Canadian Rocky Mountains

[Wiredup]

I havent' done a lot of work on the layout so far this fall/winter because the budget has gotten a whole lot tighter all of a sudden... so this week I started looking at ways to work on the layout without going out and grabbing more stuff I can't afford.

The first area I worked on is what will become the main yard. I have a few new ideas for this section and have started to apply them.

The first is that, against my better judgement, I'll be taking the inner track of the double tracked truss and running it around the loop and into the yard. This is an absurd idea that may become a bit of a headache when a passenger train may use this inner track as it's going to be a 11" radius curve. But it will add to operations.

I also have successfully joined the yard to the northern approach to the terminal. This does create a wye that should become useful... yet I still have to figure out how to turn whole trains on this trackplan... i have one reversing section, but it's only accessible from one direction... which sucks...minor design flaw eh?

Anyways, heres some photos of the yard in planning:



This is taken from the walk in, and also before my plan to attach the inner track of the truss to the yard. I plan to put a carshop where the dayton machine co. is located right now. 3 bays, but only 2 will be tracked, the other one will be vehicle access. I've been inspired to add this building thanks to Mike Fifer. An interesting idea, but something I have to research to see if it sexists anywhere, would be to have one of the bays pass through to the track that leads to the truss....



The yard will be sitting on Woodland Scenics n scale roadbed. Instead of buying a pad, I just used left overs from my last flextrack layout attempt and alternated between having them upside down and right side up, butting the beveled edges against each other, for the base of the yard. It levels out nicely with the unitrack allowing a steady transition. Right now nothing is glued down, it's all tacked down instead... I should have glued it down when laying it all out, but didn't want to in case of a mistake... what I'm planning to do is just layout and tack down all the track and the foam and then ballast the whole area and use the ballast to keep it all down.



Now this is where I became overjoyed that I decided to use sectional/flex for my yard again. the main yard lead...which at this point is a bunch of turnouts with a 2ft length of flex track will run through the coaling tower as seen in the above photo, and then will continue on to the wye or to the mainline shown in the first photo. The trick was that I used a combination of peco #6, #4, and curved turnouts to make this area work. I even put in a small 45 degree junction. This will make it easy for a switcher to spot coal cars for the tower.


It was then time to start work on the other town.



I partially built a few of the DPM kits included with the big box of buildings in the woodland scenics town kit. But only a few... I really hate these kits... i do... their tedious to build, and I don't like how I gotta cut my own roofs and glazings... it's fine, really, it's just a royal pain.



Anyways, I put a few together so I could start planning out the town. As you can see in the above photo there is a siding that runs between the buildings on main-street and the passenger station. The large building on the end is a factory of some kind. The track will continue on and into the dayton machine co. which will be relocated to this side of the layout.

I also played around with placing some of my old starter set rolling stock as makeshift gas and storage structures... will have to do some incredibly heavy weathering to these.



And this is the view from the front of the street so far... it's only structure placement to get an idea, but so far I'm liking how this concept is working out! The two buildings on the right are Walthers structures.

So thats all for now... I'm in need of some more unitrack, some peco turnouts, and some more roadbed before I can really get any further in these areas... the next step is to start carving some scenery using leftover pink foam!