Dogbone

As I indicated earlier, I wanted a hybrid layout that would provide some operations interest as well as railfanning.  When we have visitors, I want to have a unit running in a loop around the layout.  Some times this would be a lengthy coal train, but other times I might like a passenger train (if I ever buy one).

For a passenger train to run, I will need a large radius on the loops.  And I will need a way to incorporate both east and west staging while keeping a somewhat natural or realistic look to the ends of the layout.

So I thought - what if I have the loop run under the layout?  I could run down a grade, go underneath the layout, and then back up at the opposite end.  I've seen quite a few layout plans that indicate staging underneath the layout, so this seemed to be workable.

I drew up a design, and soon realized if  I was going to run the mainline at the front of the layout all the way around that I wasn't going to have much room on the reverse side of the dogbone to put staging.  Plus if I kept to a steep but reasonable grade (under 4%), I wouldn't have very much room to have staging between the ends of the reverse side of the loop.

So the main line would need to be somewhat curved.  It would come in from the back left, straighten out along the length, then curve toward the back right. I could run the staging in front of the main layout if I kept the operational portion of the mainline at the front of the "main level".  I could even add scenery to it, making it look like it is running at the bottom of a cliff face.

Yeah, it's confusing.  So a picture is worth an additional thousand words.

Latest layout

The staging area in the front (the green tracks) is a few inches lower than the rest of the layout. 

I'll need to make sure that the industries at either end are within easy reach, so the far right and left back corners are going to be scenery only, probably foothills.  I'll need to somehow make them removable to be able to deal with derailments, but that should not be a big deal.  I can live with the coke oven and the byproduct facilities being on opposite sides of the main line as it curves toward the back right.  I can run the byproduct feed pipes underneath the line in a ditch and run a bridge over the top of them.

The power plant will be just behind the coke oven - a little bit of a stretch but still reachable.

And I'm making the layout a little deeper, back to 34 inches so we can store my grandson's wooden train table underneath.  For the most part, that will simply add more space for scenery behind the operational portion of the layout.

 At this point, it has been several years since I have actually posted anything here.

I have not been idle in my hobby, but I also have not put anything to wood, nails, and glue.  The interim has involved mostly design and purchase of a few select pieces.

My next few posts will retroactively cover the intervening years.

No, not drugs. Not even soft drinks

In the September 17, 2017  edition of the podcast The Roundhouse, Bernie Kempinski talked about modeling a steel mill.  He also talked at length about the manufacturing process for steel, including the procedure for making one of the ingredients of steel, coke, a processed form of coal which is a necessary ingredient in the steel-making process.  Bernie dedicates an entire chapter of the book to this, and has some good instructions on how to model one of these facilities. 

Coke facilities are almost as visually interesting and impressive as steel mills, and require significantly less real estate to model well.  And coke facilities generate their own set of by-products which can provide additional variety to model railroad operations.  In manufacturing coke, almost one third of the weight of the coal is burned off as these byproducts, which include many different chemicals (hydrocarbons including coal tar, benzyl, and natural gas; ammonia; and various forms of nitrates/nitrites).  I think that this byproduct facility can easily be modeled using parts from a small petroleum refinery kit (which the byproduct plant essentially is).

Bernie's book mentions a specific coke facility that is now closed but is fairly well documented, partly because it has been declared a National Historic Site.  The Thomas Coke Works of Thomas, Alabama was documented by the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) in 1992, and was entered into the National Register of Historic Places of the National Park Services in September of 1995.  Much of the facility still exists, and numerous photos can be found in the Library of Congress website as well as other locations.

Note: One needs to be very specific when asking Google about coke processing.  Try it sometime but be advised - probably NSFW.

Rather than trying to find either of Walthers' discontinued coke ovens, I'm going to try to scratch-build the Thomas Coke Works facility.

I've put together a plan that's approximately 2/3 the length of the actual building as N-scale in Scarm, and I'm going to put this on the east (right) end of the layout.  (Aside: It'd be nice if Scarm would allow rotating an object in 3 dimensions.  As it is, I have to simulate a slanted ramp with a large number of small segments.  But it gets the idea across.)

And I have a neat idea regarding the end loops.  Stay tuned.

There is nothing more constant than change

And I'm still not satisfied. To quote Heraclitus: "There is nothing more constant than change."  He must have been a model railroader.

I *really* don't like how I've had to arrange (force) the track arrangement on the west end to allow for the loop.

I don't like how the west end approach to the wall for staging presents itself visually.

I don't like how I'll probably have to compress and steepen the slopes from back to front to keep within the 27" back-to-front that I've now allotted to myself.

I don't like the way that I cut the town in two with the spur to the power plant, though it would be nice to have rails going through the town.  (Lowell has some of that, and also Tecumseh and Blissfield, two other small towns in south-eastern Michigan that I'm familiar with).

And I'm only going to have a 15" radius on the end loop-backs so I won't be able to run a passenger train.

So I begin editing - again.

I decided to trash the double main line.  I'll run track along the back wall for the continuous loop.  Much of it will be hidden in a tunnel, so there's more space to do mountains and the elevations won't be quite so abrupt.

I looked at some more examples of mines on layouts (especially what appeared recently in Mountains & Coal in Model Railroader magazine February 2018 - article page 46, picture page 50).  Many layouts have mines with sidings running along the main line, and some even run the main line under the conveyors.  That's what I decided to do.  I dropped the west loop down vertically as far as I thought reasonable (2% grade down) and moved the mine onto the main line with a 2% grade up, so the main line goes over the loop with about 3 inch clearance.  (That might be a bit tight when taking the benchwork into account, but I'll address that later). The three coaling tracks along with the through track are essentially a four-track double-ended diamond yard layout.  The far west end of the mine ladder leads into the wall and the Erie-Pittsburgh west end staging.

And I'm going to revisit what my industries are.   I was listening to an older release of the podcast The Roundhouse (September 17, 2017) with Bernie Kempinski as guest, and they discussed modeling a steel mill.  That's always been one of my secret goals - having a nicely modeled steel mill.  So I ran over to Great Lakes Hobby and Toys and bought a copy of Bernie's book The Model Railroader's Guide to Steel Mills (which became the sixth or seventh of his books that I own).

After reading Bernie's book and going back to re-read some sections several times, I decided that I did not want to dedicate enough space on the layout to do a steel mill justice, even significantly condensed.  But I did come up with another idea that I liked almost as well. (How's that for a cliffhanger?)

Buildings, industries, and whatever

Prior to this writing I have not decided on the names of all the stores that would be included on the main street of the town, though I have a general idea of the mix.

The following stores I'm considering for Main Street are nods in one way or another to family members, many of whom are now departed.

• Mary Clare's Books and Magazines
• Eugene's Hardware Store
• Kelly's Pool Hall  (Downtown Deco Trackside Tavern)
• Meg's bakery
• Boor pharmacy
• Laura Mae's Wedding Boutique
• Lucille's Diner (I may try to turn one of my old passenger cars into this)

I also want to have an A&W Drive In (based on Woodland Scenics D's Diner).

Most of the town buildings will be constructed from DPM (Design Preservation Models) kits or from DPM modular sections (which I was fortunate enough to buy in bulk at a swap show).

Other structures (kits unless otherwise noted) I've purchased to be on the layout are:

• Stoney Brook Bridge (Branchline Trains)
• Pennsylvania Power and Light (Northern Light and Power - Walthers Cornerstone)
• Wood Coaling Tower (Walters Cornerstone)
• Yard Tower
• Water Tower
• Yard Office
• Roundhouse (already built and nicely weathered)

I intend to scratch-build the following:

• Columbia County Tractor Supply
• REA

I've also picked up a handful of buildings at swap meets that I may use for other industries.

Fiddlin' around

At this point the layout plan remained unchanged for over a month, which may be a record.

Prior to changes

Then one day I went down the basement to try to visualize what I was going to have.  This was a big mistake - in not having done so earlier.  I had used 32" for the width of the narrow central portion of the layout and 42" for the ends.

I can stand by the wall with my toes up to the third 9" floor tile and reach reasonably near the wall - perhaps within 4".  But the current 32" width would make that almost a foot.  And the left and right corners would probably be more than two foot past my fingertips when leaning against the fascia.

This would leave the branch line and the mine out of reach without using a step-stool or lean-over.  Another rework was in sight.

I trimmed the central width to 27".  (I can stand by the wall with my toes up to the third 9" floor tile and reach reasonably near the wall.  There might still be a need for a small step-stool if there's a problem in the center of the branch line.)

There would no longer be enough room to have a wide loop, so the ends were adjusted to loop back to the double mainline, which now becomes a passing area on the mainline.  The east end branches off of the mainline, loops around the yard, splits off to the branch line down the back, and continues to provide access to an industrial area loosely patterned after Woodstowe before connecting back to the passing area.  This last section of track would be red-flagged during operations.

At the west end, the mine was shifted forward within reasonable reach of the front, also providing some background space in which to provide some higher mountain scenery.  The mainline would hug the fascia in what would appear to be a narrow gorge, while the loop would be disguised as a double tunnel going off to the northwest, and would also be red-flagged for operations.  I switched the direction of the interchange to also go from front to back SE to NW, and changed it from a branch interchange to a crossing interchange.  Most of it would be hidden in a tunnel, providing a somewhat short but handy staging area.  I might provide a Raspberry-PI camera to be able to view the last couple of feet of this hidden track to aid in positioning any staged train.

The branch line was shifted forward a couple of inches also.  This will necessitate that the branch line passing track be on top of a 90-degree cliff against the lower roadway (which is not all bad from a scenery perspective), and could provide a slight scenery rise before the painted background.

To allow access to the tracks from underneath, there could be no under-track storage on the west end (or at least nothing that couldn't be moved easily in the case of a tunnel derailment).

After the rework

More importantly, I decided that the main at the east end would turn south well out from the wall, allowing me to add a temporary staging track (which would fit in front of bookshelves we planned on putting along that basement wall).  The west end would also have a staging track, but this would necessitate cutting through the existing drywall (and would complicate the shelving I was planning on the other side of that wall).  The staging on both ends would be three tracks centered on a wood panel 8"x 48", providing staging tracks 30", 33", and 36" in length.  These would be stored underneath the layout when not used.

Staging track

I could even add a fourth and fifth track on the staging if I wanted.

Consolidation

So we got moved in, and we've got a lot of unpacking to do.

And just like any "new" home, there's a little of this to repair, a little of that to tweak.  And we've still got unpacking to do.

There's actually a workbench in the furnace room in the basement that I've laid claim to.  That's going to be my hobby area.  After we get done unpacking.

In the meantime, I'm still fiddling around with the layout.  Looking at the 3D view from Scarm, I didn't care for the obvious transitions (my mind says gaps) between what used to be the modules.  So I decided to massage the approach a little by blending them together. I also decided that rather than having what would be an obvious fiddle yard on one end, I'd move the actual rail yard down to one of the loops, and use its classification yard as staging also.  The basement takes the shape of an L, and the previous yard was at the end of the L which would be least visible, so I decided to move the mine to that end, to make the train yard more visible.

I also decided that rather then use the two main lines as eastbound and westbound of a dog-bone, I'd actually have a single track main line, with the two tracks in front for passing but a single track completing the loop about 2/3 back, in front of and sometimes through the hills for the mine branch line.

With the smallest radius on the main line being 19", I decided to add a passenger station for the town also.  I've only got a couple of passenger cars now, but who knows what I'll have in 15 years.  We're not moving again.

The main line itself actually extends off of the layout to the west (left) and the southeast (right front).  For actual operations, I will "red-flag" the turnoffs on either end which join to the "loop" track, essentially turning it into a point-to-point layout.

That's a pipe against the wall in the eastern half of the layout that I show in the layout.  The kitchen sink has to drain somewhere, I guess.

We're going to finish the basement, since the outer walls are cinder block.  Coincidentally, that will give a better canvas for the backdrop.

Postscript:

Just to confuse matters, I leave you with the fact that the layout is along the east wall of the basement.  This means that the layout north is actually east, layout east is south, and layout west is north.  All directions are (and will be) given in relation to the layout and not to the house.