Lance Mindheim on art and operations

I just finished reading Lance Mindheim's self-published books on "Model Railroading as Art" and "How to operate a modern era switching layout" and recommend them both highly. It's funny how you can have an instinct that something is right or not, but until someone else says it, you didn't know what you knew. This works both ways, too, when someone makes a comment that changes your mind in a way that you later come to regret.

In recent years, when showing people my layout, I've made the comment that "If I'd known now how fun it was going to be just to operate the Burlington, WA yard, I could have skipped building the whole rest of the basement and just had that be my layout!" (see my previous blog post on this.)While this makes for a fun joke, Lance's work suggests that it is basically true (as many jokes often are!). Lance goes even further, to say that unless you really enjoy yard work, let your layout just be industries to switch, and not too many of them. If it takes two hours just to (realistically) switch 3 or 4 industries, on a layout with only 9 turnouts, why do you need a whole basement full of them?

I did a lot of my early railfanning in the Interbay/Balmer yard area, which led to my starting my modeling efforts by building a yard. The next question was "where are these cars going and coming to/from? This led to the realization that there were two yards in Everett to the north, and a sprawling yard complex south of downtown Seattle, so building them seemed like a priority. After that, I started learning more about some of the interesting local industries and branchlines, which gradually got added. So you could say that I gradually backed into an appreciation of local industry switching. I wonder how my layout would look different today if I had read Lance's operations book when he published it in 2011, instead of this week? Would I have fewer yards and more industries? Perhaps.

One of the challenges of a large layout that hosts operating sessions with a dozen operators at once, is what do you do in between times when you just want to operate it by yourself or with a friend? The OPSIG has published articles about this from time to time, and Lance addresses it nicely in his book. His answer is you pick one or two of your favorite industries and switch them out, using realistic procedures, and let the rest of it be. It will take longer than you think. I've tried a similar approach, which was to put paper clips in certain car cards, and then run a train around the layout working only those cars with paper clips in their car cards. It's a lot of fun and lets me work all around the layout instead of just working a couple of industries. And if I run out of time, it's easy to pick up wherever I left off.

I won't try to summarize Lance's book on art here, but one of its many great ideas is that, because of the physics of miniaturization, everything (except maybe windows) should have a flat finish on it. He uses Dullcote, but other modelers I know have said that Dullcote is still too much of a satin finish, and they use flat sprays from art stores that are designed for taking the sheen off of oil paintings. My big complaint about Dullcote is that it turns white if you put an alcohol-based india ink wash on it. More on this later after I do some experimenting with various flat finishes.

In the meantime, blow for grade crossings, come to a full stop to let the brakeman get off to unlock and flip the switch(s), and never exceed 4 mph when coupling up to a car. :)

overview of 35 years of hobby time

here is a link to a brief video that shows the overall train layout in the basement, after 35 years of work. We had an NMRA open house here last week, so for the first time in a while the aisles are clear and clean and so it's an opportunity for picture-taking. I narrated a more detailed thirty minute video tour as well, but it will take me a few days to edit it. Stay tuned.

new scenery in the "Index Loop"

There's a place near Mt. Index, where the BN mainline passes through the town of Index, WA, on a 180+ degree curve which I call the "Index loop". I didn't have room for the town, but needed a 180 degree turn at that spot on the layout, just before reaching Skykomish, so my son painted Mt. Index on the backdrop there and we called it the Index loop. I roughed in some foam scenery there in about 2004 and never got around to finishing it, until this week. Instead of the town, I put in a section house (that came from JJ Johnson's layout originally) and a stream bed that I suppose should be called the North Fork of the Skykomish river. But I would rather call it "Troublesome Creek", which flows into the North Fork just upriver from there. What you see below is just the first layer of "zip texturing", done by sprinkling dirt, grass and twigs over wet latex earth colored paint, applied directly over carved extruded insulation foam. The service road next to the section house will get paved with gravel, the creek will get a creek bed, and more trees will be planted after the mainline here is ballasted. Here is the new scenery so far:

the MILW Limestone Junction Branch

The MILW had a strange but long-standing job based out of Bellingham, WA, to run up to a limestone mine in the Cascade Mountains and supply limestone to a cement plant in Bellingham, using an SD9 and a string of ore jennies. There was a round concrete loading silo there that was fed by a conveyor that was fed by front end loaders at the mine. I have a weak spot for ore jennies, but they didn't operate all that much in the Seattle area in 1973, that I can find out, other than (1) copper ore coming down from BC to the Asarco plant in Tacoma, (2) radioactive ore or waste (or both?) that came out to or from Bangor and/or Hanford, and (3) limestone from Limestone Jct. to Bellingham. Let me know if you've heard of anything else.

But my layout only goes as far as Bellingham staging, so the Limestone Jct. operation never made sense to try and model. Until last week. We were finishing up scenery in the Index Loop area, which includes a spur for the Grotto gravel pit just west of Skykomish, and suddenly it occurred to me that there was room for an additional switch there that could make it up a 3.5 percent grade to a new shelf on top of the Skykomish staging yard. And, it would connect directly back into the Bellingham staging yard via the existing connection track between Skykomish and Bellingham. And, the mountain backdrop above the staging yard was high enough, and generic enough, that there was room for this new shelf without modifying the backdrop. And, if it was only two tracks wide (enough for a runaround track) it wouldn't hinder the operation of the Skykomish staging yard significantly. And that there was room above the base of the main peninsula to bring the mine out from the wall and really model the operation of the limestone silo. All of these ideas came in one week!

So, here are the results so far. The silo is represented so far by a white stand-in I cut from a used plastic bottle. Haven't had a chance to paint it grey yet, or make a better one.

Partway through construction:

And now after some quick scenery:

Stay tuned for the when the first operation begins...

water for the MILW barge

A long time ago I got the idea to make the water under the MILW barge out of a two-inch deep plexiglass box, so we could model the sea bed underneath the barge. I've had the piece of plexiglass sitting around for years, and finally I took it over to my neighbor's house and we sawed the needed pieces on his table saw. We tried scoring and breaking it, but it didn't work nearly as well as running it through the table saw, using his carbide tip blade. I did cut the two inch strips to length by scoring, but that was easier than the longer cuts. Here are pictures of the box temporarily taped together with blue masking tape:

After glueing and removing the protective plastic layer, it came out pretty well!

Distinguishing parallel tracks

The Stacy St. Yard complex on the Burrlington Northern ended up being a sea of parallel tracks. This is partly because it began in a different house as a seven-track staging yard, and then I converted it to a working yard. For many years there were seven parallel tracks of unpainted flex track, and it was difficult to tell which tracks were main tracks and which had other uses. Different colors of ballast would be an obvious solution, but it takes time to do. A few months ago we did ballast the two main tracks in a light grey to make it clear that those were the main tracks. But the rest of the tracks still looked the same. Recently, we decided to paint the rails different colors to represent their usage, and to paint the ground between them to create several "zones". The photo below shows the result. At the top is the "house track", painted a rusty color. Next is the "mud track", which was used for temporary storage of cars set out by passing trains, colored a muddy color. The next two are the ballasted main tracks with a dark grey rail color. The rest of the tracks are in the yard, painted "rail brown", but the first three are arrival/departure tracks, so we put grey paint on the ground between them, and then for the classification tracks we painted earth and weeds. It will be nice to get these tracks ballasted, but for now this rail and ground paint is already a big improvement.

Hopefully this will give crews a better instant visual cue as to which tracks are which.

We also put labels on the tracks, but of course they only work when cars aren't covering them up.

These last two pictures also show the complexity of the yard layout, hence the need for cues to distinguish track purposes. In the photo below, to the right of the main classification ladder in Stacy St. is the "Waterfront Yard", which was used for supporting the MILW car barge operation, and we also use it for handling runs to Harbor Island and West Seattle.

Burlington as an ideal LDE

You've probably heard the term "LDE", referring to "Layout Design Element", and the idea that a layout is simply a string of LDE's in a row so trains can run between them and stop at each one to do work or meet other trains. My layout is certainly like that, and every time I turn around I'm adding another LDE and another level of operational complexity, and I can't seem to stop. One advantage to this is that each additional LDE can absorb a certain number of freight cars, so I can keep increasing my fleet without gumming up the operation too much, or learning the discipline to "thin the herd."

But I am also heard to say, "If I'd known how much fun Burlington would be to operate, I don't know if I would have bothered with the rest of the layout that came before it." This post elaborates on that idea.

Burlington is a small town just north of Mt. Vernon, between Everett and Bellingham, that has a five-track interchange with branch lines to the east (Concrete Branch) and west (Anacortes Branch). A switch crew was stationed there "the Concrete Local", and the Anacortes Branch was served by the "Annie local" which came north from Everett for the trip west. The Anacortes Branch served the Port of Anacortes, two major refineries, at least one grain elevator, and, in recent years, a major sawmill. The Concrete Branch brought logs out of the mountains, silica, and the output of a major cement plant in Concrete. In later years it also served a locomotive restoration company that worked on, among other things, overhauling the engines from the White Pass and Yukon. Do I have your attention yet?

Here is a picture of the schematic map of the area on my layout, from the SPINS booklet, including the names of real and fictitious industries that we serve there. It generally takes four to six real hours for the Concrete Local to get all the work done there, which to my mind is long enough for it to be considered a complete layout in its own right. It certainly is a respectable LDE!

I don't have the space to extend the Anacortes or Concrete branch any distance, so in essence they function as staging tracks. All you would need would be a staging yard to the north and one to the south, and this could be a very satisfying first class railroad switching layout! (In my case there are another five or so towns with yards to the south of here, so one of the problems is that it takes too long for the Burlington-bound traffic to actually show up, but that's another story for another time.) Here's a photo of the modeled yard, seen from the north end:

This photo shows the center of the yard, with the mainline ballasted in grey, and the Anacortes Branch off on the right side near the aisle:

And finally, this shot during an op session, with the Concrete Branch tracks in the foreground and NW Olivine on the upper left (note the crude stand-in blue backdrop - it'll do for now!):

Just a note on NW Olivine - this industry mined very fine sand from the Skagit River, for use in, among other things, locomotive sand towers. This is one of those rare instances where it is ok to bill a sand car from Concrete directly to one of the engine terminals on the layout, an "intra-layout" move!

But the main point is, as an LDE, Burlington yard and vicinity is worth taking a look at, and fun to operate!