Sand Towers at Interbay, Part 3

 Work continues on the Interbay Engine Terminal's sand tower project. Here is an overview from the south looking north, showing that I removed one of the existing tracks and replaced a number 6 switch with a wye switch, in order to make room for a concrete pad to support the sand towers. Dave Enger built the pads out of sheet styrene, which you can see are temporarily in position. The BN mainline is the track to the left of the construction site, with grey ballast and raised above the rest of the yard.

Here is a detail view of the approximate track alignment, showing that we'll have to cut part of the concrete pad to accommodate the curving track

And finally, here is a view from the north looking south, showing that we've added a new turnout to provide a short track for loading sand, oil and water to the various dispensers that will be on the locomotive service pad. I doubt this track was there on the prototype in this exact location, but it's where we have room for it, so there it is. It will be fun to spot cars there during op sessions. Especially since we have a model of Northwest Olivine on the Concrete Branch, which was the source for this high quality locomotive sand, making it one of those rare prototypical on-layout origin/destination pairs.

 

Sand Towers at Interbay, Part 2

 

Here's a better close-up of the Interbay sand towers that we're trying to model. One early design decision we had to make was how far north or south to located them in my condensed HO scale version of the Interbay Engine Terminal. Below are two photos, with the mocked up towers positioned to the right (south) and left (north). We didn't consider going all way to the north, because I wanted to allow room for a short spur for unloading sand cars. More on that in a later post.

Based on these mock-ups, we've decided to locate it to the right, as shown in the upper photo here. Next up will be to install the concrete pavement between the tracks and re-install the track.