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.

The Sanding Towers at Interbay Engine Terminal

 

Here's a view of the (prototype) Interbay Engine Terminal, looking north, about 1995. I don't know when these towers were installed, but let's just assume that we "need" these on my model of the Interbay Engine Terminal. The only thing is, just a few weeks ago we "finally" got around to ballasting the tracks there, and there isn't a space between any of the tracks. You know what this means. Rip up something we just did a month earlier. Love it.

So, we decided there was room to move one track over and create the space for a model of this. Despite the obvious stupidity of this, I'm pretty excited about it. These sand towers are really going to add some excitement to the engine hostler job at Interbay! All I can report today is that Dave Enger is mocking up a scratch-built version of the towers, and I've removed the offending track. See photo below. Stay tuned...

Should we lengthen the siding at Everett's Bayside Yard?

 

The short answer is "no". Here you see the very skeptical Bill Messecar and Dave Enger having a discussion with me about moving the south turnout of Bayside yard from behind Bill's shoulder on the left to underneath Dave's hand on the right. While installing a turnout on the "squid bridge" is not "impossible", the larger question is whether it is "worth it". Fortunately, I build the main curve far enough away from the 6x6 column (which supports two stories of house above it!) to make such an extension possible. But after discussing the pros and cons, we decided that a better thing to do would be to install a working signal at the existing turnout (or even to the right of the squid bridge) to allow the Bayside yardmaster to hold any northbound trains out of the yard until the siding is clear. The siding is used for drilling all tracks in Bayside, so if a switcher needed to back out on the mainline, such a signal could at least provide some additional length for drilling.

I'm not not saying "never", just "not now". We plan to reconsider the decision in the year 2031...

The arrival of Nord Door in Everett

There was a long-standing woodworking company in Everett called E.A. Nord Co. (referred to as "Nord Door" by the locals) which shipped doors and other building supplies to contractors, sometimes by rail. Ray Wheeler told me that they used to spot boxcars there in the early '70's, and I believed him (as I usually do) and thought we should have a model of Nord Door near Bayside Yard in Everett. I mentioned this to Bill Messecar one day and he decided to scratch-build a representation of it for the tiny space I have for it up against a low section of backdrop on the north end of Bayside. The result is a great little removable piece of scenery with two doors to spot boxcars at. You can hear Bill describe how he made it on this brief video on YouTube, and here are a couple of pictures of the finished product:

And here's Bill with proof that it's removable...

 

Paving the Interbay Car Shed, Part 2

 

My first try at using EVA foam to model asphalt pavement between the tracks and rails in HO scale is progressing. As described in the previous post, I decided to try using black as the base color because it would take paint or pan pastels well, and any sort of unintentional blemish would not stand out like a sore thumb, like it does with plaster or other white materials. The one foot squares in the front of the photo are the 2mm thick pieces, for in between the tracks, and in the back is a roll of 1mm thick material, for fitting in between the rails. In truth, for the base layer, any material with about the same thickness as the height of the ties, such as balsa, styrene, cardstock, etc, would work - I just happened to have this material on hand and thought it would be easier to cut (which it was).

The first step was to prepare the surface between the tracks. In most cases it was bare cork ready-to-go, but along the front edges I had to use a putty knife and vacuum cleaner to remove some ballast and ground cover from next to the tracks, as shown below.

Then, I used a white chalk pencil to mark the edges of the 2mm thick black foam sheets, and a rotary knife to cut along the white pencil lines. The result was pieces of foam that fit between the track sections. I used white glue and various weights to glue these to the underlying cork roadbed:

The next layer was 1mm thick pieces to fit in between the rails. Similar process, same glue:

After removing the weights (again!) and testing the flangeways (they worked fine, thanks to the soft nature of the EVA foam), the next question was how to make it look like weathered asphalt instead of jet black foam. I decided to try blotching it with gray pan pastels using a make-up powder sponge. It turned out great!

I left the center part darker because it will be covered up by the car shops, in between the four square spacer blocks you can see glued on the foam. I thought about digging some inspection pits in there, but until I find out more prototype information about the actual building, I'm going to leave those details for a later time.

The last step (for now, anyway) was to pave the gravel areas on each side of the asphalt pavement, true to the prototype. This is the subject of a couple of YouTube videos you can watch, but in short, I applied Woodland Scenics fine grey ballast, leveled it off, cleared the flangeways, and carefully dribbled diluted white glue with an eyedropper to maintain the open flangeways while the glue dried. This also turned out pretty well, as you can see in both the above and below photos, although in retrospect I wish I had used real gravel dust instead of ballast, to get more of a variety of grain sizes in the pavement. It's certainly good enough for now. Here's the "final" product:

One last footnote - I noticed from Google Earth photos that the prototype kept the switchpoints clear of gravel pavement, so I did the same thing here, as you can see in the above photos and also below:

So now the car repair facility is paved! Next up will be putting all the equipment back, and possibly painting the building white like the prototype. Stay tuned, and I hope this motivates you to try some of your own paving projects.

Paving the Interbay Car Shed, Part 1

 What's the quickest and easiest and best way to pave the surfaces between the rails and tracks at the Interbay Car Repair Facility, now that I've removed all the locomotives and cars (which hopefully you already enjoyed in this quick video short on YouTube)? Here's an aerial shot of the whole area to be paved, which you can see is pretty large:

In the past, for paving streets, I've used (1) "lightweight spackle", (2) plaster, (3) sheet styrene, and (4) sanded grout. Here is my experience with each:

(1) I painted the lightweight spackle a gray acrylic, which looks ok, although a bit uniform for my taste, but I find it's easy to accidently gouge it with your fingernails or with a track cleaning tool, and then the white spackle shows through. I suppose I could make it less uniform with washes and pan pastels. The same is true for all the other methods, too.

(2) Plaster has the same gouging issue, and also can crack over time. I suppose you could add dye to it and make it the pavement color throughout, but again it would be too uniform in color. And I'm looking for something quick and easy, not a plaster dyeing project.

(3) Sheet styrene is durable, paintable, easy to scribe cracks into, and not subject to changes over time. But, it takes a lot of work to cut each piece to fit. It's not quick and easy.

(4) Recently, we've been trying sanded grout, in various shades of gray. You can putty it on like plaster, and it dries rock hard. Rock hard. You can't gouge it with anything other than tool steel - it's reconstituted rock, once it sets. So getting it out of the flangeways of the track, and below the railhead, is important if you want reliable operations with DCC. We did this while it was setting, but when I came back the next day it seemed to have slightly expanded in the final stages of setting. It was a real job getting the rails clean enough to have reliable electrical contact. The surface looks pretty good, although a little shiny for my taste, and I may need to go over it again with some pan pastels one day. Also, if you don't use pre-mixed grout, you have to get the proportions of water and dry grout just right, or the thing will not set up right. I suppose you could dribble the diluted fixative of your choice on it afterwards. This isn't sounding quick and easy either.

So, I'm game to try something new. Above you see a sample of a product that's easy to cut, glue, paint and weather. It's called "PVC foam", and I heard about it from Al Frasch and some other online NMRAx clinics. It's denser than regular "foam rubber", but it cuts easily with a knife and comes in thicknesses down to 1mm. This is good, because the height of my code 70 rail is .070 inches which equates to 1.8mm. (code 83 is about 2.1mm and code 55 is about 1.4mm). But the stuff you can buy in a regular craft store is usually just the 2mm thickness. 2mm would work fine for areas of code 83 rail, but in this case I need it to be a little less, so I ordered some 1mm foam online in order to try it. I don't really want the foam (or anything else) sticking up above the railheads, so stay tuned for the experiment. Al is using 2mm foam for pavement on his N scale layout, on the code 75 Atlas track, which should be about perfect. He claims that the loco wheels push the foam down and he has no problems with it. I might try an experiment with the 2mm foam, but first I want to try the 1mm foam and see how it works.

The other thing is how to color it. I could spray paint the whole sheet with a gray primer, but then would it curl up over time, or be hard to glue evenly? What you see above is that I tried a couple of shades of pan pastel on it, and I'd say it looks great. I can just glue it down black, and come back and create a realistic uneven gray using several shades of pan pastel.

Above, you see a single piece of 1mm PVC foam cut to fit the entire area. I should be able to cut it in strips with an Xacto knife without to much effort, and glue it down with white glue and some weights.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves - the areas between the tracks need to be raised up to the height of the ties first. We'll get to that in my next post. So much for quick and easy, huh?