Rather than incur any wrath in WPF for posting too many images, I thought I would make my own thread for this.
For most of 2008 my youngest son has be participating in a freight car interchange with a group of other modellers. His freight car has been on a tour of the US and we have had monthly visitors to our layout.
To comemorate this, I made my son a poster for his room with his favorite shots of his freight car.
This is the last month of the interchange and we decided to go out with a bang, so took the visiting car to the K-10 model trains layout in Maryville, Illinois for a grand-finale run.
K-10’s is a hobby shop that happens to be tacked onto the front of a 4000 square foot layout. I don’t have a wide enough lens to begin to do it justice.
Here is Crispy getting set up for our tour.
We started in one of the main yards. The blue BS line train behind our small train is one of the local road lines. It proudly goes by the slogan “We’re Knee Deep in it!”
From the yard we were soon running past the iron ore smelter
then on to the amazing ore dock
From the Ore dock there is a short run that takes you past the main station
Thanks guys. Today is one of the public running days, so there will be 20 plus trains running all over the layout. It gets quite hectic and requires 3 or 4 switch-men in radio communication to keep the trains apart. Since anyone can join in with a throttle there are many inexperienced operators running that fail to observe signals etc. All the switches are thrown manually, so you have to know where you are going. Confusion often reigns!
Boy, I am lucky to live with in 2 miles of K-10. For people that love yards, how woud you like this for your bench?
This gives you a little idea how big the bench is.
Layout is 64 foot X 80 foot with over a mile of track, over 870 scale miles in HOand Max grade is 1.5 percent. It will give you a work out when you run it. All main curves are 32 inch.
Thanks to your help I was able to make it to K-10 on a Saturday a couple weeks ago. I also found a few gems in the hobbyshop for my layout (actually 10 gems) and ended up dropping over $100. As always the layout is impressive. My two sons spent over an hour oohing and aaawing as they walked around it. What impresses me is the fact that there are 3 yards on the layout the size of the one that Ken posted in his pic . Even my retired Dad keeps threating to see if he can join the operating crew.
I make sure I visit when ever I make it back to my folks house in St Jacob. I usually leave with new inspiration to continue work on my layout.
Hi Ken, thanks for adding your images, I thought you might stop by this thread at some point. I have hardly done any modelling since the Spring and last Saturdays visit to K-10 was the first time I had been to the store in weeks. Anyway, hope you are well and continuing with your layout?
Mike, I am pleased that you had a good visit. I find that the store has as good pricing as anywhere and for such a small retail area has an amazing amount of stuff crammed in. I have certainly spent my share in that place!
Yes Simon I am still having at it. I have came along scenes are meeting last year or so.
My modeling and spelling has gotten much better![^] As you can see I like more of a country look, love to have a place in the country. I all so hope some day to visit your layout and bring over a few engines to run. I did check out your layout as well. thumps up. You are welcome to drop by your self, but I think the lads would be going “Dad, looks like we built this bench”! [;)]
We both need to take and post better pictures of K-10 layout. What was posted so far really does not show what it offers.
Last year Christmass party that you missed, I got to pull 95 coal cars with my Y-6b. That is something few people will ever get to do on there home bench. This year I am going for the record, 125 cars. I will be packing, with the PCM Y-6b and a PCM Big Boy doubled headed. Yes the bugs are worked out of the Big Boy.
