Week 3 and 4 construction progress report

Progress in the last couple of weeks has been slow due to needing to wait for various mail ordered kits and parts.

I glued 3/4" foam to the top of the benchwork.

I ran an operating session on the temporarily connected track to figure out if the layout would support a 5 car freight train and a short passenger train at the same time.  The idea is that the freight train comes into town in the morning and starts switching out cars.  The passenger train then arrives, and does a quick turn-around, and departs.  The freight train completes its switching moves, and then leaves town as well.  This plan worked without any awkward switching moves being required.

Once the Walthers Santa Fe brick depot kit arrived I realized the station had a larger footprint than I expected, and didn't fit in the intended spot.  This prompted a re-arrangement of the industries on the layout, and then a track plan change.  The diagram below shows the new track and industry layout. Note that the structure sizes on the diagram are only rough estimates.

I'm still waiting to receive one more building kit, the Walthers Santa Fe brick freight house. Once it arrives I can be sure that everything fits as planned, and can start gluing the track down.  Next up will be wiring, once the terminal blocks I ordered arrive.

I spent a fair bit of time looking for appropriate refrigerator cars to serve the Sunkist packing house. The ATSF/SFRD reefers appear to have been popular and seem to be out of stock most places I looked.  I managed to get a set of three Intermountain 40' RR28 steel reefers, and a set of three Athearn 50' RR30 steel reefers. The paint schemes on these are more appropriate for the 1940s, but since I didn't have any luck finding any in the 1950s scheme they will have to do for now.

Athearn reefers:

Intermountain reefers:

Week 2 construction progress report

I started this week off by ordering some building kits and DPM modular brick building pieces.  I am using Walthers' Union Crane & Shovel as my Hughes Aircraft Company manufacturing facility.  I got it built and painted this week.  This building will fit a single car on the track that goes into the building.  The area in front of the door will fit a second car for outdoor unloading.

Next up was building the brick Del Monte cannery out of DPM modular sections.  This building can fit up to three boxcars for loading and unloading at the doors.  The single story section at the left houses the coal boiler, and will have a tall chimney.  The inbound coal will be unloaded unto the ground, and then brought in to the boiler via the tall ground-level door at the far left of the building.

Del Monte needs to be completed and painted, and the windows and doors painted and glued in. With a modular structure of this size I will need to come up with some way to structurally reinforce it. Hopefully the addition of a roof with also make it more rigid.

I still need to find a suitably narrow depot to fit in the available space.  I may end up trying one of the prototypically correct Santa Fe laser-cut depot kits that are available.

After that the Sunkist fruit packing house will need to be constructed.  I will need to order more DPM parts to be able to start this building.

More week 2 updates to come as I hopefully make more progress this week.

Week 1 construction progress report

After coming up with the layout concept yesterday construction started.  A 4 x 1 ft benchwork box and a 2 x 1 ft benchwork box were built out of 1x4 lumber and 1/4" birch plywood.  By building the benchwork as two separate pieces it will be easier to move the micro-layout upstairs from the basement, and to load it in the car.  At the end I may end up adding a backdrop and a structure to hold built-in lights.

Once the benchwork was built I moved on to arranging the track on the benchwork, to see if the buildings would fit where I envisioned them in the layout sketch from the concept page.

One of the key buildings that determines if the layout concept works is the fruit packing house on the far end of the layout.  This building divides the visible side of the layout from the two staging tracks behind it.  I may end up adding a short backdrop behind this building to help hide the staging area. There are some good resources out there capturing many of the interesting structures that served as packing houses.  It appears that most people wanting accurate models of the prototype end up scratch building a structure, but with my hope to get this layout built and completed in a few weeks I plan on using DPM's modular brick structure pieces.  I built a stand-in paper building to test out the size and look of a potential packing house using DPM's planning templates.  The paper template building is 10 modular pieces long and 2 pieces wide.  As can be seen in the below photo a two piece wide building is a bit of a tight fit into the space.  However, if I slimmed the building down to one piece wide then I feel like it would be unrealistically narrow.  This current building can fit four 40 ft reefers at the loading doors.  While real packing houses may have likely loaded many more reefers each day, I think four is the most this layout can handle, considering the daily freight from the staging area will only be able to fit four to five 40 ft cars.

The photo below shows a short freight with four freight cars, and a short single-coach passenger train hiding in the staging area.

That concludes the construction and planning progress in week 1.

Layout concept

The layout concept page has been created with details about the locale, era, and proposed track plan for this micro-layout.  My hope is to complete the construction of this layout in a span of a few weeks.