MILW car barge slip in Seattle

After many years of looking like this:

The Milwaukee Road car float slip finally received its sheet piling today. Here are a few progress shots:

The sheet pile is an Evergreen Styrene product painted with a random blend of acrylic rust and graphite colors, and glued on to the plywood base with Aileen's super tacky glue. My plan is to cut some sheets of 1/8" clear acrylic to make a block of water for the car barge to rest on, representing the water level. Stay tuned.

Bethlehem Steel

The Monroe Swap Meet this weekend provided an unexpected boon to the Steel industry on the Burrlington Northern - someone was "downsizing his layout" and sold me a built-up transfer crane that's just the right size to sit on top of the two tracks currently serving a location that I call Bethlehem Steel, even though all it had been was a single brick building. Now the scene looks much more convincing as a steel-handling industry:

This is still a temporary location for Bethlehem Steel - the new expansion in West Seattle will eventually create a larger space for a better model of the plant, but for now it will do as a place to receive scrap and ship steel products. Here is one photo of the prototype plant, shot in 1972 and published by MOHAI:

Looking forward to modeling this one day! :)

finally finishing the "Squid Bridge"

Many years ago, say twenty, I was in a hurry to get the mainline running and enough scenery to host bus tours for the NMRA convention in Seattle coming up in 2004. There was a spot on the mainline between Seattle and Everett just perfect for a low bridge, but I didn't have time to fuss with it, so I just carried the plywood subroadbed and homasote roadbed right across where the bridge would eventually go, and called it good. This is what it looked like during the surrounding scenery construction:

the carved pieces of pink foam did a decent job of simulating the look of concrete piers, and it wasn't long before I painted them a concrete color. I painted the "bridge" black just to hide it as much as possible. After the scenery was "finished", I got the idea to have a giant squid chasing two parents in a rowboat while their kids watched in horror from the shore. People loved it, so we started calling it the "squid bridge". When Paul Scoles was here taking pictures for the RMC article (January 2008 issue) he wanted a large locomotive coming around a dramatic curve, so this is the photo that ended up being published in the article:

He made me take the squid away, but I couldn't believe that he tolerated that completely unfinished bridge in the scene!

Nevertheless, the layout had many other higher priorities over the next ten plus years. At some point I bought some MicroEngineering deck girders to make the bridge out of, and spray-painted them an aluminum paint color. I thought this would get the ball rolling. But it didn't. Those girders junked up the scene for many years, and eventually I got so disgusted that I used them as gondola loads during ops sessions. You can see them ruining the scene here. It also looks like the squid lost its focus on the couple in the rowboat. Not to mention my messing around with dual gage track up in the air above.

Fast forward to 2018. Dave Enger started helping me on the layout, and he suggested that we could just cut out the piece of plywood supporting the bridge, paint the homasote to look like a concrete casting around a ballasted girder bridge, cut the plywood in three angled sections, glue the girders to it, and be done. So we did. Here are some progress photos and final shots to show that this morning, after 20 years, I finally put the guardrails in place over the finished bridge, and get to make a fun redo of Paul's magazine photo.

Abutments and piers:

the giant squid returns:

and, finally, guardrails!

Now, here's a new version of Paul's photo, (without all the photoshop improvements he made to the background etc.). I can see what he meant about the squid being a bit of a distraction. Good call.

the N scale version

The Burrlington Northern has an N scale version upstairs in the living room, that we built before the HO version, in 1980-83. I designed it for operations, but had various challenges with derailments and poor loco performance that never made it fun. But recently, I tried out a Tsunami-2 sound F45 on the layout and tried filing the switchpoints on one of the most troublesome turnouts. The result was, for the first time in almost 40 years, I actually had 30 minutes of fun switching the layout today! What a bonus! Here are two photos of the F45 in action. The string of boxcars are being spotted at what will be a large sawmill complex sometime in the future. Hopefully this won't be too much of a distraction from the more important work downstairs.

West Seattle yard construction update

The West Seattle yard is under construction, in order to facilitate future deliveries to spots such as Ideal Cement, Sea-Land, Puget Sound Tug & Barge, Alaska Hydrotrain, Bethlehem Steel, and Wycoff Industries. At this point the roadbed is ready for track, the (styrene) backdrop is about to be installed and the water surface for the Duwamish River is almost ready to be painted (after some rip-rap riverbank is installed first. The yard area itself is about 11 feet wide, and is located below the Ballard Branch and the Terry Ave. line. Here are some photos of the current state of things:

Nord Door

E.A. Nord Co. (called "Nord Door" by the railroad crews) was located on the north side of the Bayside yard complex in Everett. Doug Paasch sent along a map he found of its track access:


It seemed like a good industry to include in my Bayside yard complex, but there didn't seem to be room. But then, as I thought about double-ending more of the classification tracks in Bayside, it seemed obvious that a spur against the front fascia would work, if you didn't mind it facing the wrong way, and would only involve an extension of the benchwork two feet long and six inches wide. So, consider it done. Here are some progress photos:

A loading platform will be built along the fascia, with perhaps some sort of mill photo or building front. The center track will continue as the empty car track, and the right hand track will continue as an extension of the Port of Everett.