Finishing Up Loose Ends

Receipt of a new box of track has allowed me to wrap up two details:

1. Completion of the Southern Railway depot/interchange track. This will be the arrival and departure track for all passenger trains, as well as a place to park those cars that are being left for the Southern Railway to take out to the wider world and vice versa. I've got 89" of storage here, which is enough for 4 passenger cars or 5 typical freight cars.




















The track board here is a 2x8, which leaves 2 inches of clearance (4 scale feet) for a very shallow model of the Southern Railway depot. This scene will include a model of Cornelia's "Big Red Apple", probably to be erected on one side or the other of the train door. In this way I hope to capture this scene:
















Notice the second caboose in this photo, located at the far left. That car is parked on the real life TFRR arrival track, as described in the last post.


2. Completion of the TFRR Departure Track. This is the track that will be used to store cars as they are being collected into outgoing trains by the yard locomotive. This track is 128" long, providing enough storage for 7 average freight cars, maybe 8 if some are smaller.



















There is plenty of free space on that middle plank to the south of where the two arrival tracks curve away. I am tempted to add a short caboose track here to parallel the departure track, however for the meantime I am deterred by the fact that there will be no easy way to reach it OR the switch.

At the end of the three planks I plan to have a model of the TFRR's office, which was a tiny frame structure that is perfect for the spot. It perfectly fits the operation, too, as you can imagine the conductor stopping in the office to get any final paperwork before the train rolls out toward Franklin.

I haven't been able to find any photos that show what the ends of yard tracks actually looked like in Cornelia, so in the meantime I am using a pair of Bachmann's inexpensive timber and earth bumpers on both of these. As usual, a coat of paint did much to improve the look of them and cut the plastic shine.

Bridge Complete!

It probably seems like the last month has been occupied by HO scale side projects, but in fact I have also been busy building the bridge that will allow the rails to span the walkway between the porch and the fence.

I had been stuck on the problem of how to support the 90+ degree curves that would be generated by the arrival tracks for Cornelia Yard - the place for inbound trains to be parked for classification and sorting. Mine is the most simple possible: #1 track will hold the inbound train and provide access to the Southern Railway depot through a backing move, while #2 will provide the run-around track for the locomotive to get to either end of the train to either push or pull it. This arrangement duplicates the southern end of the wye found at the junction of the Tallulah Falls and the Southern Ry, highlighted here in blue on a 1922 Sanborn fire map of Cornelia:






Even reduced to two tracks, if I used the same 2x6 and 2x8 planks for the right-of-way the result would be quite heavy, with more weight added by whatever would be used to tie the angled boards together. And the presence of the pathway underneath eliminated the option of adding support from below.

At long last I was inspired by a paleo-railfanning trip to the Central of Georgia Railway's bridge over the Apalachee River, which still stands proudly on a forgotten, tree-grown section of the track between Madison and Athens.





































The timber decking revealed the solution! The ability to deck my bridge with small timbers would allow me to use a couple of light beams to support both curved tracks with one deck with no planks at all.

To see where exactly to put it, I once again used the incredibly valuable trick of bending that 1/2" plastic conduit around to reveal exactly where the tracks will need to go and the curves they will follow. This allowed me to put the beams more or less right underneath them.





















I used 2x4 lumber for both beams, standing them on edge and bolting them to all three track boards along the fence, then notching them with a jigsaw and chisel to allow them to be supported by the handrail of the deck. The longer beam in the foreground of the next photo stretches all the way back to the right-of-way where it first emerges from the porch, providing additional cantilever support.





















As a bonus, the short section of the beam between the handrail and the porch provides a way to support the south ends of the plank rights-of-way that will support arrival tracks #1 and #2 after they come off the timber trestle, thus solving what was going to be the next puzzle in this project.

The actual timbers proved to be more problematic! Test cuts of the 1x2 and 2x2 lumber available at Home Depot were disappointing. Not only were they not quite the same height as the planks, which would generate a distinct change in elevation, but eventually we realized that the dimensional lumber just didn't look right. Both the 1x2 and 2x2 had significantly rounded corners, while the timbers on the railroad bridge are sharp and square.




















And so I finally broke down and bought the least expensive table saw available, assembled it, read the manual, then immediately set about ripping 2x6 lumber into nice square-edged timbers that were 1" wide. Here you can see the comparison with the Home Depot 1x2.



Despite the amazing low price of the saw and my jitters about using it, the whole thing was a snap and the Riyobi purred like a kitten.

The decking process went quickly from there. I cut each timber to be 3" longer than either the edge of the track or the edge of the supporting beam, whichever was longer. I used another piece of the timber as a spacer between each new timber added and the one before it, ensuring perfect spacing and evenness between them.

I am really pleased with the results!























































I love it when a plan comes together!

A Side Project to the Side Project

I decided to make a supplementary display for highlighted items and singletons that do not fit with the rest of the fleet using some short pieces of trim that were left over from making the main display. This was super simple. I just cut them all the same length and screwed them together with some old tomato stakes I found in the garden shed.




























I painted the resulting ladder with white primer, followed by a coat of some dark green paint I found in the crawlspace. At first I was alarmed to find out that the dark green paint had gone south to some degree, but the effect was actually kind of interesting - a textured "antique" look.






















I thought the results were ok, so I ran with it. Here's what this corner looks like now that both displays are complete.