That towns of Grass Valley and Nevada City actually fit and in their proper orientation.
I have duplicated all tracks save one. All the buildings on the plans I have are on the layout with the exception of the Kidder Mansion. The engine house in Grass Valley is a single on my plan and a double on the plans in the book I have.
I am completely baffled as to the use of the sidings. Obviously industries are missing or the tracks are used to sort freight for towns and industries not show.
That’s a roundabout way of saying I don’t have an operation plan. If I go this route, I’m going to need more research to find out exactly what moved and how.
I wish I was. Best’s book is out of my budget for a week or so. The map I got came from Narrow Guage Nostalgia by George Turner. There’s a chapter on the NCNG. they just have the basic stuff–maps, a history, a few pictures, and diagrams of specialized rail equipment.
Wow, Chip! I am moved to latin: “per ardua ad astra!” - “through struggles to the stars”. It is annoying to throw away stuff we have grown attached to and start over, but this design really looks clean and very promising as the basis for an 1890 layout!
You can reuse your bench work, you have staging, two realistic looking towns without reach issues, tracks meandering along river, trestle, no turnouts or hard to maintain track in the hard to reach center of layout.
Point to point layout this time ? Or will you add an option for continuous display running between the north end of Nevada City and the track from staging to Grass Valley ?
I’m not settled on this as I have a few issues to work through. As I mentioned I have no operational plan. I know that the three major products exported from this area are timber, produce, and gold bullion. But from this sparse map, I have no idea how this is accomplished. I have equipment and structures for both logging and mining operations, but I have no idea how to place them.
I will probably connect Nevada City to the staging/GV line as you suggested.
There is also a matter of future expansion. This line was 28 miles long and you see all of it. Where do I go from here? I could go back to the SP main and go on up the line to Truckee, but then I have the same issues as my last layout design.
As a native Californian who’s spent many a moon in Grass Valley and the Sierra Nevada, it’s been fun watching the development of your layout! Seeing picts of yr earlier work (was that “Mungo” in yr Rock Ridge? [:D]), I think yr 1. going to do a fabulous job, worthly of the Golden State & 2. find that the Sierra Nevada has myriad scenic elements that you’ll enjoy modeling, from craggy rock “castles” to waving yellow grass rolling over hills and around bigbig oaks that have more personality than Mark Twain (who also spent time up in the area).
I like that you’ve scaled it down to Navada City / Grass Valley for now. Connect the continuous loop and then the trip between the two can take as long as you want.
As far as operations, if my manditory 4th grade lessons on California history were true, then you don’t have to worry about modeling mines. Yes there were some, but most of the mines were started as gold mines but then found silver and copper. Much gold mining was done by 2-3 man troughs (pour riverrock/sludge in and let the running water of the river separate the sludge from the gold flakes), which would involve “camps” at river / creek sides, as well as individuals panning for gold.
That means that in the main elements you need in Nevada City include: a bank that would weigh & pay the miners, a foundry for melting the gold flakes / nuggets right there so they could be transported in solid bar form, a saloon, hotel, blacksmith, stables (horses and donkeys), mining / panning outfitting store, etc. There would also be a camp / “chinatown” that would involve labor & laundry, since the Foreign Miner’s Tax of the 1860s effectively banned Chinese from mining for gold, and there still were many living in the Sierra Nevada well into the early 1900s.
So you’d need all sorts of supplies coming into Grass Valley (which was the collection point for ma
You are right on the verge of excellence there, Chip…really good progress, I think. Lots of improvements and…well…it just works!
Are you going to close the loop at upper right as it curls towards your staging lead? It it won’t mean a compromise on min radius, you may even be able to have an interchange or a passing siding, if short, to keep it unencumbered there.
Also, if you wish to turn trains, as the main starts its curve toward the bridge, leading out from the staging, you could place a turnout there running through the woods (or tunneling if a hill), to emerge at the curve at lower right and joining the main there, maybe on the industrial track…whatever…it’s a possibility for you.
In the view that opens for me, the heavy black “box’s” lower end falls outside the confines of the drawing. I hope that is just an artefact and not a real problem in terms of your aisle-width if you have to bring it back up and into the drawing.
Neat. By concentrating between Grass Valley and Nevada City, you’ve got a lot of room for some interesting features. Your “Bear River Bridge” can now become the Gold Flat trestle, just outside of Nevada City, and I’d put a short tunnel out of Grass Valley to represent ;the Town Talk tunnel between the two towns.
The two turntables were wooden, A-frame, armstrong types.
The spur to the left of the Grass Valley turntable served a railroad store house and oil tanks. The structure on the left side of the yard was a combination freight and passenger depot. The structure with the track running through it was a machine shop, with a blacksmith shop located near the beginning of the upper part of that track. The Kidder mansion was located just below the opposite end, adjacent to the tracks. The long spur across the mainline from the turntable was an elevated track serving an oil spout used to fuel the locomotives.
At Nevada City, the structure adjacent to the yard was another combination depot. There was no icing spur. On the spur there were three adjacent on-line businesses: the Alpha Hardware and Nevada City Hardware warehouses and the Valley Feed and Grain Co. warehouses, leastwise circa 1910.
While the NCNG had no refrigerator cars, undoubtedly a standard-gauge version would have refrigerator cars on the line for the seasonal fruit shipments. Otherwise, you’re talking about general freight shipped in box cars, machinery and such on flat cars, and tank cars.
My gut feeling was that the bulk of freight traffic came/went via team and house tracks.
The center of operations, maintenance, and management was at Grass Valley.
An 1890 timetable shows a daily round-trip freight between Grass Valley and Colfax, and two round-trip mixed trains between Nevada City and Colfax. A 1927 timetable shows a daily round-trip passenger train between Nevada City and Colfax as well as the two mixed-trains. Trains toward Colfax were superior to trains of the same class found from Colfax.
There was a spur to the fair grounds on the Grass Valley side of the Town Talk tunnel you may
Okay, everyone seems to like this plan better, but I’m not sure. First of all, where are the industries? If 52% of the traffic on the line is lumber, where are the sawmills. Did they ship directly to Colfax or did they ship to one of the towns. Did the towns run a local turn to the mills? If so where is the track?
The other major exports are produce are gold bullion. As mentioned above you would need a foundry and mines. The mines would ship to he foundry or have one on site. Where was this handled?
Produce would be handled either through the freight house or produce distributors. In Colfax, there were 5 distinct produce companies with buildings on the Southern Pacific that received produce from the NCNG. Where are they on the NCNG end? Where are the icing platforms.
The freight station in Colfax is massive. Where did they ship all those products. The sucker was easily a block long.
These are questions I don’t even know how to begin to answer.
Operationally, as the two layouts stand, the Rocklin and Colfax vs the NCNG, are as follows.
Rocklin and Colfax
Max number cars on layout: 179
Number of Cars moved per session: 133
Trains: 18 10-car trains per session
Nevada County Narrow Gauge
Max number of cars on layout: 82
Number of cars moved per session: 74
Trains: 5 14-car trains per session
Granted if I figure out how the railroad actually served the industries, I could increase the operations on the NCNG.
With the simple, stub-ended staging at Colfax, the layout is set up as if the NCNG is a branchline of the Southern Pacific: trains originate and end at Colfax. If modeling an independent shortline, the trains would originate/terminate in Grass Valley or Nevada City. If modeling a shortline, I suggest you modify the staging area to allow turning of trains, or facilities to turn the locomotives and rearrange the order of trains (coaches/combination cars located at rear of train).
Hopefully, you sent this message before reading my earlier one.
Don’t have information about the sawmills. I’m sure there were local ones, but my bet is lumber was consumed locally for general construction and especially for use in the mines. Undoubtedly, the NCNG would have shipped lumber on flat cars if lumber was exported, but I haven’t seen any pictures of that happening. There is a late-period photo of a train ready to leave Colfax with an import-load of lumber…
Just read pages 53 and 54 of Best’s book. Lumber was hauled from a nearby sawmill to You Bet for loading on the NCNG. The sawmill operation had a narrow gauge railroad, but it never connected with the NCNG. Operations ended in the 1890s when the supply of timber became exhausted.
Peaches were shipped from Chicago Park where there was a dead-end spur. Photos show no evidence of any special loading or warehousing facilities. Probably, fruit was loaded into NCNG box cars directly from farmers’ wagons to be hauled to Colfax for transfer to SP refrigerator cars. But as I said before, if modeling a standard-gauge NCNG, the fruit would be loaded directly into standard gauge refrigerator cars.
Going through Best’s book I found no evidence the NCNG directly served any mines, stamp mills, or smelters. I didn’t see it mentioned nor saw evidence of NCNG tracks in the photos. While the NCNG served mining communities, it was not a mining railroad.
The NCNG plan is cleaner and has a more definitive purpose. I would build it and operate it standard gauge as shortline or branchline.
Where are the industries? Now you know how bankrupt and abandoned railroads get bankrupt and abandoned.
Maybe up in near the trees.
I cannot concieve of the town the size they were of consuming a huge amount of timber on an ongoing basis. My guess would be that after the initial construction, probably 90% of the lumber would go off line. The lumber might have been cariied down from the mill by wagon and loaded at the railhead. Based on my understanding of east coast logging, the trunks in the 4-6" range would be culled for prop timber (used in mines for mine props). the big lumber would be cut for boards and beams. Straight trunks might be stripped for poles and masts. Small diameter wood would be taken to spindle, lath or spool mills. Bark and stumps would be processed for tannin, turpentine and other chemicals. Other wood was burned for fuel a the sawmill. Probably more board wood was moved in boxcars than flatcars.
I would think that the mining would be rather transparent to the railroad. Any gold bullion if carried by rail would require a couple cubic feet on the safe of an express car on a train. If they used an acid process to leach the gold
I’ve seen no evidence that the NCNG was a major hauler of lumber. (See my earlier post.) And what is the source of the 52% figure? I think it bogus…I’d think the NCNG would ship lumber via flat cars for easier loading and unloading compared to a box car, and since the distance of its hauls was extremely short, wouldn’t need the protection of one. And I see the mining communities and their mines to be huge consumers of lumber. Structures were mostly made of wood, and mines used timber for lining tunnels and many probably used tree cuttings for fuel. If anything, you see lumber being imported to mining districts once the immediate timber supply is exhuasted, and not ever exported.
Like your plan. It appears to me that the NCNG, like my TTT, handles most freight at freight houses and team tracks. Most of the shippers and receivers didn’t generate enough traffic to need their own spurs, or only generated it on a seasonal basis.
About gold. The Empire Mine, which operated for more than a century (finally closed in 1957 - now a CA state park,) was a BIG, RICH hard rock mine (not three men sluicing river gravel.) Its entire production for that period was a cube 7 feet on a side - or about 20% of the cubic capacity of a DM&IR ore jimmy. Since it was concentrated on-site, there wasn’t much outbound tonnage. OTOH, the mine needed a lot of rail (300+ MILES of underground passageways,) mine timber (inbound from Colfax after 1890) and assorted machinery. Regular shipments inbound would include (but not be limited to) cable, lubricants, pipe (for water and compressed air) cloth products, soap and cyanide.
When trying to generate traffic, don’t just think of what’s immediately adjacent to the rails. Think about the needs of people and businesses located miles from the right-of-way. The fancy European furniture and the marble for the fireplaces in the mine manager’s mansion at the Empire probably traveled part of the way from producer to consumer on the NCNG.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with mines for coal, not gold)
