Layout Tours: Reno 2009

Reno Layout Tours 2009:

 

Happening Friday through Sunday this week around Reno/Sparks/Carson City in Nevada, the 2009 layout tours sponsored by High Sierra Hobbies, could not have had a better fall weekend.  Crisp weather in the 60’s, sun, and lots of model railroad fans out to see the layouts and have fun.

 

Living more than 100 miles from Reno, going to all 3 days was not in the cards.  However, a friend and I did drive up to Reno on Saturday to see layouts, and we managed to fit visits to 6 layouts in.  While I’ll cover each one in separate posts as I go through my photos, I thought I’d share with you one thing from each layout that I liked and intend to incorporate into my own layout.  You’ll remember, I’m just in the early stages of construction, so doing this kind of idea-borrowing is important now.

 

First was a visit to a massive layout under construction by Jim Price.  This massive layout will eventually depict the Southern Pacific from Oakland, CA to Reno, NV.  At the moment, the Oakland area is nearing completion.  Jim and his wife actually live ABOVE the layout.  (I tried, but my wife wouldn’t go for the same idea).  While Jim’s layout is massive, and early in construction, there was still something to learn here.  The picture is of a portable programming track, on top of a case.  There are plugs on one end to attach to a computer running decoder pro.  This setup allows Jim and his crew the ability to program any locomotive, anywhere, anytime, and not have to include a dedicated programming track.  On a small layout, or even on a layout like mine where locomotives will be all over, this idea is something I can see myself borrowing and using.

 

Next, we visited the outdoor layout of Fred Twigge.  This G scale layout is complete and running.  It is a beautiful example of G scale garden railroading, and it is built to do what I feel G scale layouts do best… run.  A three times around design with only two turnouts on the whole layout, makes the need for turnout maintenance minimal.  What could an HO scaler learn from a G scaler?  I learned an important lesson in display of a layout.  You need to have your most reliable locomotive on the track, tested, running, and ready to roll before you open for tours.  While we visited, Fred had to troubleshoot a new locomotive that was going to break in that day.  While he got it running, it showed me again the need for reliable motive power.

 

Now later in the day, more layouts were opening.  Our next stop was Kevin Caldwell’s N scale layout depicting Southern Pacific (and adjacent railroads) in 1984.  This bedroom sized N scale layout is quite well done.  In the middle stages of scenery construction, the code 55 track is beautifully installed.  I was impressed with long run that Kevin managed to get for his trains in a 10×10 bedroom.  The thing I’ll take away from this layout to use myself is the high standards set for the rolling stock.  Kevin has made incredible progress on his layout, and it is noticeable that no freight equipment hits the layout without being properly weathered to his standards.

 

Before lunch, we stopped at Jim Petro’s for a visit to the D&RGW Joint Line.  I’ll have a detailed report on this beautiful layout another day, but Jim has done something that I found amazing with his turnout controls.  As you walk along the layout, the controls are all recessed into the facia of the layout.  This method of installation makes it possible for controls in tight spots to avoid being snagged on clothing of operators.  That is something I will be using on my own layout.

 

After lunch, we visited Charley Lix and his atic-located harbor terminal.  Showing that you can build a railroad in just about any space you have, Charley’s layout demonstrated to me that my plan to have the bottom deck of my 3 deck layout sit at about 30″ from the floor will work as operators sit in chairs.

 

The last visit of the day was to the layout built by three persons in the Kuczynski family.  This nicely sceniced 13×15 layout located in the garage was a great way to cap the day.  The scenery on this layout, done with plaster cloth over packing peanuts, is simply amazing.  It captures the look of the area around Tehachapi that they had hoped to capture.  My learning experience here was the recipe for the rolling hills.  Needing some of that myself, we’ll look at the technique later in a trial I’m planning to do for my own layout.

 

Most of these layouts, and many of the ones I didn’t get to see, will be open for the NMRA Pacific Coast Region convention in Sparks for 2010.  I hope to make return visits and see the progress everyone has made!

 

-Jeremy

Layout Tour: Hidden Lionel Empire

Okay, who says a layout has to be accessed through a boring old door? How about searching for a rectangular portion of carpet, and uncovering a HIDDEN trap door to a magical LIONEL empire!

I witnessed just that, and I was impressed.

Through the trapdoor at the foot of his youngest sons’ bed one of my friends has built an impressive empire, hidden away to all; except the invited. After descending a ladder, you are sitting in the middle of an around-the-walls three-rail O scale mainline operation. At least 4 mainlines and plenty of secondary trackage weave their way around the nicely sized room carved into the hillside below his home.

He prides himself on collecting a vast majority of very rare LIONEL post-war equipment, like the SOO and Monon boxcars that were very realistic in appearance, but poor sellers thanks to their normal boxcar red color. Plenty of flawlessly operating 2-8-4’s, 4-6-4’s and first generation diesels ply the racetrack, the smell of ozone quickly fills the room as 3-5 trains loop around the layout creating the deafening roar of steel wheels on steel rail.

The layout itself was based on a childhood memory of a friend of his. One of the richer kids on his block when growing up had the same fantastic set up, albeit a bit more crude. You entered through the middle of the kitchen floor, into a recently excavated series of tables dug out beneath his friend’s house. The memory stuck after all these years, and now the finished product is quite spectacular.

Plenty of operating accessories and other authentic and original postwar accessories dot the unscenicked layout. When asked about the scenery, he suggested that it’s perhaps more authentic scenery for a LIONEL layout to be on bare plywood than be dressed up with all sorts of scenery. After seeing this layout, I’m definitely inclined to agree, it’s playing with toy trains at its Zenith!

The Beauty of O Scale Brass.

I thought I’d share some astoundly painted, superdetailed and weathered steam locomotives owned by a gentleman located in the south bay area.

I would love to revisit his layout and perhaps cover it in a full article here at some point, can you identify the man behind this layout? (E-mail me with the details, I lost his card accidentally a couple of months back.)

SVLS Spring Meet 2009

From 5/16/09 – 5/17/09 RailfanHunter’s club, the Sacramento Valley Live Steamers (SVLS, had the annual spring meet. This year was one of the rare occasions that the steam locomotives actually outnumbered the diesels! I also had my first steam locomotive operating experience when I got to opertate a 9-car Southern Pacific Daylight consist. I spent most of my time operating the club’s SW1500, it is my favorite locomotive on the club’s roster. I would say I spent a good 6 hours operating the SW1500, over the 2-day period. Of course you still need time to BS with the other guys, and I did that too. one of the funnest things that I have ever done at the club also occured during this meet, when I and three other people operated a 26-car train, and each of us worked a different part of it. I got to work the end of the train. When almost everybody went home, I had the task of collecting all of the club owned freight cars, and switched tham back into storage.

All and all it was a very fun weekend, and I can’t wait for the fall meet.

Model What Used to Be: Abandoned Trackage.

Since the beginning of the railroads not every commercial venture between two steel rails has always worked out for the better. There are over 10,000 miles of abandoned right of way in the US alone, probably much more if you count yards, sidings and industrial spurs.

Often, abandoned right of ways tell almost, if not more of a story then the active lines you’d model on your railroad. Most times bridges were left in place, signals still standing (some still operating years after the track has been abandoned!) Of course embankments, ballast and the right of way itself will remain until redevelopment or nature destroys it.

Railroads merge and traffic dries up, creating duplicate routes and usually the one that’s costlier to maintain is abandoned. Case and point would be the Southern Pacific’s Altamont Pass line. It was steeper in grade and featured sharper curves to the rival Western Pacific mainline just across Alameda Creek. Rails were removed in the 1980’s when much of the traffic along the line had disappeared, and what was left was easily served by the WP mainline (namely the Kaiser Gravel Plant at Radum, between Livermore & Pleasanton, Calif.)

The mess of industrial trackage that can still be found in most American cities that experienced industrial growth before 1940 is another interesting example. Really tight curves, crossovers, diamonds, double slip switches and small yards would be utilized to efficiently serve the major industries of the day. Often the buildings were built with the curvature of the railroad tracks in mind, as were fence and property lines. One can trace former industrial trackage without great difficulty as long as it hasn’t been completely redeveloped. Many older industries simply left the trackage in place and removed their mainline connection (usually a switch) sometimes they would have a few obsolete railroad cars delivered before this would happen to be turned into storage.

When railroads fail completely, due to lack of traffic or commercial business reasons, the right of way is either left to rust or ripped up. All infrastructure except for ballast is sold off and the grade is left to nature. Most often when this happens, especially if it’s in a scenic location near affluent residencies, a “rails to trails” program is started, which usually paves the right of way with a bike path. The Southern Pacific’s San Ramon Branch is an excellent example of this, as is the Northwestern Pacific’s line to Tiburon. It would be interesting to model a little paved pathway with bikers and joggers with evidence that tracks once existed there.

Disasters can also cause a line to be abandoned. The Eel river plagued operations on the NorthWestern Pacific railroad up in Norther California’s Redwood Empire. The river would rise more than 40 feet, washing out bridges, flooding tunnels, destroying buildings and eroding embankments. Eventually the line was so unprofitable that it was abandoned. Plenty of other hard-to-maintain railroad lines have had their rails pulled up.

Here’s some excellent examples of abandoned trackage:

Layout Tour: Westside Lumber Company in Sn3

Tucked away in a corner of Ed Loiseaux’s spectacular New York Central Valley Division is a rather anomolous addition: A taste of the Westside Lumber Company of Sonora, Calif. It’s a fairly generic depection of a lumber mill scene using some amazing scratchbuilding skills to create a believable Lumber mill. Around the sawmill structure is a plethorea of scratchbuilt auxiliary buildings and platforms.

A closer view of the lumber mill reveals interesting details. A brass Sn3 DRGW switcher works the plant.

It all starts up at the lumber camp high in the mountains where flatcars and logging skeleton cars are loaded with lumber…

They Travel to the sawmill’s log pond and are dumped into the pond with a spectacular splash!

The lumber is cut to size at the mill, then taken a short distance via flatcar to the transloading dock, which loads the lumber onto standard gauge flatcars which are pushed to the local interchange by a Heisler geared steamer.

Layout Tour: The O Scale Tall Pine Timber Co.

The Tall Pine Timber Company is a good example of what type of O scale layout you can have in a typical 1950’s tract home garage. (about 1.5 car garage) Despite 2-Rail O scale models’ firm status as the #5 modeling scale, behind HO, N, G, O 3-Rail, and maybe even On3, there are a good amount of available cars and locomotives to help the modeler build the layout that he’s always wanted.

The TPTCo. occupies what seems to be a 20X25 foot space and features a double-track mainline of 2-rail O scale and features an On3 point-to-point operation above the mainline on a ridge. A modest yard is located on either side of the layout with a town between the yards on a ridge, which is served by the On3 branchline. The layout is basically an around-the-walls “doughnut” which maximized the mainline run and also provided for gentler curves for the large Southern Pacific Mt-4 4-8-2’s that he likes to run.

What stands out most in the TPTCo. is the collection of rolling stock. An excellently detailed and weathered collection of 1940-1965 era equipment can be found on the layout, each beautifully weathered an nicely detailed. All the gondolas seemed to have really nice loads, and there was a surprise to be found in each boxcar which had an open door.

It seems like working on rolling stock is this modeler’s favorite activity, as you can find many examples of highly detailed Maintenence of Way equipment, (like this gray drovers’ caboose above) A large collection of MOW flats and gondolas literally covered in people occupies both medium sized yards on either wall.

The people were EVERYWHERE, it was an impressive collection of figures doing all sorts of things. From the requisite Woodland Scenics’ characters to other brands, you could see just about anything. Mules, Hoboes, Businessmen, Workmen, Ladies, Children and more. It was almost to the point of overpopulation, in some areas, which is rare for a layout of any scale.

Alot of detail was poured into every scene and the layout (to me) looks like it’d be located in the foothills of the Sierra Mountain range. Snowsheds, a rarely modeled feature, were present along with the normal “frontier town” scenes and a few other interesting points of interest.

Overall, very competent modeling and exceptionally detailed rolling stock made the layout enjoyable. The trackwork and ballasting were also superb and the modeler’s eye for interesting scenes that only figures could tell really brought much of his layout to life.

In addition, he really had a good sense of era, with plenty of vintage vehicles, period clothing and advertisements, and even “way of life” details, like this chicken coop behind a house with a victorian-era screen door used to keep the chickens from escaping.

Despite these great details, the rockwork was rather cartoony, with sheer 100+ foot cliffs making a “box canyon” out of much of the layout. The On3 line seems like an afterthought to me and visually disects the layout (which is a positive thing) I think the layout could have benefitted from nicely painted backdrops instead of the cliffs. Also, alot of the non-cliff rock work was incredibly steep, it created “mini-mesas” which gave a blocky shape to much of the scenery, some gradual slopes would have broken up this nicely and somewhat easily. Some bridges did look overbuilt, but that’s ok, they looked good. The overpopulated layout flooded with people seemed a bit improbable in spots, with railroad workers covering the decks of flatcars and freight depot platforms.

Overall, it’s a pretty impressive layout and it makes a great place to hang out on a warm summer day, that’s for sure! The hospitality of the hosts was second-to-none, I can’t thank them enough for an enjoyable visit.

Layout Tour: S Scale Masterpiece

The work of a dedicated group of modelers working closely together to build one layout can either fail miserably, or be a breathtaking success. Ed Loiseaux’s spectacular New York Central Valley Division is certianly the latter. Tucked away in the hills south of San Francissco, Ed’s S scale layout is located in an unobstructed 20X30 foot room in his home. You have to cross a japanese looking water feature on stepping stones to reach his layout, then dive under a duckunder to then be surrounded by the magnificence of S scale.

The small group of modelers that work on Ed’s layout have created a wide variety of scenes. He has not only a great depiction of Upstate new york, but a sizeable corner of his layout has an S scale version of the Westside Lumber Company in there for variety. His backdrops are painted by a local professional backdrop painter who has done quite a few local model railroad backdrops. The seamless quality from the front of the layout to the painted backdrops really give the illusion of depth and don’t break your sense of modeled reality that bare or cluttered walls give you.

Each industry on the layout is well planned and executed. There is an oil refinery in one corner, on the opposite side of the room is a large coal mine, with the Lumber mill and Waterfall/Dam Scene occupying the other two corners. He is one of the few modelers who actually (and realistically) decided to model a dam, and it’s quite spectacular!

The rock work and scenery all across the layout was done with extreme care and attention to detail, period detais from the 1940’s abound with not only period vehicles, but street signs, industrial details, and of course an impeccable roster of postwar equipment.

It seems like the roster comprises a good mix of plastic kits and brass locomotives, although I’m not entirely sure. Almost all of his freight cars are nicely detailed and some are lightly weathered.

His depot structures are centerpiece scenes anchoring the middle of each part of the layout.

When the lights dim for night operation another world unfolds full of neon signs and lighted structures..

A Superdetailed N Scale Layout

At a recent train show I met an excellent modeler, who built everything you see here. He has an amazing eye for detail, and isn’t afraid to kitbash even the most expensive brass locomotive into just what he’s looking for. Gutting Atlas geeps, Intermountain tunnel motors (EMD SD40T-2’s) and completely redetailing them part by part into something really exceptional is his typical way to model. His layout is well-researched and constructed. Although the scenery isn’t completely finished he can teach the average modeler alot about the necessity of important details. He says that “the trick isn’t to put every detail found on the prototype, but certianly enough to make the model unique and recognizable to anyone who might have seen one in person.”

Not only does he kitbash diesels, he also scratchbuilt accurate telephone and electric poles to serve the roundhouse properly. All the vehicles adhere to a late 1980’s time frame and check out some of the smaller details he’s added to the scene.

Here’s a collection of some of his projects, some finished, some in progress. Each has been disassembled and reassembled to ensure that the major modifications would fit just right. On the right, shop trucks were scratchbuilt for when a locomotive’s trucks are removed and the frame needs to move to another portion of the shop. The oil-stained concrete is always a good touch.

A heavily kitbashed Southern Pacific rebuilt GP9E rounds the curve with a loaded ballast hopper.

The locomotives are serviced out back on the garden tracks. the Pit was made just like the real thing, with board-formed concrete.

Another fascination of his is Maintenence of Way equipment, and most of his fleet is scratchbuilt or heavily kitbashed using photographs of ATSF and SP subjects as important reference.

GHQ kits are also a sub-hobby of his, he builds them with all the movable joints and even modifies them as-needed to make them fully posable. N scale vehicle modeling is a pretty exact hobby, and it looks quite impressive when done well.

Sacramento Valley Live Steamers Public Run 3/15/09

On Sunday, the Sacramento Valley Live Steamers (SVLS) ran their 2nd public run for the 2009 season. Our club steam locomotive has been down for several months now, and probably won’t return to service for a while because it needs a new boiler. I had the chance to operate three locomotives, SLVS’ own RS-3, and their GP40, and a fellow members’ GP9. An interesting note about the GP40, although the locomotive as built is a GP40, its number is in the Union Pacific’s GP38 numbering system. Two members brought their private trains, and I ran one of them, a Western Pacific GP9. I spent most of the morning pulling weeds on a few sidings, and that took about and hour and a half, I had 2 1/2 buckets worth of weeds when I was done. We also talked about reballasting a few tracks, which will probably be done on the next work day. All and all it was a good day, I look forward to the next.