78 Miles to Yosemite

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A new, old, name

Posted on by jkdummler

Today I’m renaming the blog here on these pages, “78 Miles to Yosemite”. Some of you may be aware that my old page was taken down last year due to some unfortunate circumstances. While muddling through setting up here, fighting with my vision, and all that’s gone into returning to modeling the Yosemite Valley and what I love to model and research, the name here was sort of a placeholder, and in many ways, similar to other blogs by other railroaders who I have great admiration and respect for.

So, I’m reviving the blog name, and returning it to a more appropriate name for what I’m modeling and doing. 78 miles is not a huge distance, but the fun I’m having on the trip certainly is worth while. I hope you’ll continue to read along and enjoy the things that I have to share.

-Jeremy

A Virtual RPM

Posted on by jkdummler

My good friend, Eric, has posted a new “Virtual RPM” with models on display from several modelers. You can access the photos and descriptions on his blog here: http://designbuildop.hansmanns.org/2019/03/03/virtual-rpm-3/

Both my wife and I contributed some of our most recent work to the effort. We hope you enjoy, and I hope too that if you don’t already follow Eric’s blog, that you’ll dive in and explore the amazing resource that he has compiled there.

-Jeremy

Following Birch Creek

Posted on by jkdummler

With Cincinnati on the N&W planned, I turned my attention to planning structures for the HOn3 upper deck of my layout plans on the ‘Birch Creek Railroad’.  This line, based on the prototype of the Mann’s Creek Railroad in West Virginia, along with some ideas of my own, will add the coal operations to my plans without that appearing on the N&W right now other than in the form of deliveries in Cincinnati.

This book on the Mann’s Creek Railroad is the inspiration for my narrow gauge project.

Unlike the Cincinnati layout, this layout is intended to represent almost a whole railroad in 2’x11’.  To do that, we’re going to have to deal with tracks running through scenes more than once, and focus attention on what we’re intending to be seen at any given moment as opposed to the whole railroad.  The general plan is:

Town A – Lower right hand corner of the layout.

Town B – Located on the sector plate / hidden trackage and not modeled,

Switchback.

Town C – Located on the far left hand side of the layout with a sawmill, coke ovens, and town buildings.

Mines / Logging – Located as high up as possible with two mines and a spot for picking up logs.

Trains will operate A-B-C-Mines and back down.

With that general layout in mind, we’ll start looking at what will go where in Town A.

On the right hand side of Town A is a small 3 track ‘yard’.  Two of these tracks will likely be used for an engine house, while the third track is an equipment storage track.  From the yard, then, we move over to a run around track.  The rear track here will have a location to unload hoppers that will conveyor coal and coke off the front of the layout and to the suggested connection to a standard gauge railroad (the N&W, likely in my case),  Moving further to the left, there are 3 tracks a this end of Town A.  The track nearest the front of the layout will have a transfer point for freight and a small station for people coming off the narrow gauge line to transfer to the implied standard gauge railroad.  The middle track is the tail track for locomotives or equipment to use when unloading at the dump house.  The third and most rearward track will reach over to an unloading spot for coal where that coal will then be loaded onto river barges.  I have a beautiful river tug from Train Troll to build and this is the perfect location for that.  Trains that are done working at Town A follow the mainline to the right side of the layout and disappear off the modeled portion to what I call Town B.

Town B is intended to be slightly larger than Town A, and will house the unmodeled car shops for the railroad, a yard presumably for sorting out cars, and some company houses.  Trains will come to Town B, which is intended to be located on a sector plate, and then return to the modeled portion of the layout on the middle track in the drawing.

The ‘mainline’ of this layout entered from hidden Town B, and I had originally drawn in a truck dump not long after the track returned.  As you can see from the attached photo, I’ve moved this and drawn in the track grade just straight.  After some careful thought, I decided that switching on this grade was not necessarily a good idea.  The mainline will climb, a 2 or 3% depending on locomotive testing outcomes) the whole length of that track section, arriving at a wye track and then crossing a small bridge over Birch Creek and entering Town C.  

Town C will be up on top of some rather rugged cliffs that look down on the river below and Town A.  At Town C we’ll have a station and freight unloading track, a sawmill, and a set of coke ovens fed by Mine 1 (unmodeled).  Cars of coke can be then hauled from here to Town A for transport by the standard gauge railroad.  At the moment the tracks are drawn in sort of like a paw, but remember, I’ve drawn this plan on a piece of 18” x 11’ paper and I have 6” of space to play with as things are laid out in their final positions, so some of the tracks may be longer in the final plan.

Town C will also have a small store, a handful of company houses, and if there’s room, a small church.  

Leaving Town C, we head back to the right, and after crossing Birch Creek again, we take the rear fork of the wye and head up a little to the mines and logging area.  Here we have a truck-dump for Mines 3 & 4 that are intended to be implied as being located further up the mountains.  A track will also lead off to implied logging, so loaded log cars will be picked up and empties spotted on this line that disappears.  The very end of the line at the far right, will have a set of bings for coal taken from Mine 1 & 5, again further up the hills but close enough that the unmodeled mine cars can reach the bins.

The railroad will use small locomotive power, likely a Class A Shay and eventually an 18 ton Climax.  There will probably be a pair of boxcars, maybe a refrigerator car, one coach, and a couple of cabooses, two or three flat cars, a group of 6-8 log cars, and likely 10-15 hoppers to run this layout.  Everything is intended to be small.

I plan to use magnets uncoupling, employing the Rapido Rail crew uncouplers, servo’s for turnout control, and touch-toggles along the fascia for operator input.  With everything being small, and condensed, I want to try and limit reach-in for operators, especially since this is the upper deck and bumping into structures of scenery may happen.

I should point out a couple of small operational notes here.  Nowhere on the plan have I indicated a coaling facility for the locomotives, nor have I indicated a water tank, or a sanding tower.  Sand will be brought in bagged and can be loaded into locomotives by hand.  That’ll be hauled to Town B where the shops are.  Water will come via hose attached to the locomotive and dropped into Birch Creek. This was a common practice on some logging and other specialized railroads with Shay’s and other geared locomotives, I’ve seen it in prototype photos, and plan to make it part of the operations on this layout.  I most likely will try and find wood-burner locomotives, allowing me to fuel the motive power from wood piles brought out of the woods.  Any kind of coaling would be done at Town B if a coal-burner is procured.

With plans now made, and crystalizing, it’s time to move to the construction portion of this project to really get some trains running this year.

-Jeremy

Ever-shrinking layout space

Posted on by jkdummler

Ever-shrinking layout space.  The bane of any model railroader’s plans.

It’s over 10 years ago now that I started building a version of the Yosemite Valley Railroad in a 3 car garage at a house out in the Central Valley of California.  That layout didn’t get terribly far, though trains ran in Merced.

Last year, in a bout of optimism, I launched plans to build a good sized layout in our garage based on an Iian Rice layout optimized for coal hauling. When the physical construction fell apart there, we once again returned to plans, through sever iterations, to build in that same space, in the garage.

In hindsight, we probably should have changed that plan immediately because of some of the reasons that the physical construction started to fail, but the fact that the concrete floor was sweating in the summer heat didn’t really register as ‘much’ of an issue at that point, nor did the invasion of mosquitos any time the garage door was open.  A swamp cooler, maybe some removable netting, and things would maybe be OK.

Right.

Then, Illinois decided this last week and into the coming week to remind us that we live in Northern Illinois which is, I think, forecast to be as cold as the North Pole for a few days, with wind, blowing snow, and other ick.  Then there’s all the stuff that falls off the car that anything in the garage has to share with in the form of slop, muck, dirt, and when all the dries, this extremely fine dust full of corrosive salt and snow/ice fighting chemicals and general grime.  If you’re ever wondering how stuff gets grimy on a railroad, look at a car in the winter.  The same thing hits trains.

Several things do NOT fare well in that environment.  Wires, track, electronics, locomotives, scenery…. All the stuff that goes into building a model railroad…. benchwork…. It’s just not an environment that is in the least bit friendly to a layout.

I should have known better from the get-go.

When we both looked at each other one afternoon and started to say the same thing about needing to move the layout inside, the plans for even the scaled down 4.5 x16 layout we were getting close to sharing a plan for went away.  There isn’t room for that in the house.  

The search for layout space in the house has been conducted before.  It’s not ever been extremely fruitful.  There are limited spaces to house anything inside with a family of growing teenagers, even in 1800 or so square feet.  The options really come down to storing a layout in the master bedroom, where nobody visiting would ever see it or operate it, the laundry room, which is upstairs but already is string with the airbrush and painting equipment, or finding a way to fit the layout into the closet we refer to as the “office” where our workshop currently is stored.

Ok, that’s workable.  Storage can be shuffled in the house to find room for the workshop, and if carefully planned, a layout can be built in sections that ca be moved in and out of that closet with some care.  The living space of our house is big enough to house a set-up layout for operating or work that also fits in that closet.  Can you feel the ideas forming?

So, we’re on now to a layout, inside the house, temperature controlled, space decided but still needing to be completely sorted out as we Spring Clean the rest of the house, and track plans, gotta have those.

What style of layout?  It’s going to have to be more “European” than “American”.  Many layouts in the US are larger affairs like what I’ve been planning.  I took this week and looked at more space-space-conscious layout builders and the fact that they tend to build layouts with big operations that run from staging solution, through a modeled scene, to staging solution. 

As one friend put it to me this week, it’s a good idea to build in the house. Maintenance and access will beat size of layout, especially when it comes to the fact that a layout in the garage will really only be useable or accessible here for about 4 out of 12 months due to weather.

I think he’s right. Time to finalize the new plans.

-JD

Thoughts on the Year Ahead

Posted on by jkdummler
Sights of things to come. A F&C boxcar (Central Vermont 36′) was recently on the workbench for decal work.

It’s time once again to set some goals for the year.  I find that goals, as opposed to New Years Resolutions, make it more likely that I’ll continue to aim at achieving the things I decide to prioritize.  With 2019 upon us, it’s a good time to look back at some accomplishments and set some goals for the year ahead.

2018 saw some significant work accomplished toward getting our layout up…. And then because of choices I made to re-use materials or to make-due with things, saw the layout, and those materials, go away.  It really is a combination of factors there, struggling with my vision, having close to but not exactly the tool to do what I wanted to do, making some mistakes in calculations of weight (remember, the layout was going to roll), and finally, the wrong materials and reused materials that just weren’t up to what I was trying to do.  I did learn a great deal, and had fun to the point the layout got.  In the end, the saws-all cured the issues and the trash truck hauled it away.

There were good things in 2018 too.  I managed to complete close to 20 freight cars, amassed a large number of cars to work on in the coming months, and discovered the N&W in Cincinnati, which will now wind up being the first part of the next iteration of our layout.  Lots of research was done, structures were chosen, and plans are being made.

It was a good year in modeling.

2019 should be as good, if not better, in terms of hopefully having a layout to show for the effort.

So, my goals for 2019 are:

  1.   Complete the benchwork for a 3’x14’ section of layout, including backdrop, sub-roadbed, sturdy legs, and straight cut lumber.
  2. Build as many freight cars as I can, two at a time, from start to finish.  The rule I’m setting for myself is that for each boxcar I build, I need to also build some other type of car.
  3. Build 3 structure kits.

That’s it.  I should be able to accomplish those goals, more guidelines, in 2019.  There are other things that I would “like” to do, like finding a shay, building a helix, laying all the track… but some things come faster once the bigger things are done.  Benchwork takes me FOREVER to build.  By setting my sights on getting the benchwork up and in place, and not pushing myself to get all the track in, maybe, just maybe, we’ll see trains running in 2019.  That would really be fun!

-JD

2018 RPM Chicagoland Clinic

Posted on by jkdummler

My clinic for RPM Chicagoland is now done and in the “can” as they say.  This year I will be presenting a revised version of the clinic I first gave in 2016 on modeling with low vision.

This year I’ll be discussing the newly revised workshop that we’ve built, some changes in equipment that I use on a regular basis, and more tips for operating and making your layout comfortable for those with low vision to enjoy.

If you haven’t signed up yet, and will be in the Chicago area October 18, 19, 20, please come out to hear me, and other speakers.  You can find registration information at rpmconference.com.

-JD