New plans

What you see here (why the hell is it typing a link?)

is the original track plan for my Great Falls layout... but I started to grow unhappy with it and stopped liking the operational abilities of it... so it's time to move on.

That and I convinced the wife to let me take the door off the room, so that gives me a few more square feet of construction room! :)











The new plan... wtf?

is what you see here...

it's a double decker, with the first image being the top layer. Think of this as a scenic run along the Pacific Ocean coming outa the rocky mountains...

So the track won't be as straight as you see it, but will curve along the beach front. Should be a really cool scene!




....


And this is the bottom section. Terminal is as constructed so far... I can't really change it now... but the rest is all new! The lower left section is a return loop as this layout is now a point to point style with two terminals. There will be a small lumber yard inside the loop.

The other side of the layout is a nice branch line with the mainline run. The mainline will actually pass underneath the branchline into the helix which will take the train up 16 inches to the top layer.

I'm pretty excited about this... not only should it be 100x easier to construct that of the first plan, but it should also be more entertaining to operate. Sure it does not have a few of the things I wanted to incorperate... but thats compromise I guess...

Canadian National Mountain U-1-F Class

Conversion of my Bachmann Light Mountain locomotive with vandy tender has started.

First things first, I believe the color is off... True Line Trains Olive is the color I used here...which should be correct but does not seem to be bright enough. So I'll be checking into that PDQ.

The other issue I'm having is that the tender is FRAKING HUGE compared to the prototype... and will be a royal pain in the ass to shorten to the proper size. But that's okay. I'm building this for me. :)

The side rails are made from ting styrene, as is the backing for the cab... which is not completed yet.

But for a first attempt at kitbashing I'm actually quite pleased with my progress. It was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. The cone is the next step...which I still don't know what I'm gonna do...

Picture time

So the first thing I did was print off my terminal's trackplan from Winrail9 and lay it out on the foam to make sure the measurements worked. And for the most part all is well... but how to transfer the track



That part was easy! but tedious and took a few hours thats for sure. What I did was cut out the track plan and tack it down on the foam. I then bought some nice water based laytex paint (can't remember the color... it's like Birds-nest by CEL or something like that) and painted the whole thing.... the idea is that I'm using the track plan as a stencil so that I'll know where everything goes!


As the paint dried I took out some woodland scenics fine blended turf and fine black turf and sprinkled it over the layout in the areas I wanted it in. After I got the general coverage I wanted from the two colors I took the greenery and sprinkled it over the black turf to simulate grass poking through. I'm pretty happy with the results!


The next step will be to cut a hole for my turntable and assemble that part of the layout!

It's been a while

Since I was notified by my wife that we'd be moving the old Great Falls layout has been dismantled... and as of Nov 1 2008 we have taken possession of our new place, and I staked my political claim to bedroom to be used for the Great Falls Layout... owned and operated by the Pacific South Eastern Railway.

There has been quite a bit of construction going on... lets take a look.

The first image I'd like to share is the layout to the left... the original plan for this room. It's changing quite drastically the more and more I work on the new layout as ideas keep popping into my head on how to make this layout better.


The first major change was to the terminal section:


Kinda a blurry pic... sorry. But as you can kinda see I just moved the freight yard forward and put the passenger terminal farther back. This allows easier construction and reaches for me when it comes to build and operate.

speaking of building...

The benchwork has been started... and finished for the terminal section only... which is all the treasury has for funding at the moment... BUT
I'll let the rest of the pics tell the story... in the next post.