Modeling a Model Railroad - Moving Along

I have been messing around with the track plan a bit and things got kind of messy on that original plan. I laid out things a bit neater on a new piece of graph paper and I think I'm about ready to show it off in some of the railroad forums.

Along with the adjustments to the plan I have been building up some nice warehousey looking buildings to work with. There seems to be more space to fill than I anticipated. By keeping the street a scale width it keep the tracks contained and very straight, which makes it feel like I have a lot more space to fill up. 

This is where things are at, for the moment:

Working from the left to the right. Not gluing anything down at this point, everything is in flux. I really like the idea of a viaduct but it may be to much visually in such a small space.

A lower view, which doesn't look to bad.

Here it is with the updated track plan underneath. Still shifting buildings back and forth and I'm going to need to make some buildings.

Cartoon Wednesday

 

The Clock Bench

Work continued on the new workbench for the clock room. I did all the finish work over the weekend using a new product (for me) call Bumblechutes. Its very "green" friendly and its mostly tung oil with a few extras. Went on easy, took the sanding between coats well and I'm liking how it turned out. 

The next step will be to carry it upstairs and attach the legs. Its really heavy and putting the legs on in the garage was just going to make it really hard to move.

Modeling a Model Railroad - A step to far?

While I was working on the track plan and the buildings I figured it would be a reasonable idea to add some freight cars and locomotives to the project. In hand I own a Rock Island SW9/1200 and 2 Santa Fe CF7s. In the near future they will be joined by 2 DRGW RS3s so I need to represent one of each of those three plus an assortment of 40' and 50' boxcars/reefers.

I initially hemmed and hawed about doing this but in the end since I was going to build the model an extra bit of visualization wasn't going to hurt and I might be able to see problems that I hadn't anticipated pushing these little blocks around.

So I took some measurements and built a bunch of blocks to represent the freight cars and engines out of styrene. I was going to leave them white and then decided that was just to plain and a little color was going really help me see things better (basically the whole thing is just white with a few black and blue lines).

Since I was painting anyway I went ahead and tried to a little bit of flair to everything trying not to go to overboard on the whole thing. Which means I did resist cutting down the locomotive hoods, at least right now.

I was to busy painting to take in progress pictures so here is the finished bunch (still on the sticks).

Row 1: Rock Island SW9/1200, Santa Fe CF7, DRGW RS3
Row 2: 3 40' Generic Boxcars and 3 50' Generic Boxcars
Row 3: 3 40' DRGW Boxcars, 3 50' Generic Boxcars
Row 4: 1 40' DRGW Boxcar, 3 50' DRGW Boxcars and 1 50' Generic Boxcar
Row 5: 7 40' Generic Boxcars
3 Locomotives and 24 Boxcars. From an operational standpoint the 50' boxcars won't get used very often, 40' is going to be the common size. Figure the time period as late 1950s early 1960s.

Modeling a Model Railroad - Introducing Warehouse Row

As was mentioned in "What's Going On - 5" I'm working on a couple of planning models for two model railroads that I'm considering. At the moment I'm moving forward with the switching layout. I'm viewing this as a testbed for the eventual Wynkoop Street layout and I'm calling it Warehouse Row (although the resemblance will be pretty superficial).

Within an area of 18"x8' (Wynkoop Street will be almost 14' long) I want to represent a street running switching area. I want to include a vehicle overpass (like the 16th Street Viaduct) as well as a street level crossing (like 15th Street and Wynkoop before the overpass was built). Fairly tall buildings in the back (at least three stories and going up to 5). Buildings on the opposite will just be represented by loading docks, at least that's the thought at the moment.

I showed off building the frame for this in the WGO -5 posting. I haven't taken nearly enough pictures but at this point. The frame has been completed with a top and holes drilled in the connecting ends and are currently held together with toothpicks. Being able to split it into two pieces for storage is pretty critical for this layout since it can't remain setup indefinitely. The track plan is based on Jack Trollope's Ness Street Yard modified to represent the in the street running that I envision. Since I want the street running aspect the width of the streets is really important. According to the Sanborn Insurance maps of Wynkoop street its 80' between buildings and the road width itself is 60'. There are three streets; "main" street runs the length of the layout and the rails must fit in that 60' width (at least for the most part), the viaduct will fit in that 80' between the buildings (crossing at 90 degrees to the main street), the crossing street will keep the 80' between buildings with the street taking up 60' of that (leaving 10' on each side for sidewalk and street parking).

I'm toying with building the benchwork for this one out of foam core. There are some fascinating discussions in the MRH forum about it. While the main proponent says any foam core will work he does use a fairly high end foam core by 3M called FoamCor. Jury is out on this right now on that and its not like I'm in a hurry to get to that point.

Here are some in progress shots:

Gluing the top of the benchwork on to the frame

A copy of the Ness Street Yard has been blown up to fit (scale is 1/8 = 1").

Marking up for changes and getting a feel for how much room I have to work with.

Starting to layout out centerlines, the blue pencil marks

Going to need a few buildings. A took a copy of the Woodland Scenics templates for their modular walls and adjusted the scale to match  the 1.5 inch equals 12". My fingers got really tired clipping all of these out.

The first building; foamed PVC sheet and the photocopies.