I have been thinking on doing this on the buildings in Bayard, especially with the sugar factory complex. Good Idea. I might post when I get the time and funds... :yin-yang2:
Hot holy dithering! I just noticed my peanut butter warehouse post was a year ago and I haven't started on it. I have had a small amount of progress on the layout though I have temporarily (I hope) lost the place to put it. Twenty-five years ago, I kept trying to figure out how to compress everything on the Santa Fe within 50 miles of Houston, if I ever got a room 30 foot square to build an N scale layout. If ever!!! The first thing I wanted was the passenger trains in the big city downtown terminal, but how could I leave out the blackland prairie farm town, the East Texas piney woods, the coastal plains? I heard the Texas Chief that originated in Houston when I rode it under Amtrak used to run all the way to Galveston, and I wanted at first to represent that with staging. Then with SCENICKED staging. But the more I thought about Galveston, the more it grew, as a part of that ridiculously big layout. I built and operated the East Texas piney woods scene, while daydreaming with track plans for the biggie. I built sections in Lightwave 3D back in the mid 1990s. Including Galveston features, such as the causeway to the island. Computer visualization. The causeway is probably THE most important SIGNATURE of the Galveston experience, as far as railroads are concerned. At Virginia Point on the mainland, the Santa Fe, Missouri Pacific, MKT, and Southern Pacific converged to a single track to run over a two mile long causeway to Galveston Island, where they diverged to their respective yards. The railroads “go out to sea”, and the dominant impression is that the bridge is long, long, long and goes out way away from land. Here’s what the causeway itself looks like. When the Texas Limited tourist train was operating back in 1991, I waited almost an hour to get a shot of the train crossing the causeway and it was worth it. One interesting operational feature I noted: as soon as the observation car cleared the lift bridge, the bridge went up and opened the channel to boat traffic. to be continued
Galveston causeway compression In N scale, a scale mile is 33 actual feet, so a 2 mile long causeway modeled to scale would be 66 feet long. Even if I had a spare 30 thousand dollars or so to build that dream 30-foot-square “train house”, a scale length causeway would not fit. The concrete-arch causeway has 107 elliptical arches, each much longer than they are high. The span of each arch is 70’, and the “rise” of the top of the arch above the waterline is 9’ according to figures in the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record in the Library of Congress. The rail is 16 to 17 feet above mean tide, and the causeway was a whopping 66 feet wide, originally carrying the steam railroad, an electric interurban, and brick-paved auto traffic lanes. Autos were rerouted to their own parallel causeway back in 1938, and the interurban was gone about that time too, so the causeway is somewhat wide for rail only. But despite the width, the main impression is long, long, long. Near the mid-point of the causeway was a Schertzer rolling-lift truss bridge (replaced in 1988). The drawbridge was 120 feet long, one of the longest of its type in the world when built in 1910. It had a horizontal clearance of 100 feet according to a 1965 Army Corps of Engineers chart. Gil Freitag of Houston built a national-prize-winning operating HO model of the lift bridge You can see it on page 36 of Railroad Model Craftsman for November 1970, if you have a magazine collection going back that far. I saw a model based on the Galveston causeway at the Galveston County Model Railroad Club in the Texas City Historical Museum. (I am writing this from memory and I may not have the club and museum name exactly right.) It was a technically-sophisticated correctly-scaled accurate model of the cast-concrete arches and the lift bridge from the causeway. Clean sharp work. But there were only three or four of the accurately-long arches on each side of the drawbridge. The waterway it crossed, three or four feet wide, seemed like a bayou or a moderate river, not a section of “open sea”. It just did not give the impression of that long long long bridge. I am using the top arched section of the Atlas N scale viaduct to represent the arched sections of the causeway. The Atlas kit represents a heavy stone block viaduct whereas the Galveston prototype is cast concrete. Also, the arches on the Atlas kit are round and not so long, compared to the long elliptical arches of the prototype. The Atlas arch has a “span” of only 21.66 scale feet, pretty paltry compared to the prototype’s 70 foot span. The piers between spans on the Atlas arches are 6 scale feet, compared to an estimated 15 foot pier on the real causeway. But that is not all bad. The Atlas model will have approximately 3 times as many arches for any given length as actual scale elliptical arches, adding to the feeling of many many many arches and long long long causeway. Over several years, I acquired 8 sets of Atlas viaduct kits, adding up to 32 arches at 4 arches per kit. I set most of the Atlas kits loose as a mockup on the benchwork for my causeway section. I did not have a center bridge to drop in, but I was pleased with the long long long look. Originally, I thought of the causeway section being just a few inches under 8 feet long. I wanted it as long as practical in one piece, for the feeling of length and so I could pour the water in one piece with no break. Standard ceilings are about 8 feet high, and I could store a 7’6” section setting on end in a room. The causeway would be across the room entrance, to duck under at the approximately five foot elevation when the layout is set up for operation, but to move out of the way when not running the layout. As I bought material, I realized I did not want to pick up a section that big on a regular basis. I would break it, or it would break me. I changed the plan to a rollout section. However, 7’6” would not roll into the space left in the middle of the layout so I shortened the causeway all-in-one-piece section a foot, and added a pickup-and-carry-away piece 14 inches long at the island end. I think the causeway will be an OPERATIONAL signature element for the layout. When train cross the causeway, they are transitioning between the island and the mainland. Actually, when trains cross the causeway away from the island, they disappear into staging. In fact, the causeway is the only representation of mainline on the layout. Everything else is terminal. A bit of compression of the whole blooming city… See the prototype map in the first part of this post. Some of the most interesting features are on the Gulf side of the island, away from the railroad lines on the harbor side…. the beach, the seawall, the pier nightclub, the roller coaster, the amusement and tourist trap district. I have the causeway enter the island scene over a beach and seawall, as if the Gulf side of the island bent around that way. This gives me an excuse to put in a few more features. Here it is in mockup on the un-legged section benchwork. I have gotten as far as gluing the Atlas viaduct kits together, painting, installing, but have not finished putting down and wiring the track permanently. I am using the old AHM Schertzer rolling lift bridge kit for the center span. I hope I can get it to work smoothly with an inconspicuous rod from under the layout. I have seen modelers demonstrate working drawbridge that raise for a non-existent boat and then go down after it doesn’t pass. Fun show-off, but the absence of the boat takes away from the realism. I think it is will be more convincing operation (and in fact like the prototype) to keep the bridge normally up, and lower it only when a train is due to pass. The temporary background is a roll of printed paper hung from light stands, and the water is only painted ripple plastic so far. I have left room for a two-lane auto causeway behind the rail bridge which runs down the 7” center line of the 14” deep section. The unfinished pier nightclub is sitting where the auto causeway will be, instead of its actual intended position in front. Because the pier nightclub will obscure part of the view of the causeway, the center drawbridge is offset to the left from the center so the right end of the causeway will not be visually shortened quite so much….8 arches to the left of the drawbridge, 16 arches to the right.
