09-23-2011, 01:18 PM
Mr Fixit Wrote:Re; Mountain Man's comments about a Russian Narrow Guage Millitary railroad to a fort.
Carl Arendt's website had a feature about a now disused Soviet era secret submarine base built into the cliffs and hills of one of the former Soviet States. The facility was more like a James Bond movie 'bad guy hideout' complete with blast proof doors for the subs to transit through, a canal in the mountain leading to a submarine base like what the Nazis built on the coast of Occupied France, except it was all underground and totally Top Secret.
The narrow guage railway ran through the tunnel system with blast proof doors at strategic locations, car sized turntables, and some points. There were no photos of the railway equipment, but narrow guage battery powered mining engines and a range of flat cars to handle torpedos, gondolas for munitions, flat cars with lead lined containers for nuclear materials and waste, food stores, general stores, rubbish, building materials and waste, personnel, water and sanitation requirements, and medical requirements, medical waste plus possibly sick people due to radiation sickness, machinery. Basically everything you might possibly need to run a Top Secret Submarine Base underground inside a mountain.
Remember even though service personel are cleared for service in the facility, security demands [and Soviet paranoia] meant that things had to be kept secret even there.
One other good thing about such a layout is that as long as you use logic and common sense in organising the facility, nitpickers and rivet counters cant be critical as most have never served/never will and haveno idea what would look right.
Mark
That would make a terrific layout, inside a mountain designed to be removed in layers order to view the inner workings.
I suspect I will end up building a small gauge fortress railroad sometime in the future, since the animations would be great to do.