January Railroad Activites

I've been working on the layout for 10 months now. I really need to finish the Walthers 90' turntable so I can finish the engine tracks. Then they can get painted and ballasted. The turntable pit was installed in the first month of construction. The fact that I have neglected it this long is appalling. But, so many other cool things have been worthy of my time and energy. The Anycubic resin 3D printer has paid for itself twice over. Things that I would never have been able to scratchbuild are already on the layout. A recent undertaking (as in 3 days ago!) is a proto-load that I've always wanted, but never honestly thought would become reality.

The Christmas season did not slow me down. Besides spending plenty of time with my family, friends, and working a little OT, opportunities presented themselves to engage several railroad activities.

Work has been moving along swiftly on the St. Marshall Sub. My oldest daughter enjoys arts & crafts. While she's not really interested in trains, her talents with scenery are natural (pun intended). So there is a section that she has been completing herself.

Half the layout has ballast. The river scene is nearly complete, with trees, signals, and details in place. The other half is a catch-all for tools, parts, and general clutter. That seems to happen to any layout on bare plywood spots!

Walthers had on sale these 60ft PS flatcars. While not an exact match for what UP uses on their continuous welded rail trains, once painted and detailed it'll pass inspection from all but the most hard-core rivet counters. The finger racks came off the printer about an hour ago and are drying as I type this. For rail, I'll use 80-thousands Evergreen I-beam. These come in 14" strips; I'll glue and splice them into 8ft long runs. My train will be a selectively compressed representation of a modern CWR shuttle. These generally don't have the unloader with them. Just the flatcars, and a couple of buffer cars at each end. They load up at the UP welded rail facility, head out across the system to a work site, hook up to the unloader, drop their load, and head back for another load.

This will be my first attempt at building such a train. I've spent several days researching how others have built trains like this. I looked at photos and videos on the internet, then designed a 3D file in TinkerCAD for the "finger racks", the supports on each car that hold the rail in place. CWR in real life is about 1,300ft long. This would be 15ft in HO scale. My layout isn't nearly that big to handle something that long. For that reason, I'll model a compressed representation of the prototype. I purchased 13 cars from Walthers, each a scale 60ft. That is almost 10ft over the couplers, so I will make the plastic I-beam rail about 9ft. It'll get glued to a center rack in the middle of the train, but won't be attached to the finger racks. This way the rails can slide as the train goes around curves. My biggest concern is the rails won't be flexible enough, and the cars will derail on curves. I will test this thoroughly as the project moves forward. If it's too much trouble, then I may just run the train empty. Hey, the prototype gets unloaded eventually!

Another 3D project I've been working on is a stand-up Crown RM forklift. We use these in the warehouse where I work. On the layout, I will have a small warehouse for Brenntag Chemical to blend and fill IBC totes, before loading on semi trucks. The test print came out pretty good. I just need to tweak the design a little and print several out for me and my friends.

My friend and I had some deliveries to make around Southern Illinois this week, and even though it was 1 degree during the day (yes, you read that correctly), the sun was perfect and we caught a southbound empty autorack train on CN's Centralia Sub. It had a solo UP AC44CW leader, and tackled Cobden hill like a champ! I love GE's, but I really love GE's chugging their guts out!

Lastly, I had the opportunity to attend an Op Session near Indianapolis, IN early in January. The layout is NYC transition era in HO scale. The layout owner, John, was a gracious host, and had a beautiful layout. I took my GoPro along, and I'm working through the footage now. Hopefully it will be done before the end of the month. He has a nice layout design. I did a full walk-thru in the video, and hope it can inspire those who are able to watch it!