi-prototype theme, no interurbans however, but plenty of motors to serve those packing sheds and related industries.

Dave

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looks like it will be a really nice layout . planning based on prototype track arrangements means that someone already did a lot of the hard design work for you . this plan shows that nicely

i’ll add two commments , based more on personal preferences than on any reality , so feel free to ignore them

  1. go DCC now and design/build the layout from the ground up with the future in mind

  2. don’t count on power routing turnouts to work when you really need them to , always use feeder wires

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Looks real nice.

I like the Sacramento Northern stuff. I was just at the Roseville show and a club had a great set up there.

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  1. I’m wiring in such a fashion that I think I can pretty much just plug in a DCC controller where the DC powerpack is and start running DCC.

  2. I don’t. Feeder wires are everywhere, except in the loco yard where I can store the locos on the layout. Each module (none longer than six feet) has its own feeder wires, generally in several spots.

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to quote the most famous movie villian of all time:

“Impressive. most impressive.”

I like that plan. it looks well thought out and be quite interesting.

Here’s an idea: Turn back the clock to when it was run by a traction line. for added interest give runthrough right-of-way to an another railroad.

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Turning back the clock is already in the plans…this track plan travels backwards in time! Run-through right-of-way actually functioned in the other direction: until 1953, trains traveled around the edge of Sacramento’s original city limits, but by the Fifties the city had expanded and the SN right-of-way sat on “Alhambra Boulevard,” a street named for the stately Alhambra Theater and the entrance to elegant East Sacramento, one of the city’s wealthier neighborhoods. Track was cut from much of Alhambra Boulevard after 1953, and trains crossed town via the Western Pacific mainline. I kind of “handwave” this by not showing the track between Blue Diamond and Alhambra & Stockton (the section taken out of service in 1953): I “selectively compressed” it out. I also didn’t want to model the Alhambra Theater just yet…maybe someday!

That changed again in 1966, when all the remaining street trackage (pretty much everything in the track plan except Haggin Yard and West Sacramento) was taken up, and right-of-way was obtained via Southern Pacific and Western Pacific tracks to SN rails on either edge of town. Because SN was owned by WP, just about any WP freight power could feasibly make an appearance–as long as it can handle those sharp interurban curves! That means no WP U-boats…

Part of the fun of modeling the SN is the incredible variety of stuff they used at one point or another: they even used a couple of steam locomotives during the first couple of years, for construction in places where the power wasn’t on yet.

Run-through right-of-way during the tra

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Oh yeah, one other source of run-through traffic: Central California Traction shared the trackage from X Street and Alhambra to Front Street, so part of the layout will run equipment from an entirely different railroad. The track that runs into the upper right corner is part of yet another expansion: that wall goes out into another part of the basement, and at some future point I may gain permission from The Beautiful Creature Who Says Where The Trains May Go (aka my wife) to put staging tracks on the other side of the wall–this will allow CCT trains to enter when needed. They were also an electric line until 1946, when they converted entirely to diesels. I have a 70-tonner in CCT colors for just this sort of use, but hope to scratchbuild a CCT box motor someday.

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Which one would you build? CCT No.7, the ex-WB&A car, has always been my favourite, but all of their box motors were interesting cars.

Cheers,

Mark.

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Jetrock…Your track plan looks fantastic, will be a ball to operate on, ran a few of those streets more decades ago then I care to count LOL…Hope to see you again at the WP convention this year…Take care…John…

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I’ll be there and doing a presentation on the layout as well, one that will go into more detail than this. I think I’m also going to host an unofficial layout tour as well–my house is only about a mile from the convention site.

marknewton: The plan is to model #3 and #6, the two box motors that were later converted to cabeese, and actually using them in the caboose role (pulled by CCT diesels.) That way I can model the body (the working with wood/plastic part I’m already good at) first and then later add power, lighting etc. (the electrical/mechanical part I’m not good at.) If I run across a Suydam brass model of #7 I may pick that up if finances permit…