Five years on …

A big change of direction, but with some familiar faces… the ISL wasn’t doing it for me at all.  There is no chance of ever building Guadalupe – unless some sort of financial miracle happens – or stocking it, as it requires hundreds of freight cars and dozens of locomotives.  Given the short production runs and inflated prices of super detailed freight cars, it just isn’t going to happen.  I piddled about with some changes of direction including Scottish BLT, Western Region BLT, German French and Czech, BLTs before settling on something that seemed to tick a number of boxes.

• EMD locomotives
• ‘exotic looking’ but familiar
• 80s 90s era
• interesting and prototypical track layout
• short bogie freight stock
• quirky passenger stock, including generator vans
• working signalling and other intrinsically interesting railwayana
• and something that connected with my early years

So over the past year, I have sold off almost all the US, Scottish, Western,German, French and so on and consolidated efforts on capturing the essence of this formative article, from June 1981, in model form:

More on this later.

round and round and round I go

I’m not sure whether it’s morale boosting or sapping to stick a couple of historical images up.  Back in the mid-90s, my US interests were beginning to focus more on industrial switching, having been through most of the de jour obsessions of the time.  I think the only thing I’ve never been tempted by is some form of North-Eastern twiggy pike, or anything involving car floats and FSM style scenic over-egging.

I dug these old prints out of a pile, and don’t know whether they indicate progress, or a lack thereof.  The garage wasn’t an ideal place to build a pike, and the depredations of the gas company, indifferent builders and domestic pressures to re-use the space forced the early demise of these two layouts.  Looking back, building an exact facsimile of the south section of the Milwaukee Line’s Kingsbury Branch wasn’t a smart idea.  Sure, it fitted the space and looked fine – I even started mocking up some buildings – but the era and location meant nothing to me, so it didn’t survive long.

I’d also had a very early stab at a modern switcher pike, built off the mortal remains of one of the early coal pikes.  The mix of freelance Alcos, double stacks and modern industrial buildings didn’t really come off, and this one too bit the dust pretty quickly.  Weirdly, looking at the photograph now, it has a strange charm – it’s almost like coming across an actual, long-forgotten shortline that flourished in the 90s before being engulfed by one of the Class 1s.

The deal breaker really was the horrible Peco code 100 track.  It’s so wrong, it spoiled the look I was going for back in the day.  Even weathering it didn’t really help much, and I tried ballasting a few times and hated it.  This photo is a bit of a fudge, really, as it disguises the fact that there are two double slips hiding under the train!  This was back in the day when I was still in thrall to the tricky-track brigade, who insist that curved turnouts, 3-ways and slips are the answer to the space starved modeller. This quite overlooks  the fact that the prototype railroads have eliminated them ruthlessly from their properties, and so any model deploying them instantly loses its credibility to my eyes.  Have I mentioned I’m a bit of a track nut?  I also can’t abide the main track coming off the curve leg of a turnout, another bodge to ‘fit more in’…

What does work well is the overall scene – it’s only an impression, basic buildings, a pretend freeway bridge, blue sky and a hint of earth tones on the ground and weathered track.And yet it hangs together surprisingly well.  It’s quite reassuring how such a minimal – but consistent – level of ‘scenery’ has set the scene.

I suspect the shed pike will be equally minimalist.  I just don’t really enjoy scenery modelling, and will probably end up going for a Barrowesque impressionistic effect.  A bit of sandy, gravelly ground cover, some lightly weathered buildings, a plain sky backdrop. Even when I see amazing scenery, like Pelle Soeeborg’s or Lance Mindheim’s, I don’t feel convinced by it, nor want to replicate it.  Odd that.

how fast is fast?

Not very fast it seems.  I’ve just had a conversation with a man who, among other things, will be clearing the site for a nice new purpose built outdoor railroad room.  Otherwise known as a shed.  This development was previously mentioned in March 2008, leaving me to wonder just exactly how much slower can I go?

So, perhaps by the fall of 2013 I will finally be constructing a physical version of one of the many virtual pikes that have passed this way… maybe a little premature, but it feels like the first tangible step towards the next phase of the hobby.  I’ve never had a purpose built space before, it’s thrilling and alarming at the same time.  A blank canvas in 3D, but one with actual physical constraints.

My beloved Coast Line won’t fit, not even half of it – so that’s out of the window.  I guess I’ll be building some version of the many shelf switchers,  but at least they will have a decent amount of staging which was never possible in their spare room iterations.

There are some dangerous siren voices trying to distract me… I was rather taken with Dapol/Kernow JIAs and Silver Bullets for example, and a Scottish BLT, and I’ve always fancied a banger blue Wirksworth…

Perhaps I need one staging yard that supports several pikes that can be swapped in and out according to whim!  Now that’s not such a daft idea at all…

inspirations…

I can’t take any credit for some of my counter- intuitive thinking regarding going large scale in a small space.    The credit belongs to Andy Sperandeo,  in an editorial in the September 1994 Model Railroader.  It planted a seed that has taken 17 years to reach fruition.  I’ve included it as an image below, it still makes great reading.

A key paragraph.  ‘…smaller scales may have an advantage for representing the operations of an overall railroad system, but O scale shines when it comes to simulating the job of the railroader on the ground.’

That’s exactly what I’m aiming for in embarking on this 1:29 adventure.

Oddly, the same issue contains a ‘plan of the month’ for the Espee’s Coast Line, which is my other long-time obsession.  How strange that two seminal articles appear in the same issue – and one that I have no recollection of ever buying.  I wasn’t a subscriber to the MR in 94, and I have no idea where or when I picked up this particular issue.

Nontheless, 17 years later and I’m still occasionally trying to work out how best to model Guadalupe and the SMVR in HO.  There’s no doubting that it’s a great locale, and – certainly in the 80s – an interesting area to operate.  I think the clincher for me was that the article was written by a real railroader and it showed.  The trackplan was convincing, and the suggestion of ops had a real authenticity.

One day I’ll do the Coast Line justice…

Could this be the one?

The West Chandler plank set in motion a chain of thought, spurred on by Will posting me a link to The Newcastle Industrial railroad a super-minimal plank. The ‘eureka’ moment for me came while reading about the ops on the NCIR. This modest plank, with only two turnouts, supported an interesting prototypical switching set up that provided hours of work fun for the operators.

I realised that I had been looking at trackplans and evaluating them as ‘what looks good on the page’ as opposed to what operated interestingly… and the eureka moment? There is no correlation! What looks good on page doesn’t necessarily work well, and what works well looks ludicrously barren on the page.

West Chandler ticked a lot of boxes, but in order to make it work it required a 12′ leg for the staging and lead.  Realistically, I don’t have access to that wall of the spare room.  So I needed to ‘flop’ the plan and use the opposite wall for staging – except that I still don’t have a clear run of 12′ as there are domestic obstructions to avoid.  However…

In my huge archive of trackplans and CLIC charts, I found a neat one for Zone 4 Lubbock, Texas.  It even had an actual 90 degree curve that would take the layout down the correct wall.  It also supported lots of anonymous warehouses and boxcar based industries.  One building is even a ‘super nissen hut’, a particular favourite of mine.  Here’s the ATSF CLIC chart showing just how many individual car spots there are on this short spur.

An hours work or so, and here it is in layout form to fit the spare room:

I think it may be the first plan that ticks all my ops boxes and fits in the space I actually have, rather than the space I wish I had.  The usual grubby flotilla of GP40s and banged up boxcars flesh out the roster, so that’s another box ticked (the one marked ‘Don’t like spending lots of money on new fleet’)  The slight wrinkle this time is that Lubbock, Tx is firmly in Santa Fe territory and so I can either transport it several thousand miles westwards and populate it with grey SP units or I can dual purpose it and treat myself to some tasty ATSF units – a GP30/GP38 combo would go very nicely.  For inspiration, here’s a couple of shots that give the flavour of this pike.

Not bad, only took me a decade to get there…

the trouble with Tempe…

is that it trades fun against a faithful replica of the iron on the ground.  Now, there is some satisfaction to be had in developing a hi-fidelity scheme.  But if that ends up with a limited ops scheme, I find myself questioning the value.  Is it worth expending that much real estate – which is a major investment in money and time – on an ops scheme that consists of a single pair of GPs trundling a dozen or so rattly rust boxes along a single length of stick rail, swapping them for other equally disreputable rust boxes and towing the whole lot back to the start point?  OK, that is essentially what the real railroad does, so full marks for authenticity, but null points for fun and entertainment…

So what to do?  How do you accommodate variety and authenticity?  What’s missing from the Tempe scheme?  It’s obvious really – it only supports on line traffic, so there are no opportunities for the cool things I enjoy watching when I’m in Arizona.  No stack trains, Z trains, hotshots, junk trains, repo trains and all the other exotica. It certainly won’t justify running multiple lash-ups of tunnel motors and ’45s.  Sure, I could run them because it’s my railroad and who’s to know… but, well, I would know.  The balancing act that is the suspension of disbelief would be broken by the irrefutable knowledge that the Tempe Industrial Lead would never support all those cool things.

OK, so if I want to support industry switching, a little main line action, and remain sufficiently faithful to a real place to satisfy the inner proto-modeller , where should I look?   The Phoenix Met area is a branch off the Sunset, so you’re looking at haulers or industry switching only.  Big haulers, admittedly, but nothing very exciting heads this way.  I briefly considered the yards west of Phoenix Met at Cosnino and Pipeola, but having visited them back in the summer I didn’t really get a great feeling about them.

Then  I recalled somewhere that did support mainline trains, a decent hauler and heavy switching with resident switcher sets… In fact, it was somewhere I’d spent hours watching the action.  It’s Casa Grande, specifically the western edge of town.  Here’s where the daily CG hauler blocks cars for the local switchers to deal out to the industries in the CG railpark.  South of the Sunset, there’s a busy Cemex plant and a long lead that crosses Highway 84 to serve a variety of industries.  North of the main there’s the Frito Lay plant and another chemically sort of  industry that takes tank cars in volume.

So we have a location which ticks all the ops boxes, but  how to make a decent trackplan from it?  I also need to avoid my usual attempts to shoehorn too much track into an area –  I seem to have an aversion to empty space on a trackplan.  This is one area where following the prototype really helps.  Believe me, the SP wouldn’t lay a yard of rail if it could get away with it.  A perusal of the UP 2002 Tucson Service Area Track Chart gives some encouragement.  There is an interesting arrangement of spurs that can be modelled reasonably accurately.  A compressed version of the two track yard is also do-able. These tracks allow the CG haulers to block and store cars clear of the mainline and the siding.  (it’ll be interesting to see how double tracking affects this area when it reaches here sometime this year.  It’s currently only a few miles west at Maricopa).

In the absence of a shed 60 feet long and twenty feet wide, I’ll have to live with the 90 degree bends the track makes at each corner.  One of the challenges of trying to model the various industries and railparks in Arizona is that they’re invariably set at 90 degrees to the mainline, not parallel which would facilitate modelling on a shelf layout.  In one of those dazzling moments of insight I occasionally have if I mull over something long enough, I realised that having the main turn through unavoidable 90 degree bends meant that the industry spurs, if also arranged at the correct 90 degrees, would then be running parallel to the main along the length of the shed.

Even better, at least one of the industry legs could be used to form a natural view-block to hide the through staging that would support the moving scenery, ie the stack trains, Z trains and long distance traffic that adds so much interest to the Sunset.  The pike wouldn’t be restricted to serving on line industries anymore, even though most of the ops would focus on working the CG hauler and the local switch jobs.

Brilliant!

The plan should make all this clear.  The main is blue, the Casa Grande siding orange, industry tracks red and the staging tracks yellow.

The Cemex plant just cries out to be built as a spare room sized domino.  That would provide some fun while I wait for the mortgage payments to susbside and allow spends on a decent sized shed…

This is the view looking west over the tracks into the Cemex plant.  Two track yard, siding and the Sunset main on the far right.

Here we’re looking away from the main from Cowtown Road.  The Cemex plant is on the left, the track on the right heads south over hwy 84 and serves a great variety of industries judging by the staged cars…

A nice little cameo… a UP mobile maintenance guy is working on the SP GP40-2.  Taken from Cowtown Road which parallels the small yard here, about 3 miles west of the Casa Grande depot.  A nice switcher set too, GP38-2, SW1500 and a GP40-2.  All available in quality HO models…

Here’s a sweet set of locos about to head back to Tucson with the return CG hauler.  SD40-2,SD40, SD70M and SD40-2.  The hauler runs everyday except Sundays…

The silos and covered unloading bay at the Cemex plant.

And finally, July 2008 hauler heading for Casa Grande.  With a faux ’45 on the point, 2 SD60s trailing and 22 assorted tanks, boxcars, hoppers and flat cars in tow… awesome.

Tempe industrial lead

After a bit of a dry spell, inspiration trickles back… some hard graft and input from Will (via Lance Mindheim’s CSX Miami) and a return visit to a peachy piece of urban railroading, the Tempe Industrial Lead.

This wanders south from Tempe Junction, and finally peters out a little way south of the Loop 202 Santan Freeway…

On the way, it visits various industries that see a handful of cars each.  Not many cars, but plenty of variety – tanks, coil cars, box cars, lumber racks, shorty cement hoppers, 100t hoppers for plastic pellets…  The plan stays pretty faithful to the prototype, including having the spurs correctly oriented.  West Chandler has been flopped though, so the tank tracks are on the east side of the lead not the west.  Having the spurs face the right way should help operations be more prototypical – now all I have to do is find out how the prototype operates!

Starting from Tempe Jct, follow the line south (clockwise) round the room until you arrive at West Chandler Industrial Park. Each time you’re facing the pike, south is to your right and you’re facing east.  I’m absurdly pleased at this bit of geographical sincerity, as I’m sure it will help the sense of a line that goes from somewhere to somewhere else, not just round a room.  Theoretically, if a 100 foot+ linear space became available, I could unplug the LDEs, substitute some straight ‘fillers’ for the bendy bits, and replicate the branch in all its spindly glory.

Ops remain a bit of a mystery – I’ve heard traffic on this line, but always late at night/early hours of the morning.  I’m guessing the profusion of grade crossings may have something to do with that, but I really don’t know.  And just how many trains traverse this line?  One a day?  Three a week?  I’ve never seen anything moving, just the switchers slumbering over at McQueen and various freight cars lolling about in the sun.

Talking of the switchers, motive power is blessedly easy for this one, a nice pair of tatty, patched ex-SP GP40s from Atlas will do nicely.

Patched UP 1443, and my old friend 7125 still in SP…  marvel at the myriad detail differences in these two old locomotives, including the headlights and ditchlights… 1443’s cab door is a complete replacement part in UP colours.

I won’t be replicating the graffiti though.

For a bit of variety, I guess any of the Tucson Pool could appear here at some point.  I’ve seen 7125 every year since 2005, but never in the same place so I guess the switchers move around the Tucson Service Area quite a bit.

Here’s some of the other candidates…

A GP60’GP40 combo – check out the weird hybrid paint job on the1391…

patched SP but with the new UP reflective yellow sill stripe.

Awesome hybrid, which seems to be carrying an SP number in non-standard block lettering, no hood lettering and a UP yellow short hood… you beauty!

patched Cotton Belt…

Patched SP with a funky white roof… so, not one of those locomotives is like any of the others!

Hmmm, I wonder…

The Fall trip to Phoenix has come and gone.  Bizarrely, I managed to forget to pack a camera.  After the initial annoyance I decided to go with it and enjoy being ‘in the moment’ rather than chasing around after some notional ‘master shot’.

It was a revelation.  I spent many hours sitting in the same spot, letting the tempo of the railroad flow around me.  I began to get a sense of the rhythm of the Sunset Route, several trains that ran on successive days became clear, and I got immersed in the ‘bigger picture’ of a railroad that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week…

I spent five or six hours at the end of each day down at Picacho, junction between the Phoenix Sub and the Yuma Sub.  I’ve been there before, but usually just to try catch a Hauler at the Coolidge Farm crossing, or a meet in the siding.  Well, what an eye-opener.  Picacho is a busy place…

In addition to trains moving on and off the branch, it also functions as an interchange with at least one train each evening stopping to drop off cars for the inbound Haulers to pick up.  Also, meets were common – in fact I even caught a three way meet one time.  Fast trains overtook slow trains heading in the same direction.  I also caught the in and out bound Casa Grande Haulers, the New Orleans bound CSX/Pacer stacktrains that have Tropicana Juice reefers tacked onto the rear, and an autoballaster parking up in the short siding for the night.  I even caught the local that serves Eloy/Casa Grande – five hoppers and four tank cars behind a pair of GP40s.

So, we have one location that supports crew changes, meets, overtakes, switching, interchange traffic, Z Trains, stack trains, autoracks, manifests, haulers, locals…  Generally I was catching around five/six trains per hour between 3pm and 7pm some of which were spending quite a time moving cars around.

All this on only four tracks, and a compact turnout arrangement that could be modelled exactly as the prototype.

I began to wonder if it would be a better subject for modeling than Tempe Junction.  Sure, I’d have to condense its length enormously… but if you accept that compromise, the thought of something built on modules that features an exact replica of the real layout, and has so much operating/railfanning potential… it’s almost irresistible.

The signals are a major part of the charm too, as they are clustered together in one spot and it has an SP cantilever signal bridge… I’m really talking myself into this one.  The final deciding factor may well be the presence in my luggage on the flight home of a pair of the new generation Athearn tunnel motors…

Let’s take a look at some pics to get a sense of the place…

Looking west from the signal gantry. The junction switch cuved leg turns into the siding, the straight leg connects to the main. The switch from the main tuns into the south siding.

Looking east towards the junction. The signal post on the left of the gantry has a dwarf target which will give a flashing yellow for a train heading from the north siding onto the Phoenix branch.

Looking north-west from the south siding. Signature scenic items all present and correct - telegraph poles and signal posts, and that's about it!

Looking towards the main from the Phoenix branch. In the foreground is the signal for trains leaing the branch, including a funky dwarf target for giving a yellow indication for a train taking the curve leg of the turnout into the north siding. In the background is the 3 aspect signal for the north siding/main/south siding heading east.

So how would this work in a model railroad?  Pretty straightforward really.  The main compromise (other than the linear compression, obviously) is losing the west leg of the wye.  It’s not a significant loss, operationally although I have seen a small number of trains leave the Phoenix Sub and head west.  Given a similar location as the Tempe layout, we’d end up with something like this…

It’s workable – and authentic.  I like it.  A lot.  There would need to be a reasonable amount of staging tracks – we’re probably looking at six trains in each direction, plus a couple of haulers/locals that could share a track.  Again, it’s important to understand that the staging represents three places ‘off layout’ – Phoenix, Tucson and Yuma.  So although it can be operated as a roundy-roundy, generally it wouldn’t…. although having said that, its feasible that a generic stack/tofc in each direction could just lap endlessly while I got on with switching out cars for the inbound Phoenix hauler, having to get out of the way of the through trains.

I also can see that this set up works as a series of modules – inserting extra plain track modules between the east and west switched to extend the length if more space became available.

Tempe Junction…

… it’s about as far from scenic as you can get.  But I like it.

Tempe Junction looking north

Tempe Junction looking east

Sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing…

Actually that’s not strictly true.  Over the last few months, I’ve done quite a lot but achieved nothing.  I’d hit a roadblock with the Phoenix scheme, and sometimes to get round a roadblock you have to drive a long, long way round to get back to where you started before resuming your journey.

The roadblock was pretty simple – as planned, the Phoenix scheme had two ‘deal breakers’.

1) the benchwork would have been complex.  Trying to accommodate a lower level staging yard would mean building a grade between the main board and the wall, and having two levels always means one is at less-than-ideal height.  All of which ran contrary to one of my ‘must haves’, which was for domino style benchwork.

2) the operations scheme was really limited.  Although I primarily wanted a switching pike which had a high degree of operational fidelity, I also wanted to, on occasion, kick back and watch some of the bigger traffic sway through the switches at Tempe Junction.  Stack trains behind a set of smokin’ howlin’ tunnel motors for example.  The end to end scheme with a cramped terminal wouldn’t support anything other than short trains and a pair of GPs.

So at that point I gave up on the Phoenix scheme and went on a wild and lengthy detour through some of my other railroad interests.  It’s probably best if I draw a discrete veil over some of the things that got sketched out and discarded as I tried to reignite my interest in small electric trains.  I seriously thought of just throwing in the towel and remaining an armchair modeller and occasional locomotive collector.  I can thank Will for keeping the faith and putting some serious counselling effort in to get me back on track.

He also kept badgering me (in the nicest possible way) to build a plank, just to build something to get past the deadlock.  I resisted this, as I am reluctant to build anything that won’t contribute to the final ‘grand plan’.  I’m strapped for time, and having built a number of planks and pikes over the years and seen all of them end up in the skip, I’m a commitment-phobe.

We spent quite some time working through the ‘givens and druthers’, a rather homely term attributed to the wonderful late John Armstrong, for a systems engineering method of working out what you want, and what’s achievable.  This allowed me to slough off some of the glamorous but unattainable distractions and rethink what it was I wanted to spend time and money on.  The matrix doesn’t make the decision for you, it just lays out some of the unalterable facts that allows you to make a more informed decision.

That brought me back to Phoenix, but it didn’t get me past the problem of the limited traffic base and the complex benchwork.  But creativity is a wonderful thing – you put lots of stuff into your brain, and sooner or later (often much, much later) a solution will pop out.  A eureka moment.  Will’s been working on a ’roundy-roundy’ that features through staging.  That simply means running the pike as if it were end-to-end and joining the two end staging yards together to make a complete circuit.  The advantage of this set up is that although generally you wouldn’t run trains round and round, you can when the need or desire to arises.  Visitors say.  Or the times when you just want to kick back and watch those stack trains behind a set of smokin’ howlin’ tunnel motors…

The advantage of staging which represents destinations in both directions is obvious – through trains.  You aren’t limited to only running trains which can be handled in your modelled terminal yard.  So my eureka moment was to apply Will’s through staging concept to the Phoenix scheme.  Eliminate the modelled Phoenix yard – which was too small to be useful, and used too many turnouts to be cheap to build and maintain – and represent Phoenix with staging.  Tucson is also represented by staging – the same staging, so also cheaper than two staging yards.  I like cheap, I really do.  So now we can run trains from Tucson to Phoenix – big trains.  So what do they run through?  Tempe Junction of course!

On the original scheme, Tempe Junction was an afterthought, literally just a turnout to split the Tempe Industry spur from the main.  In real life, Tempe Junction is an ugly, gritty little area between the Superstition Freeway Overpass and the Baseline Road crossing.  There are a couple of spurs, and UP parks the Tempe Switchers there when they’re not working.  It’s not a pretty place, but it has an atmosphere about it I like – railroady and unglamorous.

On the model, the area that would have been taken up by Phoenix yard is now occupied by Tempe Junction.  It has a high degree of fidelity, I can lay it out pretty close to the prototype and operate it in much the same way.  It’ll look more convincing – much less track for a start, and it’ll support more interesting operation.  The Haulers can blast by on their way to and from Phoenix/Tucson, the Tempe Switchers can trundle up and down the branch to Tempe Industry… I can either kick back and watch, or I can get on the footboard of the GP40 and spot cars up and down the Industry lead…  Putting Tempe Industry in front of the staging also eliminates the need for a grade down to lower deck staging.  So the benchwork can be built domino style.

And finally, Tempe Junction itself can be built as two 4′ x 1′ dominos – a plank in other words – with only four turnouts… so I can get on and build a small part of the bigger scheme, safe in the knowledge that it won’t go to waste.

A result, I think.