adding a run-around to the Woodinville branch

The Burrlington Northern seems like a continuous exercise in taking short cuts first, and coming back later and spending a bunch of time to get it right. As they say, "there's never enough time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over," or something like that. Also, as much as I might plan ahead, later on I find out new things I didn't know before, and go back and modify the layout afterwards. Such is the case with the Woodinville Branch.

The Woodinville Branch wasn't on my radar when I planned the layout, since I was busy enough with building both Everett yards (Delta and Bayside) and the Burlington yard further north. But one day Bill Sornsin was over here, generally approving of how things were going, and, while looking at Delta yard, he enthusiastically said "Hey, you could run the Woodinville local out of here!" With a heavy heart, I immediately knew that he was right, and I would make a new project out of creating an intermediate level deck somewhere that could be operated as the Woodinville branch.

There's a lot to be said for it. For starters, it served a number of towns where people who run trains on the layout actually live in real life today, such as Issaquah, Redmond and, of course, Woodinville. This would help make the layout familiar to operators who don't get up to Everett and Burlington that often. Plus, at the beginning of the branch, it climbs a steep grade from Snohomish to Maltby, which could justify taking a steep climb up to an intermediate-level deck on the wall of the layout room, and limiting train length to something manageable, like, say, 5 cars.

So, surveys were conducted, plywood was cut and painted, track laid and wired up, and the Woodinville Local took its rightful place in the lineup of trains operating on the Burrlington Northern each operating session. I did the project in a big hurry, was very limited in the width of the space available, and decided to limit it to a single trailing point, and two facing point, spurs. I called them Woodinville, Redmond and Issaquah, respectively, parked a few cars on them, made up some waybills, and called it good. But there was no run-around, no siding, just three spurs. What the heck, I figured, we'll stage the SD9 (needed for tractive effort on the 5% grade getting up there) on the trailing point spur (track #2620 in the diagram below) , and then the local can assemble whatever cars are there, haul them down to Everett, bring some new cars up (loco pushing uphill at the back) and shove them into their respective spurs.

It has been operating like this for a couple of years now. Mission accomplished:

But not really. First of all, the Woody Local (as it was called) started its run in Delta yard, not in Woodinville. And second, without a runaround track on the shelf, how much of a switching puzzle can it really be? It's just two staging tracks with an engine pocket.

So, the survey crew got to work and figured out a way to add a switch with a tail track about 4 car lengths long to provide a run-around option for crews in Woodinville:

Then, the construction crew got to work on adding a piece of plywood and modifying the underlying scenery:

And the tracklaying crew followed:

And now the runaround track and tail track are operational on the Woodinville branch:

It's not pretty yet, but it'll get there. Now the operator(s) will have all the extra fun of getting the loco and caboose out of the Everett engine terminal and calling a crew for the run up the hill, with a more complex switching puzzle to work on when they get there. Much more like the real thing.

On the other hand, this assumes that you enjoy switching against the wall with only about 6" of clearance between the track and the deck above. Adding a runaround track to any two-track "staging shelf" could actually take away its staging capacity, depending on how much capacity is available outside of the runaround tracks themselves. So, we will try operating the "new" Woodinville branch, and see how we like it. Stay tuned!