The old thread for my layout, Version 5 of The CB&Q in Wyoming, didn’t survive the migration to the new forum unscathed, so I thought I’d pick up where I left off in a new thread native to the new forums. So here we go with Part II!
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The last post in Part I left off at the end of 2023.
In early 2024 I was finishing up the remotoring and DCC conversion of the LMB brass CB&Q S-2 Pacific loco. Early in January I added the TCS WowSound (my favorite) decoder to the tender.
First I had to drill the holes for the speaker. The resulting speaker grille in the bottom ain’t pretty, but it’s functional (and no one can see it anyway):
Then I wired up the decoder, glued in the speaker, and stuffed everything in the tender shell. When I applied power to the loco, to my great surprise it worked!
After trying it out for a bit I had some tweaking to do. The original headlight looked like a Bozo the Clown nose, the wires in the cab looked like a total mess, and I had some power pickup problems. Here’s what the bozo nose looked like:
I worked on the problems over the rest of January and ultimately came up with this:
It’s been hauling the varnish around the layout during operating sessions ever since.
That wasn’t all I did in January. While I was waiting for parts for the Pacific I also worked on the Wind River Canyon rock castings, adding several to the south end:
Looks pretty bad at this point, but it will get a little bit better…
I also rearranged all the risers for Worland. I’d replanned the location of Powell to be below Worland in the big redesign in late 2022, but Worland was already in place, so I had to move all the risers to make room.
That wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I started with this:
And wound up with this:
That worked out really good, and was functional even when I moved the East Staging lead under Worland later in the year,
By February 1st I had the first bits of Powell subroadbed installed:
On the 3rd I posted my usual layout update video to YouTube. This one was number 51.
I’ll continue with February in my next post.
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In February I continued with the base for Powell, finishing the first sections of subroadbed and then adding cork as the roadbed / town base.
In the middle of the month I spent a few days decaling a Spectrum Consolidation for the Burlington. It came out looking okay, but not great.
I’m thinking weathering (if I ever get around to it) will hide most of the blemishes in the decal applications.
After the Consolidation I switched to the Wind River Canyon briefly, adding more aluminum foil rock castings around the south end. I began blending some of the castings together, but the plaster I whipped up for that was quite a bit darker than the castings.
This didn’t look real good, but I figured by the time I was done coloring everything it would be at least presentable.
For the rest of February I fought with a couple of Windows 11 laptops, trying to get DecoderPro to connect with my NCE system. I kept getting an error message that the COM ports were in use when I tried to run the program.
I fought with that for a few days, then by sheer chance found a post on the Microsoft support forum that said the COM port drivers in Windows 11 didn’t work properly!
I downloaded 3rd party drivers and got JMRI to work - for one day. Then JAVA started having problems.
Finally I just gave up and installed JMRI onto a low-end refurbished Windows 10 laptop I got off Amazon. Worked great from the first try.
I did several small things on the layout through the middle of March, including laying out the first bit of trackwork in Powell, adding weight to the S-2 Pacific, and adding a whole lot more rock castings the south end of the canyon.
Looking a little better, I think.
Then I spent a couple of days preparing for my March 21st Ops Session. The session went well, but I didn’t have time to get any photos, other than this one in the library as the session wound down.
After the session I added Bullfrog Snot to the CNW Ten-Wheeler I’d re-decaled in late 2023, as it had proven during the session to struggle with even a short train on the grade up from Shobon to Riverton. In this shot the Snot is still wet.
After this I began working on the staging yard, which would take most of the next four months to complete.
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Thanks for continuing your thread here, Mark. I really enjoy following your progress and your willingness to show the ‘oops’ moments and how you overcame them! Of course, your videos are equally informative and entertaining.
Keep up the good work!
Cheers, Ed
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Thanks, Mark. Very interesting.
Thanks guys!
28 December 2024
In early April I built the ten turnouts I’d need for the staging yard:
Then I began building the staging benchwork panels. By the 4th I had most of the pieces I’d need cut. I began assembling the first of the panels.
The yard would consist of four 16-inch wide panels. Three panels are eight feet long, and the fourth is five feet long. This is the first completed panel:
Over the next couple of days I built the remaining three panels, and on the 8th I began adding the cork sheeting to the tops.
On the 12th of April I had all the cork applied, so I took the panels outside to temporarily assemble them. I laid them out in the driveway, sideways across all three bays. This is the only spot where I could lay them all out in line and work on them easily.
One thing I learned - a chalk line stretched 31 feet doesn’t give a nice straight line. Can’t hold enough tension on the line to make it snap properly, but I did all the rough centerlines anyway. Then I went back and measured from the panel edge to one of the center tracks and marked it with a Sharpie and a straight-edge. Later I marked all the track centerlines off this one when I started attaching the track.
On the 13th I started building the west end yard throat. This is the end that goes under the east end of Casper - the end closest to Hudson on the CNW line above.
The next day, after I started installing the body tracks, I had to pull all these turnouts up to install the wooden “ties” - I forgot that the wood ties are a bit thicker than the PC board ones.
Since the staging turnouts are hidden (well, mostly) I didn’t waste money buying Fast Tracks tie strips or 3-D print my own. I’d kept all the Fast Tracks tie strip edges from probably 40 or so turnouts because the plywood they used just seemed too good to just throw away. I just sliced a few of them up and glued them in place under the turnouts.
I completed everything on each of the four panels as I went, including trackwork, wiring, occupancy detection and turnout control. Detection was accomplished using something called an “IRDOT” - InfraRed Detection Of Trains - that MicroMark sold years ago. I had a bunch from an old staging yard I’d built on Version 2 of the layout in New Jersey back in the first decade of the century. Turnouts would be powered by Tortoises off that same yard.
On that west end panel, the first thing I did after completing tracklaying was add all the barrier strips that would tie in all the electrical components to the aisleway-side stringer of the panel.
As you can see, this panel had four groups. From left to right, they’re Tortoise connections, then track power, Then (the one that’s almost illegible) IRDOT power, and finally one labeled “IRDOT LEDS.” That last connects a cable back to the control panel that provides the occupancy indication via bi-color LEDs.
Here’s one of the IRDOTS. The long black shafts are the infrared transmitter and the receiver. The stick up through the plywood between the rails. When there’s something on the track above it, the IRDOT lights one side of the LED; when there’s nothing above it it lights the other side of the LED.
Here’s what the top of the yard looks like with the IRDOTs installed. If you look closely you can see the tops of the transmitter and receiver showing between the ties on each track.
Here’s the underside with wiring partially completed. The yellow and purple wires in the center of this shot are the track feeders. The IRDOTs have their power wires run - that’s the black and white wires running to opposite sides of each IRDOT. The other odd colored wires on each IRDOT are left over from the previous installation and will be removed.
Later that day I installed the Tortoises. I waited for several days before completing the wiring.
I’ll pick up again at this point in a day or two.
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29 December 2024
There was only one place in the layout room with enough open floor space to make it easy to work around two connected staging yard panels - the wide aisleway near Powder River. On April 19th I moved the partially-completed west end yard throat there and set the next panel in place. Here’s what they looked like after I spliced them together:
Not a huge amount of room to move around, but there was enough.
First thing I did was mark the track centers on the new panel, starting from the centers on the first panel. You can see how far off some of the chalk lines (the faint blue marks) are from the newly marked centerlines.
Then I started adding track to the new panel.
If you look at the left ends of the two strings of soda cans, you can see a couple of Atlas rerailers. I used these as splices to cross the joints between panels. Ties were cut back far enough on the flextrack adjacent to the rerailers that I could slide the rail joiners free of the rerailers to remove them so the yard panels could be separated or rejoined as needed during construction and final installation.
All track except the rerailers and the turnouts were attached to the panels using Alex Plus adhesive caulk. The cans were placed on the tracks until the caulk dried enough to hold the track firmly in place.
Since I had a limited number of cans, I could only install a couple pieces of flextrack at a time. In between tracklaying sessions, I worked on re-identifying a couple of BLI Blueline Milwaukee Road Mikados I got from a friend. Here I’m just about to start removing the logo from the tender.
I planned to use Micro Scale’s Micro-Sol along with a brass bristle “pen” to gently scratch the logo off the tender. I’d never done this before, so I was a bit apprehensive. I could just see myself gouging big scrapes right into the plastic itself!
Surprisingly it worked great. It took nearly an hour of patient work for each removed graphic, but I wound up with a tender with no logo on the sides and no loco number on the back. Here’s that first side completed:
The only evidence of the prior markings was the slightly scratched-up paint where the lettering / logos were removed. I was fairly sure that would be hidden by the new decals and the gloss and dull coats that went along. The Mikados and the staging yard progressed alongside each other for several weeks.
Here’s one of the Mikados after it was finished:
By the evening of the 20th all the track was complete on the second yard panel:
I separated the two panels again, and by the end of the day on the 21st I had the west panel completely wired.
IF you look at the upper left corner of the picture you can see that I’ve added a “foot” that produces out from the stringer about an inch. After I took this shot I added one to the other stringer. Turned out the Tortoises’ electrical connectors protruded past the bottom of the stringer about half an inch, so I needed the feet to keep the connectors from hitting the floor when the panels were laid flat.
A couple days later I finished trackwork on the third panel:
The third panel would hold the middle set of IRDOTs, so I installed those. Then I spent several days mounting the turnouts for the east yard throat on the fourth panel, so I didn’t get the IRDOTs wired until April 29th.
A note on the color code I used on all the IRDOTs - Black and white are power, and the red and green wires go the red and green sides of the bi-colored LEDs, respectively. Simple enough that even a moron like me would be able to remember.
By the morning of the 30th I was well on the way with tracklaying on the fourth panel. The east throat is out of view to the lower right.
At this point I switched gears. Dave from Basin came to spend the day to help me install the east staging lead all the way from Orin / Greybull to where the staging yard would begin underneath Powder River. At least that was the plan.
We were moving right along until we ran into a little snag - the lead ran right smack into the benchwork stringer for Thermopolis and the Wind River Canyon! I had forgotten to take the benchwork thickness into account when planning the lead.
As you can see, it would take more than just a slight adjustment of the grade to clear the stringer, so I would have to do some serious thinking and re-planning to eliminate this problem.
We’ll pick up from this point in the next installment.
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3 January 2025
After that problem with the East Saging lead banging smack into the benchwork a redesign was needed. Investigation showed there was only one viable solution - run the lead down the helix on the Cody Branch and take off to staging at the entrance to Powell.
This is the helix I would have to utilize to get to staging:
And here’s the new switch at the bottom of the helix. The diverging route heads to staging.
This solution is far less than ideal. The helix is about 2.2%, on a 36 inch radius. This gives me an effective grade of 3%. My Mikados can pull about 14 cars up the helix, but the longest trains I planned for are 22-24 cars. The 2-10-2’s can handle that many cars - barely. So now most freights coming up from East Staging need a Santa Fe rather than a Mikado.
Fortunately, from this point things went my way. When I began building Powell I’d installed all new supports for Worland to make room, and the support scheme I’d chosen was perfect for the new staging line. Here’s the staging lead running behind Powell, through the arches created by the Worland supports:
I did have a couple of narrow spots where I had to shave risers a bit, but by the 1st of May the staging lead subroadbed was going down.
Following the placement of the plywood, I installed roadbed and then started on track.
At this point I stopped work on the lead and got back to the staging yard proper. By May 12th I finished the last panel - the east end yard throat. Here it is all wired and ready for installation:
Things really got interesting at this point. Dave, my friend from Basin, WY came for a visit on the 14th, and we assembled the entire staging yard on the floor under Casper.
Yep, it looks like it will fit just fine!
I was hoping I would be able to lift the yard into position starting at one end and slowly lifting the entire thing into place, but the assembly wasn’t rigid enough to do that. On the 16th I disassembled everything again and began lifting the panels individually. I lifted them up onto a bunch of those plastic storage bins (we have a lot of those!) and reconnected everything - again.
Here’s how it all looked from the east end, under Powder River:
Now it was just a matter of slowly raising the yard to final elevation. For this I went with one of my favorite methods of supporting from above - threaded rods. I spent a couple of days building support frames and installing the rods. Everywhere under Casper yard looked like this:
But the East End is wider than the benchwork at Powder River, so I temporarily supported it like this:
On the 20th of May I added the Atlas rerailers at all the panel interfaces.
The yard was now structurally complete. It wasn’t at the right elevation yet, but it was all assembled, for the last time, I hoped.
On the 22nd and 23rd I installed most of the control and power cables everywhere but on the east end of the yard:
At this point it was time to work out the West Staging lead tie-in to the yard, and figure out the exact height of the west end of the yard. That was dependent on the West staging lead grade.
First I tied the West Staging lead into the west end of the yard:
Then I tied it in to the already-existing lead that came down from Greybull / Frannie.
I added the rerailer at the west end of the yard throat…
…and the section of track at the splice in the lead, then over several days rolled around on an automotive creeper slowing raising the yard to near its final position.
Yard still needed to be adjusted to final position, but that wouldn’t happen for a couple weeks, until after I finished the East Staging lead. I’ll cover that next time.
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3 January 2025
A bit out of sequence here, but on Christmas Day I uploaded my 3rd Annual Christmas Day Layout Tour, this one a cab ride over almost the entire railroad:
Today I posted my latest layout update video:
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Love that Mikado, Mark!
Rich
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Can’t decide which I like more.
The Christmas Layout Tour or the hat?
Rich
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Mark. Your layout is amazing. The amount of work in it. is mind blowing.
Love it. Well done.
David
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Thanks guys!
Rich, I hope it was the hat. That thing cost too much money!
4 January 2024
Picking back up with the east staging lead, the last few days of May I was busy adding the subroadbed.
By June 1st the subroadbed was complete and I was adding the cork. The final grade wasn’t set yet, and the lead was supported on a TV tray temporarily.
But the grade under Holly Sugar and on the section that runs from Holly Sugar along the wall (see the first picture in this installment) was set by then, so I began extending the track.
I added track all the way to the East Staging yard throat, even though the subroadbed wasn’t final graded all the way. Note the stool the subroadbed is sitting on in the left background of this shot:
On the 11th of June Dave came to visit again and we adjusted the height of the staging yard to near its final elevation. That was a chore! We had to crawl back and forth along the length of the yard with my six-foot level to measure grade along the yard, and an 18 inch level to make sure the yard was level across the tracks.
Once the yard was set, we clamped temporary risers to support the east staging lead (that’s Dave in the loud shirt):
(Since the supports actually drop down from the benchwork above, should the supports be called “descenders?”)
That afternoon we ran some locos and a train onto the staging yard.
Over the next couple of days I tweaked the elevation of the staging yard to eliminate a stiffer than expected grade at the West lead and then began final installing the “descenders” 
for the East lead.
Over the next couple of days I finalized the East lead supports, then I put together the new graphic for the staging yard control panel:
And at this point I had to begin preparations for my June 25th operating session (which I didn’t get any photos of). We’ll pick up right after the session in the next installment.
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Mark, your layout seems like a life’s work! I’ve seen club layouts that aren’t as envolved as yours. Are you doing this all yourself? Most impressive indeed!
Regards, Chris
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Hi Chris,
I’m doing most of it by myself. I’ve had some help applying the backdrops, plus a little bit of help elsewhere. I’ve probably done 99% of it alone.
6 January 2024
I had an operating session coming up in late June, and I was pretty tired of working on staging anyway, so I replaced a faulty sound decoder in a BLI Blueline Mikado with a TCS WowSound unit. I started here:
And wound up here:
TCS WowSound is my sound system of choice. I like the quality of the sound, and their motor control algorithms are second to none.
Here’s the finished installation before I put the tender shell back on:
June 25th was the ops session. I actually managed to get a few photos this time!
After the session I began extending the skyboard from Thermopolis west. First I got the sections from Thermopolis around past the corner with Holly Sugar done:
Then in early July I extended almost to the west end of Worland. Holly sugar is way back in the far corner:
At this point it was back to staging. I began putting together the control panel. First I drilled the lexan sheets for the switches and LEDs:
Then I began wiring up the bi-color LEDs. Here the green element wire is installed:
(don’t worry. I’m not going to show every excruciating solder joint!)
After installing all the leads to the occupancy indicator LEDs I installed all the Tortoise switches into the panel and began wiring them and the route indicator LEDs (they’re blue when lit). That cluster of switches and LEDs at the upper right are the power switches and indicators:
On the 26th of July I tested the switches and route LEDs:
Once those were working I added the occupancy indicator LEDs to the panel. Things were looking pretty hairy at this point!
Then it was time to install the panel in the frame and connect up all the leads to the barrier strips where the cables from the yard would come in. I labeled all the strips so I would have at least of chance of getting everything right. Here’s a sample:
There are nine barrier strips of various sizes from two to twelve position.
Here’s the back of the panel fully wired, including all the cable connections from the yard. It’s now August 7th:
I didn’t get any photos of cable installation to the yard itself, but here’s a couple shots of the cable bundles after that work was done:
I did most of that work in late July. I have a video clip of me doing that, but no photos.
Then it was time to test the staging yard. I ran trains in and out from both directions:
Fortunately everything performed well. I did have to tweak one turnout a bit, but I was l lucky in that it was one under Powder River, where it was easy to get at.
Here’s the panel set on a moveable rack, with power supplies on the shelf below:
I had to replace the train set power pack a few weeks later - it powered the occupancy detectors, and it just wasn’t quite up to the task. After about 45 minutes the pack would go into thermal shutdown!
Here’s the back of the panel showing the cable bundles and power cords:
At this point the staging yard was fully functional. The occupancy detectors work great, but I wanted a visual aid to see the trains at the yard throats as well. I’ll go into that in the next installment.
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8 January 2025
With major work on the staging yard finally complete (only took about four months!) I focused on other projects. I had a couple of BLI Blueline Mikados in Milwaukee Road livery that I wanted to change to CB&Q, so on August 11th I finished scrubbing the lettering off the locomotive:
I had taken the Milwaukee logo off the tender some time earlier.
By August 22nd I had the locomotive re-identified. It came out okay, I think:
Meanwhile, on August 13th Dave came down from Basin again to spend the day (in the winter I go up there, because he can’t see well enough to drive at night). We put the end piece on the skyboard for the Worland peninsula:
I had picked up a set of four RTR Tangent tank cars from Spring Creek Hobbies earlier, and on August 17th I began getting them ready for the layout. What a disappointment! Every car but one was either missing parts or had been damaged during packaging! Here’s one of them showing the torn up stirrup step on one end:
I contacted Tangent about getting missing parts (these were brand new cars, after all) - cut levers and eyelets and such - and the best they could do was send me a new car to cannibalize for the missing parts. That was free of charge, which I appreciated, but it still left a bad taste in my mouth. I’ll be much less likely to buy Tangent products in the future.
In late August I also installed the turntable in Thermopolis. There was never one there on the prototype, but since I didn’t include the location south of the Wind River Canyon where the locals were turned (Bonneville), I decided on the turntable in Thermopolis:
No more running backwards all the way to Greybull!
Also in late August I added the finishing touches to the staging yard - vehicle backup cameras to look at the West Staging yard throat and the center of the yard (the East Staging throat is visible by just turning your head and looking at it from the yard control station). Here’s the first of the monitors I installed, for the camera at the West yard throat:
I liked that one enough to order a second one to look at the occupancy detectors at the center of the yard. I got it installed by mid-September. Here’s the completed staging yard control station:
That’s pretty much it for the staging yard - finally. We used it (for the first time) during the October operating session, and it worked great.
While I was waiting on the second camera system to arrive I Cut and installed the fascia for the south end of Thermopolis:
After I got the camera done I painted all that bare fascia (including the big pieces a the end of the peninsula) and reinstalled it. Here’s the completed fascia at Thermopolis:
Towards the end of September I masked off the new fascia and painted all the track in Thermopolis:
Then the first couple of days in October I painted the skyboard…:
…all the way around nearly to Worland on the opposite peninsula. This shot is taken behind the furnace wall:
Then I spent a couple of weeks on small projects and getting ready for the October 22nd operating session. One thing I did was modify my scratchbuilt timber tunnel portal - the one that had been smashed back into its component parts decades ago - and placed it in the north mouth of Black Tunnel in the Canyon:
It will look a lot better when the scenery is done in this area.
And that’s it for now.
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Excellent, Mark (as usual). Love the grey skyline. 
(The sky looks grey when I look out our window. I thought you might be going for a U.K. looking sky 
)
Seriously, well done.
David
Thanks David!
10 January 2024
I’m getting close to caught up. Another installment or three and we’ll be current.
I held an ops session on October 22nd. As usual, I was too busy to get any photos. But here’s a few shots of the layout after it was prepared.
Greybull yard:
Casper yard:
Thermopolis:
After the session I bought another BLI Blueline loco off ebay - this one is 5502. That was great - a road number I didn’t already have, so I didn’t need to renumber it. All I needed to do was install a motor decoder. Not quite as easy as I thought it would be.
The Bluelines were dual decoder locos - one came installed for sound, and the purchaser would need to add an 8-pin type motor decoder. Programming these locos can be a bit tricky, as you need to lock one decoder to program the other one. I cheated - I have a Proto 2000 SD9 (yes, a diseasel!) that has an 8-pin plug. I simply program the Blueline sound decoder to the correct address, then program the motor decoder to the same address in the SD9 and transfer the decoder to the Blueline. No locking the decoders for programming.
Anyway, when I plugged the motor decoder into the Blueline tender, it looked like this (motor decoder is the small board on top):
When I went to put the tender shell on, it wouldn’t fit! The electronics stack was too tall. I guess the Bluelines were designed for decoders with a wiring harness.
Well, since I didn’t have another decoder on hand, I simply shortened the standoffs between the sound board and the mounting plate. I covered the plate with electrical tape to make sure nothing would short out on the lowered board, then put everything back together:
There wasn’t much of a difference in height, but it was enough. The tender shell went on and I had another new loco in the roster:
There is one little problem. The chuff sensor has partially failed, so I only get an occasional chuff out of the loco. Sounds pretty weird! But I got a few sensors from BLI, and I’ll be replacing the bad one in the next week or two.
In early November I finally got back to work on Powell. I installed the short section of missing track on the eastern siding:
Then added the last bit of subroadbed to the west end of town and the curve leading out of town towards Vocation:
On the 10th of November I switched gears and went over to Casper to ballast the rest of the mainline. The first part, at the east end of town, had been done at least two years earlier.
I laid the whitish ballast (supposedly the ballast CB&Q used most places - but apparently not out west) through the rest of Casper:
Then switched to a more reddish-brown ballast at the yard limits and continued west towards Powder River.
By the 23rd of November I had reached Powder Rive, and stopped there as there’s more basic scenery to be done before I can ballast further.
Then it was back to Powell again, extending the subroadbed farther west…:
…and installing cork for the mainline in town:
This takes us to the end of November, so we’ll continue again later.
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Fantastic. The progress, documentation, everything. Just fantastic.
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Let’s not overdo it, Mike.
Mark has a big enough ego as it is.
Rich
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