Minutiae

The SNR is pleased to announce the completion of a couple of infrastructural trifles I've been intending to get to for like, years.  These are nearly meaningless as well as unphotogenic, but come celebrate with me anyway!  ☺

1.  East Segway Interlocking -- Occupancy Detector

If you've ever crewed a helper engine, changed road power, or operated the yard at Segway before, you'll recall how impossible it is to tell when your consist has cleared the interlocking at EY tower.  This is because the eastern extremity of East Segway is located:

• behind the diesel house, 
• around a bend, 
• through the trees, and 
• inside a concrete block wall.

You're never quite sure if you're going to throw a switch under your locomotive, 

without hiking to the other side of the wall for a visual.   

 

 

But no more!  With the addition of one optical detector from Azatrax, the crewman can now tell from the panel when the interlocking is clear and the switch to the main may be thrown.

      

Installing the detectors from underneath the diesel house, through the benchwork, and behind one of the only non-removable hillsides on the property, was a bit like building a ship in a bottle.  Each stem had hot glue liberally applied to it, and then was placed by feel and held until set.  

This was an iterative approach however, as the first attempts ended with my fingers glued together, or, with the sensors glued to my fingers but not to the layout.  Eventually a proper placement was achieved though, successfully illuminating the new panel indicators when the primary switch is fouled -- and successfully clearing when not.  

I was so pleased I added a repeater on the main yard panel while I was at it. 

2.  Della St. Crossing Flashers -- Re-Configured West Detector 

I put out a call a few weeks ago for an Atlas telephone shanty, should anyone happen to have had one in his junk box.  Bill Doll (Forest Park Southern) stepped up with a unit from a prior layout (thanks Bill!).  If you were on that email, you might be wondering what it was about.  Well here's what I did with the shanty and why.

As above, it has to do with optical detection.   I love Azatrax flasher circuitry and detectors, and have installed them at three separate grade crossings.  

Azatrax allows you to configure the infrared LED emitter/collector pairs in either across-the-track mode, or between-the-rails mode.  In the former, breaking the beam trips the detector.  In the latter, connecting the beam -- by having it reflect off a car chassis -- is what trips the detector.

Initially I liked how clean the between-the-rails mode kept the surroundings, and so wired all the visible detectors this way.  It was not long, however, before I began pulling these back out, and re-configuring them for across-the-track mode.  The primary reasoning was twofold:  across-the-track 1) is significantly more reliable and less finnicky, and 2) accommodates multiple parallel tracks with one detector.

I reconfigured every last pair except one -- the west remote detector on the mainline in St. Amour.  This was primarily because I couldn't find a good disguise for the collector, which would just be hanging out there in space between the main and the yard, with no room (or reason) for a building, outbuilding, or pile of shrubbery.  

This meant that for years, Della St. motorists have been unprotected from trains moving eastbound on the secondary track.  And even on the main, sometimes the engines are halfway to the crossing before the detector gets a good reflection off a car chassis and trips.

Well I finally got a fit of inspiration -- the one thing that would both work and fit (and be plausible) would be a skinny telephone shanty like the Atlas.  So I went looking for one -- and here we are.  

In the new across-the-track placement, the collector just keeps an eye out through the window in the shanty, 

and the emitter is hiding in the woods.

A train approaching Della St. now trips the detector even while on the secondary.

In the Company's two-tone green paint, and at an SNR level of compression, 

the telephone shack might even pass for a yard office.  

3. Rodentia

As if destroying my smoke at the Basin refinery wasn't bad enough, the mice have now, for no apparent reason, chewed through my delicately-strung barbed wire.

"Enough is ENOUGH!

I have HAD it

with these MOTHERf____in' MICE

on this MOTHERf____in' LAYOUT!"

-- Samuel L. Jackson, Snakes on a Plane

Bet you didn't know Sam was a model railroader.  😉   (To see the actual clip, click here. [PARENTAL WARNING].)

The irony is, it's the snakes that are missing from the equation in this case.  The black rat snakes which ordinarily patrol the woods around the house so diligently seem to be on sabbatical, so the varmints are free to set up shop in the basement.

The little vermin can't resist raiding the scrap wood piles at Slim's Cooperage -- 

which used to look a lot more like lumber cutoffs and less like mulch.  But no real loss there -- 

and it makes Three Rocks the ideal location for countermeasures, which have been effective.

Just wish they hadn't sampled the barbed wire across the tracks.  That was all strung in continuous threads and super-glued, so repair is going to be a project!  Why.  Alas.

👉 Well thanks as always for reading, and let me know what you think!

   

Misty

 

"Look at me...♫   I'm as helpless as a kitten in a tree...♫"

-- Erroll Garner Trio, "Misty", 1954

If you've operated at my place recently, you've probably already seen the complete-ish scenery at Misty, W. Va.. (Or if you prefer Led Zeppelin to Erroll Garner, "Misty Mountain".)  

In a me-like fashion, it's been 90% done for months -- have just been waiting on some last-minute details before posting about it.

One of the things that took so long was that I have been recording the process to use as a "How It's Made" page on the permanent blog.  I've been wanting to document (because someone might be interested!) the scenery contour methods on the Suffolk Northern.   They are a bit unorthodox, not unlike most of the rest of the layout, nor the owner himself.  But hey, re-inventing the wheel and tuning it for my own needs and preferences are actually part of the fun.  

I'd appreciate it if you'd take a look at that page and tell me what you think:  Suffolk Northern Ry.: Landforms.  All feedback is welcome -- on the methods, the effect, the page itself, the author's musical taste, whatever you like.    

"On my own...♫  Would I wander through this wonderland alone...♫"

Misty is the helper cutoff point at the summit of the westward ruling grade, and the location of the Cornelis-Imperial Co.'s #3 tipple.  Finishing the scenery here was a boost to railfanning, so the trains emerging from the summit tunnel, instead of just drifting through masonite and homasote, finally have some mountains to conquer.  Or as the Tweeners say, "mouw-ihs".     

"So I'm packing my bags for the Misty mountains, where the spirits go..."

-- Led Zeppelin, "Misty Mountain Hop", 1971

Thanks as always for reading, and please if you have a minute, take a spin through the page at Suffolk Northern Ry.: Landforms and let me know what you think.  

Something Different for Alleghany Scrap

You've probably seen or heard me talk about Alleghany Scrap in St. Amour, and how there are retired locomotives towed in and set out for it by road trains.  Seldom modeled, but a regular occurrence in the Transition Era. **

In the back of my mind I'd also planned on sending freight cars to their demise as part of the process.  I sprang the first one on unsuspecting operators last week, and was surprised to receive compliments, rather than abuse for it being silly as I'd expected.  So I thought I'd share it here.

I wanted a car badly-enough compromised that it needed to be scrapped, but not to a cartoon-violence degree where it would need to be cut up on the spot.  It seemed the best way to approximate this would be with a metal car, rather than melting a plastic car into a glob.  So a while back I picked up a couple derelict remnants from the good ol' days on Ebay for cheap-ish, to eventually use for such a purpose.

All-steel cars actually have a fair amount of structure in the box, ends, and frame.  They crumple by degrees, rather than just being crushed like a beer can.  So I braced the car in the carpenter's vise a few panels back from each end, with some cradles cut from scrap wood to preserve the essential "house" structure - and began delicately beating the crap out of it, trying to mimic the damage one might expect in an accordion-style derailment.  

As I did so, the 60-year-old paint flaked merrily off at the deflection points, leaving acres of gleaming metal, sparkling in its deformity.  So I applied rust in those areas - and other areas where the structure had given way, such as the roof popping off the sides at the far end.  It's probably a little extreme, but I figure it must have rained at least once between the derailment and the salvage op, so a little orange and yellow rust on the newly exposed areas could be expected.  Beats repainting it!  

The flat car was a gift from my friend Bill Doll (Forest Park Southern), dressed up nicely with sprung metal trucks and a beautiful wood deck.  I kind of hated to cover most of that deck, but the car was handy, and not in service yet - so it's now the official conveyance of wrecks.  Not to imply any issues with the FPS's freight-handling ability or anything... 

The destroyed boxcar awaits its turn with the torches at Alleghany Scrap in St. Amour. 

During ops, I generally like to have the scrap item set out at St. Amour by a westbound overhead freight.  That gives the road crewman something to do, and, it allows the white-lined equipment to make almost a full lap of the layout before being dropped off.  Even with an old cast-boilered steam engine, I'm happy to add a helper to shove its fat ass up the westbound grade, rather than just have an eastbound drop it off immediately after departing staging.  

But, that scheme requires said equipment to actually make it around the layout.  

Disaster looms in Claymoor, W. Va., as the scrap load approaches the Cassandra Rd. bridge.

See, the SNR, in addition to its boxcar slogan "The James River Route", is known variously as 

• "The Shoehorn Route" and 

• "The Path of Least Clearance".    

Or, as my friend Darren Williamson (IHB) puts it, 

• "NO ROOM FOR CAR ON SIDE OF CAR."  

While not technically even exceeding Plate B, the damaged car with those jaunty crumples snagged everything on the first test run - trees, tunnel portals, fences, buildings, standpipes, bridges...  Even turning it around only solved a couple of problems - and created more.  God help me I should ever run a high-wide movement.  

That crumpled roofwalk shoved the highway bridge fully clear of its footings

and collapsed it into the cut, 

causing the further destruction of a beautiful aquamarine 1950 Buick Super,
and the profound irritation of its occupants. 

So in service, the car will have to be dropped off by an eastbound freight only - running about 20' out of Gallipolis staging - and with the big crease facing west only, so the St. Amour crewman can actually fit it into the cut tracks at Alleghany.  Period.  Ah well - it's been fun.  Guess that's why it needed its own post, so somebody could see it!

Thanks as always for reading, and let me know what you think.  Interesting, or silly?  (No need to comment on restricting Plate B movements however, thank you very much!)  

FOOTNOTES

** More info/photos re: Alleghany Scrap, Inc.:

•     the yard, and first delivery:   Suffolk Northern Ry.: Alleghany Scrap
•     another hapless arrival:  Suffolk Northern Ry.: Passenger Fs!

 

 

Bulk Storage for Aidan Castings

 

I've finally gotten down to working on the scenery around the industries in Bryan Ferry.  But since it takes me forever to actually finish anything, I thought I'd show you first the major sub-project in that endeavor by itself, which is the bulk storage bins for the Aidan foundry.  

👉There's some interesting discussion around it, too - stay tuned!👈

The foundry receives coke, limestone, and pig iron in gondolas, and sand in covered hoppers.  As a small-town furnace, their operations are a bit casual - bulk materials are unloaded with an ancient conveyor, and stored on the ground, and charged into the furnace used a bucket loader.  Scrap is also a major inbound commodity, but being chunky and irregular, it can just be piled in a heap off to the side - no bin required.  

So I've been staring at that odd-shaped blank space for years, knowing what I wanted to build - a set of bins radiating out from a movable conveyor - but stewing over how to terminate it at the layout edge.  Any facility not extending beyond the layout would be ridiculously undersized, even by SNR standards - so an accommodation had to be made. 

Now, I've sliced through foreground buildings before, and I've treated the raw slice in two different ways:

 

1). At the J.D. Bumhauer Co. in St. Amour, I left the building open at the section, 

since the primary point was to provide a "railfan-through" scene, 

where one can watch rail traffic roll by through the numerous 

steel-sash windows, as I once did at a client in Hartford, Ct..  

2). Whereas, for the sand bin on the Yaeger service tracks, 
I built some mock-fascia to cover the exposure, 
since in real life one wouldn't want to see the inside 

of a giant pile of sand.  Or so I thought at the time.

At the foundry though, I had these odd-shaped walls in irregular alignment, with some interesting material heaps in the foundryman's four favorite flavors.  It seemed a shame to cover it all up with fascia - especially given that the wall slices go all the way to the top.  

So I opted to reverse the sand bin ruling, and leave these bins exposed at the section - as if the material were piled up against a pet's terrarium glass, to be viewed from the outside - along with the pet - by a superior species.  Well - at least a species that thinks it's superior to the pet.

The walls are foam-core, with the edges capped with putty.  All five of them actually follow the same pattern, just being abbreviated in different places based on where they strike the layout edge.

As always with concrete, I painted them with a latex mix, using horizontal brushstrokes which help suggest the casual, small-batch pours that were used in the day.  Initial weathering with washes of India ink highlighted the unevenness.  The sectioned foam-core centers make pretty decent concrete cuts, I think - maybe I should add some rebar!  

I did a quick mod on the Walthers conveyor to align the wheels circumferentially, allowing the conveyor to swing and serve any of the four commodities.  Haven't thought through what the pit is going to look like yet - would they just leave a mix of spillage at the bottom, or clean it out after each unload?  

I shaped the heaps first with foam and a hotwire, then covered them over.  The limestone is ballast, but the sand and coke were done with bona-fide sand and coke.  (For the record, all the coke and coal on the layout comes from nuggets of each I picked up as a kid, along the B&O in Tri-County.  How's that for authentic.)   Those three materials could be added after gluing the foam shapes into the bins.

For pig iron, though - in gondolas I use Chooch sugar-beet loads, which have textures that are surprisingly close in shape to the little piggies.  When painted and weathered with oxides, they're pretty convincing.  No such material exists in aggregate however.  So I approximated it with aquarium gravel, except that had to be painted after heaping and gluing, but before installing.  That was fun.  

And there it is - inbound materials at long last.  Next up, as Paul Harvey would say:  "the rest of the story."   

Eventually.

❓

 👉  Faced with the same dilemma, 

would you cover the section with fascia, 

or show off the interesting stuff❓ 

👉  Is it silly to see the sheer faces of aggregate heaps❓ 

Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think!

Hopper Traffic Flow

Mine shift job HC-39 heads across the Gloucester Fork arch bound for the marshalling yard, 

where it will send its coal loads off to market and pick up empties for the next op session.

Since no one asked, I thought it might be interesting to start a discussion on the flow of hopper cars...  I'd love to hear your philosophy and opinions - how do you handle bulk loads?  What's most important to you?

Guys who are better modelers than me (this means you!) often prioritize the beauty of the load over the flow of the hoppers, preferring cars to be permanently loaded.  I totally understand this, and I'm blessed to get to run on some gorgeous layouts that handle coal this way.  

However within my head - scary as that may sound - it's more important that the railroad seem to be going about its business on its own.   Meaning, I want to be merely a spectator and a railfan, interfering as little as possible with its traffic.  The more I have to think through and manipulate things during re-staging, the more recognizable the trains are when they emerge during ops.  And on my own layout at least, that pierces the fourth wall, and takes away some of the fun.  

HC-39 arrives at East Segway after an ops session to deliver its loads.  

The former BE-46 waits on an adjacent track to supply it and other shifters with empties.

So if the goal of ops is to try to run a layout like a real transportation system, on the SNR at least I just can't re-stage loaded cars back to the mines.  And just I can't take the loads out of shifters and send them back out with the same cars they just picked up.  It chafes, man.  For the simulation to work, I want to know that a mine's coal is going to all the way to market, and in the very empties that were delivered to its tipple to fill.  As I said, it's a scary place in my head.

Anyway...  In the era before unit trains, this tenet yields two important corollaries:

1. Empties must be loaded at the mines between sessions.
2. Hoppers must circulate randomly, with little identifiable repetition or pattern.

 

At the Permian Fuels Corp.'s Claymoor Mine, empties set out by FS-41 during the last op session 

are filled as delivered.  They'll await the return of FS-41 in the next session to pick them up.  

In implementing these rules on the SNR, the mine shifters' loads are combined to form new road trains during re-staging - and at the same time, the empties trains are broken up to supply hoppers back to the shifters.  Basically this mimics the work of a marshalling yard on the prototype, not to mention mimicking the distant consumption of coal once it's brought up and sent away.  And not having room for an actual coal yard, I still get to operate through that part of the cycle out in the light, between sessions. 

At East Segway, F-M #164 breaks up an empties-east job from the previous session, to re-supply the visiting shifters.  He'll marshal their setouts into a new loads-west road train for the next ops.

Arguments can be made that this is overkill and that no one will notice.  That is probably true, but - I will.  Plus it lets me enjoy running my own railroad even while doing behind-the-scenes work.

The flow looks something like this:

The upshot of this flow is that each hopper makes a single, complete circuit of the coal production loop, every time.  Just like life.

Since every re-stage of the layout sets up two monthly-ish op sessions, the diagram suggests it could be almost a year before any given hopper gets back to where it started.  And when it does, it's going to be in a very different mix of cars than in the previous round.  Just like back in school - you went through 12 years with the same group of people, but every class in every year was a different subset. 

With its marshalling work complete and its symbol changed, new shift job HE-38 
threads through the interlocking at SE tower and gets out of town, bound for Gallipolis staging.

This all is what the world looked like to me as a kid when I first discovered coal trains, rolling up the B&O through Springdale.  There didn't seem to be any detailed mechanics or obvious repetition at work - just loads moving west and empties moving east, continuously.  So that's always been what I wanted to see happen in my own model world.  

How about you?  Love to hear what you guys think, and what matters on your layout.  Thanks for reading!

  

Kanawha #1812 departs Segway for Amherst staging, with the shifters' loads 

having constituted a new TC-17, ready for the next ops.  

Footnotes:

My business partner once remarked to me, being the CPA, that "Even your checklists have checklists."  This is from the attorney who couldn't follow a recipe to save his @$$, but that's a story for over beers.  He's right, though, and just to prove it - at the risk of drowning you in minutiae (don't read it!) - here's a sample of the Coal re-staging checklist.  And yes, it itself is represented by a single line item on the Overall re-staging checklist.  

    

Plexiglass Alternative

 

I have a number of good friends who swear by Plexiglass, for protecting delicate details unavoidably located close to the front of the layout.

These guys are great operators and great modelers, and have some years - er, wisdom - on me too...  So you'd think I'd want to heed their advice.  

Thing is, though...  yeah.  I just really like to avoid things that "break the 4th wall" - interfere with the scale reality when operating - if I can help it.  I keep structures and details floating on their mounts wherever possible, and in general I'd just rather fix things, than be walled off from my gameboard.  Just my preference.

There is one significant exception, however - one that can't float, and can't easily be fixed.  It's the right crossing flasher in Three Rocks, which is at shoulder height, 1" from the fascia, and square in the path of uncoupling-related arms and elbows.  It also happens to be a Tomar mast, which is not only the best of breed IMO, it's also no longer available - and has no reasonable facsimiles out there.

Over the years, that outside mast has been blasted, bent, straightened, glued, soldered, and jumpered so many times that it not only has become permanently stooped, it's also down to one single operable lamp out of four.  Reminds me of Homer Simpson's Christmas lights.  

For the record I am certain that virtually all - if not actually, literally, all - of the destruction, was at the hand of... the owner. 😁  (Or the elbow, or forearm...)

Anyway, I was recently fortunate enough to find a used pair of Tomars on Ebay whose buy-it-now figure wasn't stratospheric multiples of the list price.  But I had to accept that this one was officially a rare bird, in danger of extinction, and was going to need to be armored in some way.  So I began musing about novel defense mechanisms...

Here's what I came up with - how about protecting the delicate stuff with buttressed versions of things that could belong in the scene anyway?  In this case, that meant telephone poles.  On the surface they are unassuming line poles - easily snapped off with a sidelong glance, you say?  Au contraire - in reality they are made of coat-hanger wire, which, when cut to short 5" lengths and anchored through the homasote into bedrock (plywood), become stout enough to fend off the errant elbow even in 1:1 scale.  

Interestingly - for all the reaching I've done in Three Rocks since installing them, I've almost never actually contacted them, much less hit the flashers.  There's something about their presence that just makes you go carefully around or between them.  Whereas, I mercilessly beat the crap out of the previous unarmored model, QED.

One weakness in the plan, though, is... what are they, actually?  There ought to be poles nearby - I mean, there's a signal line paralleling the tracks, isn't there?  (Out in the aisle)...  And there are probably utility lines crossing the tracks to serve downtown...  But since neither of those installations actually exists, it seemed OK to not affix any specific crossarms to the poles, and just let the viewer's mind figure it out.  To me they look wrong individually... but the scene looks right.

I would love to hear what you all think.  Useful?  Or clumsy-looking?  If you've done switching up at Three Rocks recently, did you notice them?  Did you ever run into them?  And for your own layout, could you envision a similar application?

Thanks for reading, and I'm looking forward to discussion. 

"Say Yer Prayers, Varmint!"

"Git yer flea-bitten carcass off'n my real estate!" - Yosemite Sam

It's a fact of nature that when you live near the forest, you will - at least occasionally - have mice in your house.

Generally the black rat snakes out in the woods do a pretty good job at patrolling the perimeter.  But every now and again, an intruder or several will penetrate that defense, and set up shop in the basement.  Maybe the snakes are on vacation.

This round's first evidence of illicit rodent activity:  a peanut in the trees! 

Right below the precarious deck-girder bridge at LaMont...

"What the...?!"  

Most often they (the mice) raid the stack of scrap wood outside Slim's Cooperage in Three Rocks.  Plus of course some collateral disruption - and yeah, some extra "coal lumps" along the right-of-way.

But most recently, they committed acts of larceny so novel I almost had to admire their resourcefulness, if it weren't so infuriating: 

👉  They destroyed my smoke, man.  👈  

The Basin refinery in St. Amour has a mirror behind it, which doubles its apparent size.  And the mirror has (well, had) cotton smoke plumes concealing the top edge of it.  And these little 𝄳@§+@ℾ𝅘𝅥𝅮$ actually climbed tanks and scaffolds to tear them down, strip them clean, and abscond with the cotton!  

St. Amour residents may be pleased with the pollution abatement - but the owner is not happy.

Note the stripped smoke plume skeletons left dangling from the flare pipe 

and draped across the refinery complex.

There has to be one dang comfy mouse nest around here someplace - that I'm sure I'll discover someday,

when I least expect it.  Thankfully I had plenty more vitamin-jar cotton wads in stock.

With a little encouragement, the cotton wads naturally contribute some great curling and roiling when stretched out, that seems to animate the smoke plumes even though they're standing still.  

Some spray adhesive both attaches the plume to a wire frame, and, 

puts a "set" on it so that it will hold its shape.    

 Add some gentle shots with the flat black - and a whole bunch of fiddling, fussing, and cussing -  

and the James River Basin Petroleum Corp. is back in production, filling all those JBAX tank cars.  

The varmints, for their part, have been forcibly removed.  

Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think!  What have critters done to your layout?  

Notes:

1. For the adhesive, I find the 3M #77 works better for this purpose than the #45.  It's stronger, yes, but what goes with that is that it tends to dry more completely, and loses its "tack", which helps it resist cobwebs, etc., better.
2. The wire is just some #22 hookup, stripped bare.  You're looking for strength enough to give the cotton some spine to suspend the plume, but not so much that you destroy the puffiness trying to adjust the overall shape. 
3. The flare pipe is powered by an Evans Design LED flame module.  They have two styles - the smaller "Fire" version, which I used in the still over in Mineshaft Gap, and the "Flickering Fire" version, which alternately flashes two orange and one red LED.  I chose the latter for the more spirited inferno you expect from a flare pipe, and added another LED to it, too - a slow-flash yellow.  It's a pretty cool effect I have to say - the surging flame combined with the roiling smoke really does make it hard to believe nothing's moving.  But what it does best, though, is totally distract the eye from the fact that there's a giant mirror across the scene.