Closing in on a Milepost.

Well, it's just over a year since the reconstruction of the Western Maryland Western Lines began, and I'm actually pretty pleased with the volume of progress I've made thus far.

Last night I made a significant advance by installing the 32" diameter helix I constructed over the course of a week. It goes in the corner, and will carry the Connellsville line down to the staging yard under Ridgeley. At this moment, there's about five feet of railroad to build to make this connection, which should be complete over the weekend.

The beginnings of the west yard throat will be just above this monster eventually, but I think I'm going to cheat a little and run a temporary track around there to make a connection to North Junction and on to east staging. This will afford me the opportunity to run trains in earnest for the first time in about year.

Like the initial section of the layout over by the paper mill, I constructed the bulk of the helix off-site (at the kitchen table to be precise) to make it easier to align the track, do the wiring, and otherwise try to get it right. Once completed, I hauled it up the steps to the attic. Amazingly, the vertical dimensions worked out to within 1/8", which was easily handled by the leveling screws on the legs. I secured it to the wall to eliminate any wobble.

The outer track on the twist has a radius of 16", and the inner 14.5" Ascending trains will have the wider berth to reduce friction as much as possible. It will be interesting to test to see how long a train can reasonably manage the climb. The overall rise goes from 31.5" to 38.75" in two and a quarter turns. Not sure how the math works out on that, but I'm sure it won't be long before someone chips in with that calculation. It doesn't look like more than a brace of SD40's can handle. I'm hoping I can maintain my projected train length of 30 cars.

Anyway, that's all for now. Stay tuned for further developments.

The Contemplative Process

As I forge ahead with my seemingly endless endeavor to rebuild my N scale empire, I'm discovering that the various phases of the project generally proceed along the same basic sequence.

First, I find myself standing in the train room, usually in my pajamas with a coffee cup in my hand, staring obliquely at whatever the current obstacle is that's confronting me. This process can be repeated for several days, or over the course of several weeks or even months. Usually these silent vigils take place in increments of about 10 minutes to an hour. It depends on how hungry I am.

During these periods, my mind will alternately slip in and out of gear. At the more productive moments, it's envisioning the finished scene, or the complex turnout linkage, or fully lit grouping of structures and vehicles. These thoughts are quickly replaced by a spell where I just stare blankly at the framework, as I go over the "to do" list that will be required to get from what I'm looking at right now, to what I fantasized about a moment earlier.

Next, I heave a sigh, scratch my head, then take a sip from my coffee cup, which has gone stone cold during the elapsed time.

If it's my day off, I may swing into action and start to tackle the list that will nudge me ever closer to the goal. This list may include actual model railroading activities, such as plugging in the soldering pencil, or moving some rolling stock out of harm's way, but usually it starts with such mundane activities as getting dressed so I can head out to the garage to find a piece of lumber or a box of screws. If my wife isn't home, I may bypass the whole getting dressed thing, and just put on my slippers for the trek across the driveway. (These are usually my least productive outings.)

The first trip to the garage is generally an assessment of the inventory at hand, which may lead to a safari to the lumberyard or hardware to fill in any missing gaps. There's so much stuff stockpiled, though, that this is rarely needed.

Returning to the train room, which is in the attic, a full three flights of stairs from the garage, I quickly realize that a critical tool or piece of material has been left down on the workbench. This scenario will be repeated throughout the day, and this constitutes the extent of my physical fitness regimen.

Another recurring theme in my layout construction is the law of "One Step Forward Requires Two Steps Back." This means that before any real forward progress can be recorded, some hastily concocted shortcut will have to be undone. Most recently, this involved the relocation of a turnout that I had installed to close up the long siding on the Connellsville Sub.

That's it there in the middle of the shot. When I did this, my main concern was keeping the turnout on the "fixed" portion of the layout, and not on the removable section I have to install in front of the window. I had neglected to verify that this location would provide the desired minimum train length of 30 cars, plus 2-3 locomotives and a caboose. Once the glue dried and everything was in place, I checked this, and was disappointed to see that I was stuck at around 28 cars.

I walked away, and resumed the ritual with the pajamas etc. for several weeks.

The other night, I resolved to work on the removable section, which involved re-working an existing module so that it would fit in the space, span the window, and provide the base elevations so I could make the final adjustments on the previous work, and set the grades for the sections beyond the window to the right. This was fun, and led me to a solution on the Connellsville Sub siding issue.

You can see the turnout will now appear on the removable section, which will require additional wiring connections, but I'll work that out. The worst part will be digging in to the old scenery, and making a hole in the plywood deck to make room for the Tortoise switch machine that will run the turnout. Not impossible, to be sure, but it will take a bit of head scratching.

So next time we chat, odds are I'll be in my pajamas clutching a coffee cup and staring blankly at a hole drilled in a bit of plywood.

And so it goes.

Holiday Progress

Here we are, the first post of the new year (2011). I was fortunate enough to have a few days off over the holidays, and took advantage of that time to press ahead with a couple of key projects. First, I continued to flesh out the scenery around Thomas, West Virginia, closing up the chasm between the yard there and the masonite fascia. This also included finishing out the base scenery along the Connellsville line on the lower level along the river bank.

This also involved completing the highway bridge leading out of Thomas. I used an old Atlas Warren Truss bridge as the basic component, and tricked it out with some Evergreen H beams and a styrene deck, then added some road striping with a yellow pencil. Finally, for the sake of the safety of my N scale motorists, I added some guardrails using Evergreen strip stock.

All that's left to do in Thomas is to construct the iconic brick station building, a couple of more company houses, and then work on detailing out the post and frame foundations. I have a stand in for the lumber mill operation, and a kit to bash to finish it, and of course, some trees, figures vehicles and so forth.

Next, I moved around the corner to start roughing in the framework for Cumberland, which will be my urban section. Since the benchwork is fairly deep at this area, I have to work from the back wall out, as I won't be able to easily reach the far sections once the mainline is installed through town. The Thomas Sub line to the helix runs behind Cumberland, and parallels my version of US 40 into the Narrows, a scene showcased in our last installment. Working forward from Route 40, I'm creating a typical highway commercial scene, replete with billboard signs, gasoline stations and fast food joints. So far things are just slapped in "for placement only" consideration, but I'll be refining this area in the coming weeks.

My time frame is around 1970, and I've been told that there wasn't a Pizza Hut in Cumberland until 1972, but I'll take that under advisement. The Pizza Hut got a "snow" job when I used it on a slap-dash Christmas Garden a few years ago, so I'll need to be repainting that. I'll also add some more details to the roof and landscape to make it look a little less Plasticville. Either that or I'll build a proper road side greasy spoon, but for now we'll stick with pizza. In the background you can see the larger buildings of Cumberland's main thoroughfare, Baltimore Street.

I'll be using some DPM structures, and kitbashing a few others to get the downtown feel here. I've also seen some Japanese Tomix buildings that look like they might work for the newer buildings that were constructed in the 1950's and '60's. We'll see what the budget allows for in the coming months.

As we proceed back toward the aisle, we pick up the segment of the mainline through town where the Western Maryland Station is to be located. I've been working on a scratchbuild of the station for some time, and this will give me the motivation to try to finish it.

The station scene will represent how the building looked in the early 1970's, with the middle platform removed. Baltimore Street crosses the tracks just to the left of the station, and there will be an interchange track for the B&O just to the right like the prototype. The panel in the foreground will be the stream bed for Wills Creek, which in this area is enclosed in a concrete flood control channel, as shown in the map below.

View Larger Map

The challenge for me will be to patiently work on these background scenes and get them to a level of completeness so I can confidently finish running Wills Creek from the back to the front, and then install the remainder of the main line. Usually I'm too impatient to do things in the proper order, and I end up regretting it later. I'm already struggling with myself on this one, as I really want to get the track installed in front of the station. Somehow I'll manage, I'm sure.

Making the Scene...

Been cobbling together some more scenery.

Here's some highlights:

Wills Creek, west of Cumberland. That would be US 40 there. This runs along the back edge of the layout, and will be difficult to access once I construct the main line through Cumberland, so I'm trying to tease out as complete a scene as I can before I close up the hole in the bench work.

Looking the other way. Once the scenery is closed up, the state highway department assures me that this will be a less dangerous curve...

High bridge over the Casselman River. This scene might seem confusing if you consider that the high bridge is on the Thomas Sub in West Virginia, while the low line is somewhere between Deal and Meyersdale in Pennsylvania. Ah the joys of selective compression!

Another view. The scene remains incomplete, I need to add the walkway on the near side of the bridge. The engine is a Walther's 0-8-0 into which I recently installed a decoder. It currently resides in Minnesota. I like this photo angle... More trees will do just the right trick.

Thomas, West Virginia. I've been working on the company town housing along the ridge.  I'm happy with the way the town is coming together. I'm working my way from the skyboard out to the fascia, gradually filling in the peninsula. You can see the Wills Creek scene just above the Cool Whip tub I use to mix up my Sculptamold. The big factory in the back is Kingsford Charcoal.

Detail of a "Company House" duplex, abandoned, and gradually returning to nature. That was kind of fun to do!

As you may have guessed, building out the scenery is my favorite part of the hobby. I regard tracklaying and wiring as necessary evils, but once they're done, I'm slinging mud and planting trees and other details. I'll try to keep you updated on progress as it happens. I'm going to try to finish out the Thomas scene in the next week or so, then I'll be making the push to get the business district along US 40 done. After that, I can get back to the dull stuff to get Cumberland operational.

The Missing Link

I looked forward to receiving my author's copy of N Scale magazine with much fervor. I had worked pretty hard to get all the shots in it together, and really hard on the cover shot... Well, David K. Smith did most of that work, but still.

When it arrived, I eagerly thumbed through to the article, and enjoyed seeing my work in print. The layout of the article wasn't quite what I had envisioned, but overall it was well done. But as I got to the final page, I noticed a critical element was missing.

You see, the article was written more or less as a time line describing the history of Casselman Crossing, a fictitious location on the WM that's featured on my layout. I started with a photo of a steam train pulling passengers, then proceeded to shots of some coal trains and fast freights in the early transition era, and on into the 1960's and early '70's. There's a picture of a Chessie engine in one of the lash-ups, which could have been captioned "There Goes the Neighborhood", then I described in the article how the line was ultimately abandoned by the Chessie System (I always preferred to call it Chessie the Knife), and the coup de gras was to be a photo that I painstakingly staged, showing the bridge as part of a hiking trail in the current era, with a CSX freight rumbling by in the background.

But somehow, it got lost in the shuffle and didn't appear in the article. So I provide it here, dear reader, as a public service.

I've got lots of work to update you on, but the hour is late, and the land of Counterpane beckons... More next time.

Everything Old is New Again!

Back in ought one, or whenever it was that I first discovered the interwebs, I quickly recognized that there was an opportunity to learn from other model railroaders, and maybe show off a little of the stuff that I was doing. Apart from a few awkwardly run e-mail groups, the first real forum I wandered into was the Atlas board. If you've ever been there, you know it's a pretty good forum, peopled by a lot of regulars. There's a few that are kind of "out there", but there are also some really solid modelers who are quick to share their work, and advice to help even the most bumbling novice find his way to satisfaction in the hobby.

When I first got involved with the forum, I saw the photos that people were putting up, and I started thinking about how I could be a part of the fun. The first challenge was the very real problem that I didn't have a layout at the time! But I had a plan.


So I picked what I thought would be a good place to start, and... well, started. This piece was to be the spine of the peninsula I had planned, providing not only a nice mountain for a view block, but also a cool switch back to a coal mine, modeled loosely after the WM's Chaffee branch. This is where the Big Six operated, which was the last Shay type locomotive built in the US.

Anyway, I had gotten a digital camera for my job, so I started firing away out in the garage as this pile of foam evolved into something worthwhile. It started to attract a bit of an audience, and I really enjoyed the positive feedback I got from my fellow forumers.


Long story short, I got the Chaffee Branch section, which was about 30" wide x 8' long, to within about 15% of completion, including ballasted track, structures, and even figures on the porch of the structures. For a long time it sat up in the attic serving as a photo background. (A big, heavy photo background!) It was enjoyable, and it was nice to get back into constructing a layout, or even just a part of one, after many years of moving around in pursuit of a career.

Finally the day came when I could get the main portion of my dream plan installed in the attic. The room was renovated, including wiring and new lighting. To make room for the new benchwork, though, I had to displace the Chaffee Branch. This was partly to keep it from getting damaged as the rest of the construction was going on, but mainly because it was just so damn big that I could no longer work around it! You may recall that once the room was renovated, I had to temporarily share the space with Andy, my son, so the room was also occupied by his menagerie of Legos, his desk and his bed. Something had to give.

So, back out to the garage it went, getting placed up above some power tools on a precarious shelf. It was high enough up that the cats couldn't get to it, and out of the way now. The idea remained to ultimately install it as part of the layout.

This was probably five years ago.

It came to pass that Andy moved into his own room, the layout got some temporary construction to allow me to at least run some trains, and finally, I started having some friends down for regular operating sessions. These sessions were very instructive as far as how screwed up my dream plan was. The staging was set up all wrong, and way too small. The yard was too small and in the wrong place... etc. etc. etc. Then there was the big one... The aisles proposed in the "Dream Plan" were way too narrow! Model Railroaders in general are not known for their athleticism. The die was cast... I had to redesign the layout; and not just a little bit.

Which is why we're here now! The good news is that all the good work on the Chaffee Branch wasn't for naught. The other night, wielding an array of artillery, I cut a big chunk of mountain off, and carried the organs up to the attic for transplanting on the layout.

Part of this is due to the fact that I'm cheap. Here was some perfectly good Styrofoam, coated with perfectly good Sculptamold, and tricked out with perfectly good puffball trees! Why waste any of that!? I pulled back the canopy of puff balls, and put the old Chaffee branch cliff up against the new skyboard. I then worked some newspapers and what not into the joint between the new new work and the old new work, and made with the Sculptamold. I use a mixture tinted with craft acrylic paints, usually black and some sort of brown.

There's still a bit of blending to do, and some more "real" trees to add to the scene to really cinch it, but it looks like the rest of the Chaffee Branch will be an invaluable asset to finishing out the scenery on the peninsula that was supposed to be its home in the first place.

Just Shoot Me...

I'm pretty excited. Once again, Pam Clapp at N Scale Magazine has exhausted every possible alternative, and pulled my submitted article out of her wastebasket to run in the November/December 2010 issue. To soften the blow for her readers, she's asked me to re-shoot one of the images to use as a cover shot. This way, the readers will lower their expectations before they purchase the issue, and subscribers will have the opportunity to toss the magazine on the burn pile as soon as it arrives in the mail. (What, Me Worry?)

Anyway, just to keep things interesting, the particular composition she wants me to re-shoot is smack dab in the middle of the reconstruction project. So over the last few evenings I've scurried up to the attic after work to repair the damage and perform the necessary reconstructive surgery.

I carved foam, I smeared Sculptamold, and planted trees. Last night I re-applied gloss medium to the river and touched up the waterfall, and it's all coming together nicely. Except, of course, the whole camera situation. I'm still working with a very sub-par point n' shoot, so I'm scrambling to get some help.


So, Sunday I'm expecting a visit from David K. Smith, the multiple published author, photographer and model railroading bon vivant, who is bringing his DSLR, a bag full of smoke and mirrors, and 1,000 watts of studio lighting. All the way from New Joisey, and all of this for a chicken dinner.

Now, I'm not going to spill the beans on the content of the article, you'll have to pick a copy up when it gets published. (I'm sure you'll hear about when that happens here...) But I can assure you that the cover photo will likely raise your expectations for the article, because the honorable DKS has a reputation for making objects in your mirror appear much closer than they actually are.