Removable scenery and B's Cafe

I'm a big proponent of removable scenery, and have many examples on my layout that are vital to its long-term success. For example, it's great to be able to take the top off a mountain if you need to clean the track inside a tunnel. This week, my example is a shelf above the narrow gage staging yard in Everett. I wanted to have a four-track staging yard to store narrow gage trains, but the area above it also needed to represent the Cascade Copper Co. mine, at the end of a narrow gage branchline. If there were derailments inside the staging yard, I needed to be able to get at it, but otherwise the space above it was perfectly good "real estate" ready to be developed. 

After several years of staring at an odd-shaped piece of foam only partially covering the staging yard, I asked my friend Eric Vannice for his thoughts. The next thing you know, he had crafted a detailed piece of scenery designed to fit over the staging yard. Here he is proudly standing next to his masterpiece:

One of the challenges with removing removable scenery is what to grab onto to remove it without damaging the scenery. Eric thought of making a small, vital, solid wood structure, screwed into the base, so you could grab the scenery by the building! Here's a picture of the screw holding the building firmly into the underside of the scenery base:

I won't be able to add a detailed interior to this particular building, but it looks great as it is! My wife and I both have names starting with "B", so this is arguably the obvious choice for this establishment, which will be well patronized by the miners at the nearby Cascade Copper Co. mine. I'll plant some HO scale picnic tables out in front of it and see how fast those hungry miners show up.

You'll also notice (above in the picture with Eric) that the rock molds in the removable scenery match the nearby rocks. Many years ago, when Eric was making the original scenery to the right of this removable piece, he suggested we cast some extra plaster rocks from the same molds we were using "just in case". I kept them in a drawer under the layout all this time, and now here we were with a perfect use for them. It turns out that being a model railroad pack rat sometimes pays off!

Below is a final (for the moment!) shot of this shoehorned piece of real estate next to a locomotive. Another thing that worked out well is placing the building in front of the shadow line. Right where the shadow line is I plan to put a gravel road and a few period vehicles, to further distract the viewer from the shadow of the deck above. Not to mention install some more of those rocks below the track where the locomotive is standing. And a few trees in the back. Perhaps if the trees in the back of the insert are a lighter color, it will dilute the visual effect of the shadow. A model railroad is a never-ending quest!

This blog post inspired me to do a YouTube video about removable scenery, which you can enjoy here.

A little construction progress

 We started slowly back to having "Train Days" on Tuesdays, mostly work parties with breaks for random fun with train running. Tim applied some Automatic Car Identification (ACI) labels to cars and locomotives, to help establish our time frame of about 1973. Above, you can see one of the newly-arrived Athearn Genesis GP-18 locomotives with the ACI label underneath the "F" in "PACIFIC". This locomotive clearly fits in that time frame, having been renumbered for the BN after the merger in 1970, but not having been repainted BN green, which would have happened well before 1977. In this case, we put the ACI labels on both sides of the engine, but with freight cars we're only applying it to one side, in case some day we want to run trains in the eras either before or after the ACI craze.

Dave, on the other hand, has carried out a couple of track and scenery improvements. The first was to lengthen the "Marysville" spur, which we use as a staging track to represent industries in Marysville, just north of, and across the river from, the main yards in Everett. There is no end to the effort that model railroaders will put into adding additional track capacity, and this was no exception. We carved up a perfectly good sloping hill and replaced it with a Chooch retaining wall in order to lengthen the track by about ten inches. Before and after photos shown below:

Along the narrow gage line, there was a curve behind the "Needles" rock outcropping that was bare blue and pink foam, ever since I reworked the grade in that area (5 years ago?) to clear double-stack trains in the standard gage tunnel below. Dave carved Sculptamold to match the cast plaster rocks above, and then colored it with acrylic washes. Then I came in with dirt and scree along the side of the tracks, glueing it down with diluted liquid latex on the ballast and diluted white glue on the scree. Mission accomplished!