Southern Pacific's Jefferson Branch

[ratled]

@ Charlie - So glad it helped someone!   I have had them for about a year now (my layout is about a year old now, I'm just bringing the blog here up to date) and still love em as much as  I did back on day 1.   All the pictures are from layout and room lighting only without a flash on a Iphone 10.  Once you get them in give them a couple of days so you can get use to them before making any decisions.   One tip for anyone who uses these lights, the little clips are a little fragile.  They go in fine and stay up fine but be careful if you want to relocate them or even unclip the light from them

The yard track is in!

First a quick follow up on the lights. I'm still really liking these things and they are the final lighting choice. Anyone looking for under mount lighting really should consider giving these a look.

The Humboldt yard is complete! Well, the main yard part anyway, the service tracks still need to go in but I have to figure out the route from the yard over to Jefferson to see how the service area will fit in. All of the feeder wires are also in and ready to hook up to the bus.

I spent a a day or so just playing with the final track configuration and tweaking it as I went. I didn't mention it back in the layout philosophies but I really don't like a bunch of crammed in track packed in one area. I really like how it came out both in looks and function.



From left to right-
The switch back from the service area to the yard. I'm not a big fan of switch backs but it had to be. The tail end will serve has the ready track for water cars that have been serviced and are good to go.

The next three tracks are the classification tracks.  The longest will hold about 10 cars of mixed 50'/60' cars

AD-1 which will also serve as on line staging – anything coming in from the rest of the world will get set out here.

The main. Only the main will be elevated with the standard Midwest cork.

AD-2 – Originally planned to be stub end visible staging but I went the double ended route. It only makes sense as it improves it from an operational standpoint and I think it looks better overall. While it can be used as visible staging I see it being the terminus for trains coming from Jefferson and Siskiyou. It's better operationally in that cars that are outbound for the rest of the world are out of the way and cars to be sorted in the yard don't have to cross over the main to get the classification tracks.

The RIP track is a stub track off the far end of AD-2.

The yard run around track is also in and will not only serve as the run around but it will be where returning water cars are set out to be serviced. There will be a water column there to service these. Fouling the run around should encourage the ground crews to service the water cars quickly so the yard switcher can push them to the water car ready track.

Noticeably absent is a yard lead. It just wasn't going to fit in a practical manner. Given the size of the yard and the traffic on the line I don't think this will be an issue. It is my understanding that this is not an uncommon proto practice for yards this size/traffic anyways.

OriginallyAD-1 was supposed to be the only double ended track in the yard. The idea was there would bit of main would serve as the escape track for AD-1 and it would flipped up & down as needed. Looking at it this evening I was thinking of putting another little extension off the end so it would be up all of the time. I went ahead and mocked it up but was concerned that it would look out of place.


I remembered a picture I took some years ago of a SP tunnel and thinking that could make nice little scene out this section and would represent “the rest of the world” while providing a an escape track for the AD-1 & AD-2.





Next up is giving the yard a good vacuuming and wiping down all the rail with some MEK in preparation to getting it wired in to the bus and running trains. I'm going to start putting in the bus and 1156 bulbs short districts to get things started. I'm really looking forward to get my original Zephyr up and running. I decided to give the Digitrax wireless interface a try so I can use smartphone throttles instead of buying several more throttles.  (NOTE: as of 12/15/2020 I am no longer using the Digitrax LNWI as it failed me too many times but I am using wifi and phone throttles still… very happily)