Jefferson City Yard

I have been spending a lot of time with a soldering iron in hand building turnouts and laying the track to finish our Jefferson City Yard.

This morning I added the last two pieces of track for the yard!  the track work in the yard is complete.  Spent part of the day running locos with strings of cars over areas that have power already and cleaned up an difficult spots.  Now just a whole lot of track feeders, a couple dozen Tortoise switch machine installs, the yard diagram featuring manual throws for the Tortoises for more efficient switching, more ties added, ballasting..... at least as of right now I have the mainline and 3 yard tracks that I can use to entertain myself.

Also I started on the yard layout board, diagram, switch controls, today.  I am building it on a 1/8" x 24" x 8" piece of plastic.  The plastic had been purchased awhile ago for cnc milling and it was still around so...  

I printed out the design for it in full scale across three sheets of paper and then worked from that adding artist tape to the plastic where the track lines would be.  The plastic is naturally white, somewhat translucent, so once the track marks were down with artist tape it got a layer of black paint, tape was pulled, and then a couple coats of polycrylic to protect the paint from being torn up as easily.
All spots that represent a turnout have been drilled out to accept mini DPDT switches and then 3mm bipolar Red/Green LEDS have been added just beyond the switch to indicate which way the switch is aligned.  The is a whole lot of wiring to go on this project and its going to be a little bit of a nightmare.  Each DPDT switch will have 12v input and then have 12v output to the Tortoise, and also have to go through a 380ohm 1/4w resister to provide power for the LED indicator.  I've decided on fabricating resistor circuit board to help clean up the wiring a little, but as you can imagine, its a whole lot more soldering coming my way.

Sedalia Spline and Mill Siding

Ive had some time off and am getting the chance to work on the Model Railroad a lot these past few days.  Today I didn't really have a plan when I walked into the room, but, after looking at it for a few minutes, I ripped out the basic landform behind the incline toward Sedalia(behind the mill and fuel facilities).

All of the area that appears to be covered in masking tape, and the area in the far right of the picture with the paster cloth on it went straight into the trash can.

The problem with this area is that we are fitting the grade to Sedalia along the back wall of the layout in as small of an area as possible while still making the landscape between the two height diferences believable.  My first attempt at building this was using plywood as sub-roadbed, and I have cut the ply to about 2-4in wide, which resulted in some of the terrain between the two levels as a sheer cliff and in one six inch section, the top of the cliff protruded further than the base.  Rather than attempt to fight it anymore, In the spur of the moment this afternoon, I ripped it all out and decided to put in a new spline roadbed for this section. 

Spline Roadbed is quite an easy process, just some what time consuming.  It seems to always be good to have another project that you can work on while the glue dries a little bit before we have to take clamps off to put in the next section of spline.  For our spline we use 1/8" Masonite(hardboard) cut into 3/4" strips. I put a screw in the middle of every riser so that I could clamp the first stip to it and work outward from there.  With 1/8" Masonite, it takes 7 layers to be wide enough for the cork roadbed.

Once I completed the Spline to Sedalia, I began laying track in the siding for the mill/fuel area.  Most of the turnouts for the layout are being hand laid with the FastTracks system, but I only had a few of them completed currently. I still need to build 4 more turnout before I can lay the two tracks for the fuel area, and all of the tracks for the mill.

Helix Approach

Started working on the sub-roadbed from the river crossing to the helix today.  The area will also including the siding tracks for Sedalia Quarry, and part of it will need to be removable to access the window.  I decided to put in spline roadbed, and had completed that when we decided that we could put in a small 8" deep lift out section and just scenic the whole area.

Since the bridges are still part of the incline grade to the helix, I notched out part of the supports for the spline to sit down at the correct level.  I used a 12" piece of plywood to clamp to the spline as it went in so that area stayed straight for the turnout to be placed there.

Here are a few pictures after a few of the spline have gone into place.  I seems we use a clamp spaced about every 4-6 inches to make sure it is held together nicely while the glue dries.  The area below the spline is covered with shop towels to catch any of the glue that drips out.  While I am very particular about no glue squeezing out on the top of the spline, I dont really care about the bottom.

This is the part where we decided to change it all up and add an 8" deep section of plywood that will be the lift out so that we can put some rural scenery around that tracks as it crosses over to the island of the helix.  Had we know we were going to do this at the beginning of the day I wouldn't have put in the spline roadbed, but now that both are in, it will look nice having the elevated track and have the scenery slope down from the track in front.

A couple pictures of a few of our locomotives lined up in the staging yard.

June Update

Staging Yard

The staging yard has now been completed, It has four stub end tracks and then a 5th that also serves as a reversing loop.  We have installed ground throws for the staging lead turnouts, the cost of tortoises didn't seem worth it for the staging area, especially since all turnouts are very accessible.  We used a Digitrax AR1 on the reversing loop to control the power of the isolated track.

 

River Crossing & Sedalia Quarry

When the trains enter the layout from the east staging, they enter here on the lower track of the river area representing the track between St. Louis and Jefferson City running along the river and through some rock outcroppings.  Once the train has passed through Jefferson City it begins its climb up to these bridges that cross a river here on the way to Sedalia, where we have decided to make home to a Quarry.  The Quarry will have a siding off of the mainline here before the mainline crosses over the staging to where the helix will be (above St Louis Staging).

These are the two areas that have been much transformed in the past few days.  For the basic landforms we have used a few different methods.  Most of the river area is cut from 2" thick foam board, the rock cliff between the river and lower tracks is made of layered ceiling tiles, and the Sedalia are is masking tape on cardboard strips.  All area have now been covered in plaster and soon will be on to paint.

Milling Facility

While the layout continues to change, the milling facility has been through many different configurations.  This is the latest and hopefully final configuration of the buildings to best fit the space, now I just need to finish the buildings, foundations, loading dock, windows, doors, details.  The roadbed has finally gone down into the facility, a pull through track just behind the elevator, holding track next to it, and then the short track in front of the elevator will the the locomotive holding track for the town that the Milling and Fuel facilities reside in.

St. Louis Staging

Today we got some of the staging track put into place, once the glue has completely set over night we can make the cuts for the lift out section.  The outside staging track is actually a loop to easily turn around trains and hold a large unit train that will run a thru on the layout going from east staging to west without any scheduled stops.  all other staging tracks will hold around 14 - 50' cars and 2 locomotives.  Now we just have to wait to get the rest of the cork roadbed down and then continue on with the track work.