May progress

My big event for May was a trip to Ireland with my mom. We came and went from Dublin, but the majority of the 10 days were spent in the west - mostly Mayo where my mom's grandmother left in 1900 when she was 19 years old. I also made great progress on the layout in order to be ready for the NMRA region convention in June.

The typical mall bookstore in Dublin had an amazing selection of train magazines.

A hobby shop on the north west side of Dublin mostly had plastic vehicle models and Hornby trains.

The line to Kiltimagh has been abandoned, but the depot remains and serves as a museum.

Back home, I continued to lay track.

This pano was taken where the slight bend is around the furnace closet. You can see the bucket on this photo and above.

One of the biggest challenges in linear layout design is the turnback blob. I am using curved turnouts from Walthers to add crossovers in the blob.

This side of the peninsula is primarily the Billings warehouse district and passenger station.

By the end of May, most of the switching area was in and I had moved around to the other side which is mostly the Billings yard.

April Progress

April was a pretty productive month. A lot of changes took place on the layout. Mostly centered around the Billings passenger station and warehouse district, but I also put the connection to the other side of the section house in by adding shelves along the wall in what used to be the bathrooms.

On the first Saturday of April I had a group of guys from the division over to see the progress. I gave a clinic on the spline benchwork I used on the upper deck.

I had my two best helpers painting sky.

Katy is a great helper and her attention span is infinitely longer than her brother's. Here she is mounting the top of the valance to the wall where the bathrooms used to be.

I picked up some LED strips to add some light for the lower deck. I went ahead and doubled up the LEDs, but I think another two strips will be needed to make it bight enough. That's makes the cost about $48 for 16 feet plus a $10 power supply. At $3 a bulb, the light strings are about $52 for 16 feet - but produce a lot more light.

With both shelves in along the wall where the bathrooms used to be, I was able to see where the Yellowstone River crossing is going to be. Somewhere I have a third bridge. I'll paint them all black. The tree boxes also need to be built. I was thinking about kitbashing these Walthers kits into 150' bridges. They are a little short now. The middle pier is from Chooch and the concrete abutment is from Walthers.

Starting to get some track along the downtown Billings section. The LED lights aren't on in this photo but the lights in the valence provide good light for the front of the layout.

More painting for Katy. I recycled masonite from Shane's old layout here. I'm not sure I like it the way it is, but it was easier to work with than the sheetrock. The Homasote is painted with some light brown Oops paint I picked up that is perfect. I need to figure out some kind of cover for the breakers that I can paint blue and will be easy to remove in an emergency.

March progress

With most of the upper deck of the west peninsula wired, I added some facia to see how it would look.

I need to secure it better and trim the top to match the profile and paint, but this gives a pretty good idea what it will look like. I also need to clean up a little.

I operated with Eric Mumper on March 1, which is always fun. Eric models the Fox River Branch of the CB&Q in the transition era. He's my go to guy for all things Burlington around here.

I started adding a lower deck. I used 1x4 joists. Mostly salvaged from the club layout.

The deck is pretty high grade 3/4" plywood. I like to be able to put track right on the plywood if necessary.

Inspired by layout construction

Coming back from Prairie Rail I was definitely motivated to work on the layout. While visiting Steve and Cinthia Priest, I snuck some construction photos for ideas. I've done this in the past, I supposed I should go back thru Lightroom and grab all the benchwork photos and study them. In the mean time, here are some closeups of what will surely be one of the finest layouts in the country.

Stephen and his crew have very tidy benchwork and wiring. You can see the LED lighting he has chosen to use.

Here is some more of the benchwork without the facia. This appears to be a very good method of turnback blob construction.

Stephen adds signs everywhere something needs to be done so that when crew members arrive, they know exactly where the projects are.

I'm not sure how much I like having the wiring in the front. On one hand it is accessible and on the other, it is in the way.

Some Central Valley bridges roughed in.

Another smaller, bridge with a pier or abutment on either side.

A nice deck bridge with a shallower drop in the benchwork.

Another one. This bridge screams Santa Fe to me.

Now that's what we're talking about. 

CMRI circuits neatly wired along side NCE.

Prairie Rail 2016

I was lucky enough to get another invite to Prairie Rail this year and jumped on the chance to operate in one of my favorite places. Dean Ferris and I traveled together. We started the weekend by having lunch at Union Station, which is a fantastic building. I didn't think to look for bullet holes.

I operated on Mike Borkon's fantastic Union Pacific Wyoming Division layout. Mike models the UP mainline thru southern Wyoming around Green River in the late steam era. His space is amazing and he really captures the feel of Wyoming. I had the west yard job.

Saturday morning I went over to Kevin Leyerle's Katy in Oklahoma layout and was the yard master. Keven has done a fantastic job and his railroad ran great. It was amazing how much detail he has in his scenes even though he hasn't really started scenery yet.

That afternoon I was off to Joe Kasper's to run his giant n-scale BN Kansas City yard. So many cars to switch into dozens of tracks. What a blast. Joe's layout is really something to see.

The last session of the weened Sunday morning was Eric Goodman's Santa Fe Emporia Subdivision in 1995. As you might guess, I took the yard master job completing a perfect weekend. It is always fun seeing big modern cars and big modern trains on a model railroad, although 1995 was 21years ago, is it really modern?

A special treat was a visit to Steve and Cinthia Priest's publishing empire for an early look at the Priest family's new AT&SF St. Louis Division. Wow! I think Dean's expression says it all.

Trains running

With all the spline complete for the first section, I moved back to the flat area where Hardin, MT sets. Hardin has a sugar factory of its own along with several grain elevators. There is still a very nice brick, one story passenger station. There used to be stock yards and a freight depot. I'm not going to model the sugar factory, since there is one in Billings. Instead, I'm adding a long spur that comes off the industry siding that will probably have a beet dump on it. 

I started using the caulk again, but moved back to the tried and tested method of track nails and spikes. I like the ability to move track around as I need.

With the track down, I moved on to wiring. I don't generally like to route the bus wires thru the joists, but I am concerned about wires hanging down into the bottom level, so I went ahead and and put them thru.

I like to separate blocks in case I decide to come back and add detection. I toed all the sub-busses together using this terminal strip.

I got these Tortoise's from John McBee. John had soldered wires and added terminal strips. This isn't my preferred method of connecting to tortoises, but I decided to take advantage of John's hard work.

I've also stayed away from suitcase connectors, but after seeing several large layouts use them with a lot of success, I decided to try them and not to solder all the drops to the sub-busses.

I use resistance soldering tweeters to solder drops to the rails. The drops are 22 gauge solid and the busses are 12 gauge stranded. I used to use nothing but solid bus wires because you can bend them and they stay. Also, if you are stripping them to solder drops to, you're less likely to break wires like you are with stranded.

Here's a full shot of the peninsula right before I ran the locomotive down the spur across the switch to the industrial siding.

Here's a Youtube video of the GP9 running.

Update for December 2015 / January 2016

Not a lot has been going on since November. With the Christmas holiday and the January train show, there hasn't been a lot of time to work on the layout.

I did get Katy to help build some kits.

We took a 2 week trip to Idaho and Oregon to see the family while the kids were off. I thought hard about going thru Wyoming to shoot some trains in the snow, but I was afraid my wife would have dumped my but in a snowdrift and went on without me.

I did see some snow in Idaho. This was shot at Orchard near Boise on Christmas eve.

While I was waiting for trains, the girls were frolicking in the snow like they'd never seen it before.

They may have seen snow, but I doubt any of them remember seeing one of these.

The show seems like it was a pretty good success. I won't know the numbers until I get the report from the treasurer next month, but it felt like we had a good turnout. Once again, I had a table and tried to sell off all my Union Pacific models that I needed to model the Camas Prairie, but don't need to model Montana and Wyoming. I had some pretty good success selling locomotives, but I was surprised that the freight cars didn't move. I guess people would rather spend $45 on a new Intermountain PFE reefer than $15 on a kit I put together and weathered. Actually, I tried not to sell the ones that were weathers and was a little bummed when a guy pulled out a boxcar with a pretty nice peeled paint roof and bought it. I missed putting it in the box.

I never think about taking photos when I'm at the show, so I don't have any. Here's one from a few years ago of Terry Bobe working on the On30 Texas Outlaws layout, not much has changed.

I did put on a clinic at the show, like I generally do. I did it on Easy Spline Benchwork, which I have talked about here. I need to learn to quit giving myself the last clinic of the day, because attendance was a little light. I had to go out and have my wife take some photos of me doing stuff like putting glue down and cutting the 45 degree pieces in order to complete the clinic.

I also built this example of Easy Spline to take to the clinic.