Thank you for sharing your well-thought-out reasons for your approach to your layout! It is the reasons behind users' choices of various methods, as well as the results, that help others choose their methods. For example, if one is using flex, or even hand-laying track, some aspects become critical, that might not enter the calculus if using sectional or attached-roadbed track. Have you decided how you will implement your terrain yet?
I’m modeling the C&O, also in West Virginia, along the New River. No specific location, but I’m modeling bridges after crossings at Gauley Junction, and at Piney Creek. I did actually draw on Williamson for inspiration in solving a problem I had: I will have a turntable and roundhouse, and I already have some articulated locos. The style of the old Heljan roundhouse (and old Con-Cor, also Heljan-made) is best match, short of scratch-built, but it can’t house my bigger locos. The Walthers modern roundhouse can, but its appearance is too modern for my area and era. The roundhouse at Williamson consists of at least two generations of construction, and I decided to take that as my solution - I have have the six-stall Heljan kit, and the three-stall modern roundhouse. I’m going to orient it so that the modern roundhouse stalls point straight at me at my control panel, and I’ll have a 3/4 view of the Heljan, where my Consolidation & Heavy Mountain and Kanawha will hang out (even if the latter two will have to “leak out” a bit. So, it will be the more visually prominent structure. The modern roundhouse will house a 2-6-6-2, and a Clinchfield Challenger. (I’m modeling the C&O, but in order to get a variety of motive power, I’ve “stretched” on motive power selection to include railroads that adjoined the C&O in the Appalachians. Seeing a photo of a C&O Kanawha double-heading with a Clinchfield Challenger made that compromise easy to swallow. Maybe a Y6b will get that other stall; the brass Alleghenies that come by from time to time are out of my reach.)
I'm interested in how y'all will create dense eastern forests. I'm a long way away from that chapter of my N Scale build, but with my road set in the anthracite region of eastern PA, I'll need thick woodland.
Well, for my part, my layout has a mountainside that will be out of view from the control area. I plan to use that area for experimentation with trees and rocks. The general tree plan, for stands of hardwood, is twisted wire armature trees, from woods edge until two, maybe three rows in, then foliage clumps/clusters for the majority of the area, with the occasional complete tree interspersed to provide variation of height. Not sure how I’ll do the same for stands of evergreens. I’m going to have a branch with switchbacks running up a mountainside, and I’ll have to take care to not block too much of that trackage from view with trees. Haven’t decided on fall or spring foliage, yet. Fall has more general appeal, but spring would allow me to replicate a unique episode in C&O operations: for a couple of weeks in April 1952, the C&Os streamlined tricolor coaches had been delivered, but their E8’s weren’t ready yet. So, for those couple of weeks, J3a 4-8-4s were pulling their new streamlined coaches around.
It's been a bit longer than I'd hoped since my last post. With the first round of woodwork completed, trackwork was the next obvious step. I started in the same corner of the layout as I had started out the woodwork. This may have been a mistake, or at least a poor choice, as there are ten turnouts in just a few feet there. It's also at the back of the layout and goes through the hole in the wall. The location didn't provide too much of a problem as the subroadbed was unscrewed from the layout and worked on at the workbench. It had been a few years since I had built any turnouts, but it came back to me and before long I had the turnouts built and laid out. A few years ago, I had built a test layout. It is a 4'x8' layout with two loops, some crossovers, and a few sidings. I'll post pictures of it later before I tear it down. I had never bothered with attaching the remaining crossties to any of the switches and so my adventure into the world of the micro application of contact adhesive kicked off. I had a tube of Pliobond that I had purchased in 2014 along with the Fast Tracks jigs. I used a micro-brush to painstakingly apply it to the first turnout and the laser cut Faststicks. I lined them up, pushed them together, applied weights, and waited until the following day. Were they stuck together? Technically, yes, but a good breeze might separate them. Maybe the Pliobond had gone off. I had a quart can of contact adhesive sitting nearby that said it was good with wood and metal. It couldn't hurt. Out came the micro brush again, same painstaking process, very similar results. I realized there must be something that I was missing. Consult the forums! This is what I learned: 1.) Heat can be used to strengthen the bond. It can also reinstitute a failed bond. 2.) I need to apply more bonding agent. In my desire to come up with a clean appearance, I was too sparing with its application. 3.) A syringe is a far better applicator than any brush for this (in my experience). The dental irrigator type worked really well for laying down a fine bead. Between Easter, waiting for deliveries of the syringes, and general frustration with the initial failed attempts, things dragged on for a bit. However, things did eventually come together (and stay together): That was about a week ago. I've accomplished a lot more since then but don't have any good pictures yet, so that will have to wait for another post. On a side note, all of the turnouts are #10. That seemed to match the prototype in the yard which will eventually be the focus of the layout. I'm also too cheap to buy a whole bunch of jigs. Although larger numbers were certainly used on the mainlines, there are some technical issues that begin to crop up in N scale when going beyond #10 or #12 relating to flange gaps around the frogs. #10 turnouts still give a nice sweeping flow in my opinion and will have to do there. I believe the warehouse section of town actually used #8 or maybe even tighter turnouts, but I could make it work with #10 and as pointed out, I like the look of them and I don't have to buy another jig. However, if they were curved there, they would work even better, so I'm going to try my hand at making a few curved #10s when I get to that part. Also, I'm going to use code 55 rail everywhere. I know that it is too heavy for most of the model, but it doesn't stand out to me like code 80 does and anything smaller starts to have issues with some of the older rolling stock that I have acquired.
I thought of you on Saturday @shider . We set up a table at our church's rummage sale and I had a few train items there. A fellow of about 65 years old asked if I had anything N&W. I didn't, but a conversation ensued. His Dad worked 35 years for the N&W out of Williamson and his wife's father spent his entire career with the Island Creek Coal Co.. His wife said she had an old photo of the Williamson roundhouse, but wasn't able to find it on her cell phone. Ya just never know who you might meet at these things.
When I'm not confident in something I tend to procrastinate. Even while I researched which caulking compound to use and actually go out and buy some, I still wasn't convinced I was ready to start gluing down the track. What if it needed to be adjusted? What if the switches need some fine tuning? But I needed to get the track fixed so that I could flip the board over and start working on mounting the Tortoises. It seemed a catch 22 so I fell back to my experience with the temporary layout I had constructed. Wanting to reuse the track, I had spiked it all down. When I ballast, everything will be held in place by glue, but for the time being, spikes will hold everything in place. Maybe I'll remove them at some point if I find them unsightly but they are fairly inconspicuous at a distance. Time will tell. So the track (mostly turnouts) got spiked down and the Tortoises installed. Because of the location of a road underpass and the close proximity to other turnouts, one of them needed an additional connecting rod to make it all fit. Tortoises: They're big, they're analog, but I chose them anyway. They have a good reputation for long term reliability. I have experience using them and find them easy to adjust and provide good tension on the turnouts, holding the point rails nice and tight up against the main rail. On the temporary layout, I had used several different Tam Valley products along with servos. The servos seemed twitchy and every once in a while, one couldn't make up its mind and would glitch every few seconds as if it was between degrees and couldn't make up its mind. I know a lot of people use them with great success, but several of the model railroads I have admired use the Tortoises too so it seemed a safe decision. The built in (electrical) switches were also a great advantage. Frog juicers, and relays, seem like the hard way to route power to the frog, in my opinion. I also spent considerable time researching different methods of controlling the Tortoises. I had decided from the start that I wouldn't be happy with manually throwing the turnouts. I also convinced myself that I wouldn't be satisfied with my ability to make a control panel. DCC was always the primary candidate. There are a lot of solutions out there but at the end of the day I went with Digitrax DS74s. They aren't the cheapest solution but given some of the other combinations of point motors, controllers, and frog powering devices, they didn't come out that much more. I'm sure someone could point out a combination of servos, servo controller, mounting brackets, and contact switches that could get the job done for a lot less, but at the end of the day, I wanted something reliable, off the shelf, and supportable. So as it turns out, this next picture will look like an advertisement for Digitrax. I'm still using an ancient DB150 for the primary control station. I had to replace my PS3 with a PS4 when I bricked the PS3 trying to upgrade its firmware. On the left is one of the DS74 units. I'm using CAT6 cable (23 AWG) to connect each DS74 to their 4 turnouts. I also use a short section of CAT6 to extend the 8 contacts on each Tortoise to a 5 position terminal block. They can be had for just over $1 from Amazon and I'm only using 5 of the 8 wires, so that's all I hook up. One of my goals is to not do any soldering under the layout. I'm perfectly happy soldering, I just don't want to do it on my back! To that end, the terminal blocks allow easy connections. All the red and black wires hanging down have spade connectors that will plug into suitcase style connectors on the power buses. I know a lot of people take issue with insulator piercing connectors but I think the majority of problems come from trying to use to wire that is too thin for the specific connector. Generally speaking, electrician don't connect small gauge wire to larger gauge wire. In my case, I'm using "Ginsco Quick Splice Wire Terminals - T-Tap Self-Stripping with Nylon Fully Insulated Male Quick Disconnects, 12-10 AWG" which tap into my 10AWG rail bus lines and have a spade connection that with then connect to the 22AWG feeder wires. Although it may look a mess, everything is fairly straight forward to identify and troubleshoot. In the middle of the picture is a BXP88 for power management. I mounted it on a separate board so I could do all the wiring on the bench. It splits out into 8 power portection/detection sections. Once again, we have the issue of connecting smaller gauge wires than can actually go into the terminal block of the BXP88 to the much larger gauge rail bus wires. 10AWG is definitely overkill, but as the saying goes "overkill is my favorite kind of kill." In fairness, I will have some runs over 25' before the entire layout is complete and I like consistency. The block detection is a nice feature to have but I'm not going to wire up every section of track as its own block. Each of the passenger station tracks and each of the 2 freight station tracks will have their own detection section. The mainline on this portion of the layout will consist of 4 sections, east and west main each split roughly in half. The warehouse will be its own section and each of the 4 tracks going through the closet will have its own section so I can monitor what is open there. When we get to the yard, there will be as many as 11 tracks all run off of one detection section, but that will come later. Everything got hooked up to JMRI and worked like a charm. There was only one snafu, I didn't look at the wiring diagram for the DS74 closely enough. It turns out, that when mounted as pictured, the 8 connections for the 4 Tortoises go from right to left. After some confusion as to why different turnouts were operating than expected, I figured it out and a quick rewiring for the connections sorted it out. What isn't pictured there is the power buses as I haven't run them yet. I'll have one for the DS74s (14v) and one for the BXP88s (9v). I'm sure they'll be more later for lights and other accessories. I'm going to have all power buses go back to a single location where I can have a UPS to power everything, more for spike and surge protection than for operating when the power is out. The ratio of words to pictures seems off in this post so here's another picture:
Nice to see the whys and hows of your decisions, in addition to the whats! I don't know if keeping the electronics cool when the layout is in place over all this will be an issue, but some ventilation holes in the shelf below the heatsinks on the back of the command station would help.
Happened to come across this. I remember Plaid Stamps and even gas prices like those when I was a kid.
