Home Page › Forums › Modeling the Missouri Pacific, Texas & Pacific, etc › Mopac or Texas & Pacific layouts › I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011 › Reply To: I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011
Now the four turnouts at the east end of Tolerville yard are all in. Not powered, but then this entire stretch of railroad has no power yet….
This yard still exists. Try to Google Bel Aire, KS, then move southwest toward Wichita and you’ll see a place where K-96 jogs and passes over the yard. (I’m not modeling the highway.) Today the two outer tracks are gone, and in fact the current Google view shows the piles of ties that probably came from the track removal.
The west end of the yard is on a slight curve. The geometry of the train room is such that I’ve had to curve the main line in the opposite direction from life, but directions in the train room are so confusing that most people who see it would never notice. In fact, even I have to stop and think, ok, trains headed for the yard are westbound. so looking in that direction must mean north is to the right.
A few parts of the railroad, as is true of railroads all over Kansas, run truly east-west or north-south. I’m not sure I’ll get to model any of those, so I’m trying to analyze the actual railroad direction and get the road crossings angled properly. Even now, with some plywood strips laid down as the highway sub-base, these are standing out more than the edge-of-module plywood.
Just the other day I figured out I can put an overpass in the middle of the curve on module 10. This area could sort of be like Summit, at the extreme east end of Butler County, except the whole El Dorado thing is missing. El Dorado is going to have to go somewhere else. There was a real underpass and railroad bridge just east of Summit, which is actually on a high point in the highway so it’s really hard to see now that almost all traces of the railroad are gone. But there was another point farther east, on the other side of Eureka, where there was a big sweeping curve and the tangent passed directly under US 54, which could be the inspiration for this. I still want to build the overpass just west of Eureka also, but that module doesn’t exist yet.
Ron Merrick
