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Mine is in Wichita, didn’t have a chance to photograph it since I bought it the day before we left (long story). I was concerned that it was a little faded, but what would you expect for an object that’s as old as that house. At all events, I think the painting probably never was much livelier colors than this.
RG7
At last this module is more than just a place to put construction material.
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[attachment=2:pj9plm99]P1060294.JPG[/attachment:pj9plm99]And a further extension of the east end, which now reaches to the doorway.
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[attachment=0:pj9plm99]P1060299.JPG[/attachment:pj9plm99]Back to the other holes in the wall, where I bypassed the door. The purpose of this was to extend the branchline another 15 feet or so, with the eventual aim of connecting…to….something.
I used a technique I saw in MR, I think, of fastening a T-shaped bracket to a stud and then attaching a riser to it to support the track.
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[attachment=0:1zbwzfzl]P1060107.JPG[/attachment:1zbwzfzl]The storage yard, just two 8′ identical back-to-back modules. This remains the end of track in the direction of Wichita. There is a mini-mo that connects it to module 15. No electrical jumpers, since I discovered that the entire east half of the storage yard is hot just because of using Shinohara turnouts here. One pair of jumpers would make the other end of the yard hot also, but I haven’t gotten there yet.
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[attachment=0:cu626biw]P1040370(1).JPG[/attachment:cu626biw]The railroad has coalesced into three disconnected segments, one of about 41 feet of track from the train room door to the entrance to the storage room, one of about 28 feet of track on four modules, and a third one of about forty feet of main track plus sidings plus a mini-mo connecting it to the 16′ storage yard.
Over the weekend I finished another mini-mo of 45 inches long incorporating about an 18 degree curve, connecting modules 3 and 4 and bridging the entrance to the storage room (which happens to be where the construction started, on either side of the storage room door). I used 3/4″ plywood for this, which I ended up splicing with some judicious reinforcement. It’s not the most stable arrangement, but it works. The 18 degree change of direction plus the length allowed me to use 42″ radius in the curve with plenty of tangent at each end.
This mini-mo plus a power wiring jumper has made it possible to run a train through this whole length, albeit with a few derailments, from one end up to module 7 which is still lacking track power on the main. I’m going to put a fakey section of track across the river location soon, so as to be able to claim I can run from one end to the other.
Soon I’ll have more track than the total length of cars that are on the layout, if I persist.
Ron Merrick
Some days no amount of engineering is enough…..[attachment=1:lzpotmqj]P1040353(1).JPG[/attachment:lzpotmqj][attachment=0:lzpotmqj]P1040365(1).JPG[/attachment:lzpotmqj]
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I’ve shifted focus back to module 7, which is Eureka or at least most of it. This module had scenery supplies on it for a couple years, but those have been displaced and I have laid the track for Eureka. There is the main, with #6 turnouts at each end of the module for the siding, and at the eas end just inside the #6 turnout is a #5 for the house track. This track is far enough south of the main to (I hope) have room for the station. There were two grain-related facilities to the south of the tracks, one being something like a feed mill, and just to the west a small elevator with no outlying grain bins. This structure was just destroyed last month in a tornado that also did major damage to the rest home that had been built across the right of way after abandonment. Also on the south side was an oil dealer and probably some business that was done from the team track (I use this term interchangeably with ‘house track’. On the north side of the tracks was another elevator, basically served from what I’ve been calling the siding.
Back to the house track, in order to add some interest I deployed modeler’s license because I took the Santa Fe interchange track off from the house track. It actually came off the main several hundred yards to the east, but this way I have a place to spot two more cars.
If I ever have more room I’ll expand this scene onto another module, because I didn’t have room to bring the house track back to the main line. But in the towns I’ve done, I’m trying to lay the foundations, literally, by building up the street alignments and laying pads for the crossing signals. The Condensed Profile shows only one set of flashing lights, no gates, at Eureka which would have been Main St. just west of the depot. There is also one wig-wag shown, which is correct because it was in the middle of the street. Right now I don’t have room to model this one, I don’t think.
I’ve clamped this module to the one just to the east of it, which is out of order but it was the best way to arrange things. That module 6 represents Sallyards which is actually way to the west of Eureka. Test runs of the alignment are in progress.
In the near future, I’ll move module 8 from the other room and clamp it into place. It has that three-foot hole in the middle representing the Fall River bridge, so I’m thinking about sticking a piece of flextrack in there so I can finish wiring this part of the layout, and more importantly I want to fix the alignment between the island consisting of modules 9-15, and the island consisting of modules 4-7, and the island consisting of modules 1-3, plus twenty feet of main track hanging from the wall, into one slightly coherent piece. The construction of the jumpover or mini-mo between 3 and 4 depends on the alignment of the portion of the track from 4 on through the other wall to 15.
I already have sketches for three modules in north Wichita that I’m itching to build, so I;m trying to make myself finish all this before I go on. Can’t really do any fabrication of modules right now anyway, due to the temperature.
Ron Merrick
I had previously built a main track and siding through the corridor that connects the new layout room to the older part of the upstairs. Now for the first time, I’ve built new roadbed in the place of old.
Originally, there was a storage room that was unclimatized, L-shaped, five feet wide at the top of the stairs. I’d cut a hole through the wall to bring the railroad into this room and connect at the opposite end with another hole in the wall that led back to the rest of the layout. I had gotten as far as L-girder benchwork and Homasote on this portion of the layout, and there was track on part of it. When we did the expansion, about four feet of L-girder at the very corner was demolished to make room for the doorway into the new train room. This is where I’ve cut through the wall to make a connection on the opposite side.
Now I have replaced the old heavy 3/4″ plywood with 1/2″ solid Homasote with a construction similar to the modules, namely 1/4″ plywood with 1×2 at the edges for stiffness, but resting on the old risers and L-girder framework. I’ve laid Homabed directly on this surface, which is how the connection extension is laid, and tied it in at the south end (railroad west). There is a nice pair of 36″ radius reverse curves to line up with the roadbed outside the wall. Track will be coming soon.
Outside the wall will be a challenge. This roadbed exists, but there has never been track on it. I added a ceiling fan to this area, which is the upstairs landing for the ‘interior’ stairway, so that made it slightly less unbearably hot here and reduced the spider growth somewhat. But I’m inclined to think I really ought to enclose this section with Plexiglas or something. The reason this area is important is that it’s the last gap between the new railroad and the old. The old railroad is frankly nothing more than a place to store cars now, but it will fulfill my original plans to tie the new in with the old — in a totally different way than I had envisioned when I started this project.
Ron Merrick
During this time the air conditioning in the house went out, so we slept in the train room for at least one night since it was nice and cool.
The following shots show the beginning of ‘bridging the gap’. I built modules 3 to 6 on one side of the room, with 6 being a turnback loop. Then I built modules 14 to 10 on the other side, obviously in the opposite direction, starting with 14/15 on either side of the hole in the wall that connects the two rooms. Module 10 is another turnback loop, representing the spot where the MoPac crossed under US 54 at almost a right angle. These modules then got built out with track and, eventually, scenery.
In order to bridge the gap I built module 7, representing Eureka, and module 9, representing a spot in the middle of nowhere that had a set of reverse curves. Module 8 then would close the gap, and it has the Fall River Bridge at Eureka. Module 7 served more as a spot to lay down scenery materials for the next year, while module 8 was out of the way in the next room so I could easily walk around without ducking under.[attachment=4:1uwh0je8]P1030027.JPG[/attachment:1uwh0je8][attachment=3:1uwh0je8]P1030037.JPG[/attachment:1uwh0je8][attachment=2:1uwh0je8]P1030043.JPG[/attachment:1uwh0je8][attachment=1:1uwh0je8]P1030047.JPG[/attachment:1uwh0je8][attachment=0:1uwh0je8]P1030049.JPG[/attachment:1uwh0je8][attachment=1:2buubxca]P1010897(1).JPG[/attachment:2buubxca][attachment=0:2buubxca]P1010902(1).JPG[/attachment:2buubxca]
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No new track or wiring, but a lot of scenery development. Several modules have had foam substrate added, which is a long process because I think about it too much. Modules 1 and 2 have a highway substructure, which is 3-1/4″ wide and about 1/2″ deep (two layers of that 1/4″ plywood that I use everywhere for the decks) and a large embankment for the US 54 highway overpass south of Durand. Once I got that done, interrupted by a couple of weeks in the land of red trains, there has been frenzy of plastering.
I use the Woodland Scenics plaster gauze material, which comes in 8″ widths and, I’ve recently discovered, a 4″ width which suits my needs more in some places. My first attempts didn’t cover the end plates, and in some places didn’t cover the side plates, which I’ve been slowly correcting. I generally burn through slightly more than one roll of the gauze per module. Once that’s down, I cover it with a random mix of green and earth undercoat to hide as much of the white as possible. That at least gets me away from the Plywood Pacific look (as Richard Hendrickson used to call it). That’s usually where I have left off, but several modules now also have the lightweight hydrocal coating on top of that, with track ballast and some coloring of ravines and other relief, and some experimental electrostatic grass that I’m not entirely happy with. No weeds, bushes or trees yet. And yes, there are a few holes in the ground, or shallow spots significantly below rail level. For some reason, that’s been hard for me.
Wherever possible, I’ve been trying to disguise the module ends to make everything more seamless. That’s been easier said than done so far, but I think things will improve shortly. There is now more green than plywood color, so at least I’ve come that far.
Ron Merrick
On Google Earth, most of the right-of-way of this branch is still visible where it was by the creeks, but in open flat land a lot of it has been completely obliterated by the farmers plowing it over.
I suppose this topic should really move somewhere else now.
Ron Merrick
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