In the South

[Gary S]

I like what you are doing, Reinhard. The buildings and track look good.

I sure wish I had a 6 month off-period ever summer!

[faraway]

I will give it a try and fulfill my dream of a harbor scene. The new north side shall be inspired by the LA harbor area. I used the building at Miner St. in San Pedro ( http://maps.google.de/maps?q=vernon+cali...2&t=h&z=19 ) as an inspiration. The length of my model is 2 meters (6 1/2'). I built the front in four sections and the assembled it in two units of 1 meter (3 1/4'). The windows are used to control the two trains in the staging strack hidden by the building.
A backdrop of harbor scenery has been ordered ( http://www.modellbahn-hintergrund.de/jowi.pdf ). Nr N130 and N131 will be combined as long as the north wall of my room is (4 meters / 13'). There is one prominent bridge (köhlbrandbrücke, http://www.welt.de/multimedia/archive/00...68454p.jpg) on the backdrop that will identify it as the harbor of Hamburg. However, i will call it San Pedro/Long Beach.



ps. The roof is made of card stock and two solid wood sticks in the back. The card stock in the front was not totally flat so I glued smaller wood sticks under the front to force it in flat shape. I did not use white glue etc. but a glue without any water not bend the wood sticks. That worked fine.
Painting of the two roof units was done this morning on the balcony with a spray can. It is somewhat cold outside. But is worked great. Except.... the small wood sticks in the front soaked the moisture out of the air and bend. Thank you nature to help me to build a roof in wave shape

[Herc Driver]

Great building!!! You've done some really nice work all over that layout.

Any chance we'll see the Queen Mary docked way in the distance?

[Gary S]

Yes, the building does look good. Nice and big.

That company that sells the backdrops sure has a nice variety. There's a few in there that I could make use of!

[tetters]

Wow! That is one loooooong building!

[faraway]

I did not have a solution for the windows last night and left that black holes as is. It was easy, just two little sticks per window changed the appearance very much.
The wood sticks at the front of the roof have been merciful and straightened out in the warmer dryer air in my home office by them self.

[JohnyBotto]

Awesome building and I like the track arraignment. Great work!

[cnw1961]

That’s a very impressive struture! Very well done . Looking forward to seeing it with the new backdrop behind it.

[Russ Bellinis]

Reinhard, Vernon, Ca is about 10 miles from the nearest water. The Google map you linked to is showing San Pedro or Wilmington on the left of the channel and Terminal Island on the right side. The short line serving that area is another of my favorites, the Pacific Harbor Line. Their older equipment was painted in various classic railroad paint schemes. They had two Sd23 or 24 (I don't remember for sure) in the old Santa Fe zebra stripe scheme. They had a low nose Gp9 in S.P. black widow scheme, and an exSP Sd40-2t still in SP bloody nose. A few years ago they received a combined grant from the EPA, the State of California, and the Air Quality Management District (AQMD) to upgrade their locomotive fleet to low emission diesel and gen sets. All of the new equipment is painted in zebra stripe. You can see more pictures of the Pacific Harbor Line or PHL at <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.socalrailfan.com">http://www.socalrailfan.com</a><!-- m -->

By the way, the LAJ is entirely contained within the City of Commerce and Vernon, with a little bit in Cudahy and I think a corner of Lynwood or Bell. The interchange to the outside world consists of a single track connecting the A & B yards to the U.P. Washington Street yard and the BNSF Hobart Yard across Washington Blvd from the UP Yard.

[faraway]

Reinhard, Vernon, Ca is about 10 miles from the nearest water.....

Russ, I know and you are very right. May be you remember my long time hidden dream of some kind of a harbor. That was a dream only with no idea how to realize.
Now two events happened at the same time. Atlas made the Genset in PHL colors available and I started to build scenery on the opposite wall of the room. It was only a small step to "declare" the north side of my room 10 (scale) miles away from the south side...at least it is all in the LA area. I try not to run PHL engines on the south side(old part) and no LAJ engines on the north side (new part). Transfers are done by BNSF and UP engines.
I know I did a step from a prototype oriented layout to a fiction toy layout but I am happy with it... sorry for that

[faraway]

I have got two questions related to the PHL and the LA basin in general

1. I can not find any photos or clips on youtube where PHL has more then one engine. Are all the moves in the harbor so very well balanced one engine can do it alone? I did also understand that the Genset has "some" reliability problems. Looks like that is another reason why e.g. all UP Genset are mostly running togeter with some other engine. May be the distances PHL serves are so short they may bring in an replacement within five minutes?

2. The PHL engines look an all photos like fresh out of the car wash. I see southern California is not famous for rain and mud but I expect lots of dust in that area. Black engines and dust should be very well visible on all kind of pictures. The "dirt" is some dust on the trucks. How come? Are black automobiles also so clean (but hot) in LA?

ps. PHL engines in ATSF zebra black are real beauties. The first engine my wifes likes too!

[Russ Bellinis]

PHL has a bunch of engines. They used to have 6 or 8 Sw7s (I think they were 7's) painted in a light blue very similar to Conrail blue. They were left over from the previous owner of the line when it was the Harbor Belt Line. The line was bought by a new owner who is a railfan, and likes the classic liveries. In addition to the Sw units, they had 1 Gp9 in black widow, 1 or 2 of the Sd23 or 24 units in zebra stripe, 1 Sd40-2t in bloody nose, there was also a unit with a high short hood in a bright red and black scheme from an East Coast road.

I just looked on the So Cal Railfan Forums board, but all of the attached thumb nails have been removed from the posts. I looked up Chris Walker's photo gallery on the site, but all he has up now is pics of U.P.

There was a post that I made asking about PHL #60 because I was expecting everything to look like Gen Sets, but #60 looks kind of like an Sd40-2 with the long "back porch." Dave Toussaint, the owner of the So Cal Railfan Forums board had received a letter from Andrew Fox, president of PHL, concerning the new units that PHL is receiving. It was contained in the post I made which is on the second page of the shortline subforum titled "Curious about PHL #60." In the letter written early in 2007, Mr Fox, said that they were expecting to receive 16 EPA tier 2 emission-compliant units from Motive Power Inc in Boise, Idaho. 14 of the units would be 6 axle 2000 hp units, and other 2 would be 4 axle 2000 hp units. In addition they were also receiving 3 Gen Sets. So at that time the planned total would be 19 units. I don't know if they have received additional units, or not since then. The plan was to retire an old unit each time a new one was delivered. I believe the 6 axle units all look like #60 and #61. I have never seen pics of the 4 axle units. There are also pictures of one of the Gen Sets on the site. I think a reasonable model of #60 or #61 could be kit bashed from an Athearn Sd40-2. The biggest spotting difference that I see is the short nose and lack of a "front porch." I think a shorter Sd40 or Sd38 frame would probably be correct, with the front end shortened from the Sd40-2 to fit. It looks like it only has the 3 radiator fans on the back of the long hood, no other fans, and obviously no dynamic brakes, since the PHL is located only in LA Harbor, and there are no grades. They get between Los Angeles Hartbor and Long Beach Harbor by going around through Wilmington and they get onto and off of Terminal Island by a draw bridge.

I think the PHL handles mostly non-intermodal traffic. Many of the larger intermodal terminals have tracks right on the terminal and load out containers right off of the ships, and receive containers to go to the ships directly off the rails. Those terminals that don't have rail connections on terminal, truck the containers to the LCTF rail yard adjacent to the U.P. Delores Yard yard in Wilmington.

I think PHL regularly washes their locomotives, and all of them were replace since 2007 presuming that they received the entire order by now. They don't go through any tunnels, and they probably don't run much faster than the LAJ because they snake around the harbor and through blind curves between container yards and buidings with limited visibility. I suspect that at the low speeds they operate, they don't kick up a lot of dust. I don't know how to post links in Firefox, so I will go to internet Explorer and post links to the pics that I have found to this post using the edit button.

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[Brakie]

Reinhard,Super nice looking buildings..Two thumbs up!

[faraway]

Russ, PHL got four four axis Genset (30, 31, 33, 34). They are NRE scratch build new. Atlas shipped that model about two weeks ago. I got some of them. PHL has also two six axis Genset (80, 81). They are based on some SD engines. No model available.
PHL got also a bunch (14, #60 up to #73) of SD-40 "look alike" MP20C-3. Athearn offers SD40 in PHL color ( http://www.athearn.com/Products/Default....D=ATH89866 ) without the changes. I got one last week and put it on a Kato drive and corrected the roof (no turbo but two pipes as stack). A second one is on order and will get the other Kato drive I have in the cabinet. This is the site of the builder http://www.motivepower-wabtec.com/locomo...tchers.php



This page ( http://www.greenrailnews.com/owners/phl.html ) is very helpful for PHL because all engines are somehow green today. The MP20C-3 is not fully accepted as "green" is have only low emission.
It is very interesting to read through various forums and see the reactions. The general opinion is very critical. Without a huge public sponsoring they would not exit. The west coast rail forum has very good photos of the PHL mostly taken by Chris (as well as all his LAJ photos). I got most of his photos and use them as dynamic changing background and screen saver. Right now #66 is the background to be random changed every 5 minutes:-)

btw. Do you know where to find the PHL engine yard? It is on several photos but I can not find it with Google and Bing.

[FCIN]

faraway;

Here's a link to a RailPictures.Net search for photos of PHL locomotives that you may find of interest (if you haven't already done this). http://www.railpictures.net/showphotos.p...bor%20Line Lot's of interesting equipment. I could learn to like that black/white paint scheme myself. A bit more interesting than the b/w NS stuff I see all the time.