Ten Year Anniversary

As I was putting together (well, really, updating) a presentation on Modeling the Valley Local that I'll be doing tomorrow for the NMRA's NCR Division 2 (way out in Michigan! Thank goodness for Zoom...), I came across the following slide:

And I realized with everything going on last month, I'd totally blown past the 10 year anniversary of starting this layout(!)

So, albeit a little belated, here are a few fun photos from the early(est) days . . .

October 29, 2011
With Randy's help, I'd developed a rough trackplan, but most of the final planning was done with full size mockups on the floor like this. This will be Middletown, with a "typical" Valley Local for scale.

Looking back toward the peninsula, with Wethersfield roughed in on the far side.

November 16, 2011
To be fair, October-December 2011 saw the final planning & mocking up. This is Essex, being roughed-in in the other room. I wouldn't start laying the first track until January, 2012 - and I wouldn't get to Essex until two years later.

Another view of the Wethersfield/Rocky Hill peninsula, with Rocky Hill being mocked-up.

November 25
First benchwork going up - so maybe I'm actually 6 days early for a 10 yr anniversary? :^)

November 26
View toward Middletown, with Rosie supervising.

November 28
Looking toward Rocky Hill & the peninsula.

December 17, 2011
Overall view of the main (Middletown/Cromwell/Rocky Hill/Wethersfield) room.

I moved the craft paper & turnout template mockups from the floor to rest on the benchwork. Then, using more mockups of buildings & such, I finalized the track layout. This is Wethersfield, looking back toward the "north" end of Middletown in the far corner.

Using all this info, I drew outlines around the track and proposed building footprints to determine the subroadbed/plywood cuts. This is Dividend looking toward the Goff Brook/Wethersfield end/side of the peninsula.

Then it was "just" a matter of cutting up the paper and arranging the cutouts on plywood in cookie-cutter fashion . . .

. . . then lay it on the benchwork. This is looking toward the "neck" of the peninsula - Rocky Hill on the left and Wethersfield on the right.

New Year's Eve - December 31, 2011
This was an ill-fated experiment in raising the layout to eye level. As you can see, given the benchwork/girder height, it would have required really long risers!
I'm glad I rethought this idea.

January 3, 2012
Speaking of risers, with the coming of the new year - and all the subroadbed cut for the layout in the "main" room - it was time to set up a "riser construction workstation." For that, I needed a chop saw, wood glue, clamps, and LOTS of 1x2 & 1x1 material.

Risers galore!

Going into the archives for these early construction photos, I realize that while it was 10 years ago last month that I started documenting my layout progress, the "groundbreaking" (finishing planning/beginning benchwork) really happened this whole autumn season, 10 years ago.

Wow - time really flies. And the layout is nowhere near being done. Guess I'd better get back to it!

Hope you've enjoyed this little trip to the beginnings of the Valley Line as much as I have - and are as motivated as I am to make some more progress!

Wordy Wednesday - Second Time Saga in Saybrook/Staging

(I've received some positive feedback lately on my "Wordless Wednesday" explanations, and I'll continue to do those in the weeks ahead. But this week, we'll change tack totally and have a decidedly un-wordless Wednesday...)

While the initial reason for building this layout was to replicate the operations of the New Haven Railroad's "Valley Local" along the Connecticut River (informed heavily by the memories of one John Wallace), I'd always intended for the layout to try and represent railroad operations in the CT Valley generally along the entire line from Hartford to Old Saybrook.

But as my research continues to enrich my understanding of how the railroad operated in this area, my focus has - um - "evolved." There was evidence of this evolution from the earliest days of the layout - e.g. I'd always planned to have the Air Line come in to Middletown, just as it does in Wallace's descriptions of the Valley Local. The Air Line plays an important - though only a bit - part in the Local's operation. And so it does on my layout as well.

Old Saybrook has evolved a bit, well, differently. I'd always intended to have the "Saybrook Scene" greet visitors as they come down the basement stairs.  Since I live in Old Saybrook, including the station area is especially appropriate - but only as a backdrop to the Valley Local. Heck, at first this scene wasn't even going to be operational.

By the time I broke ground for Old Saybrook though, I'd already decided "it'd be a good idea" to make the Saybrook Scene at least workable - again, only as a minor bit player - and have the south end Valley local (a.k.a. PDX-2, the Shoreline Local from New London) come from "somewhere." So I built some staging.

Ain't it purdy?

The Shoreline local would start here and head up the Valley Line. The other tracks would be for "generic Shoreline trains" that would run around a "generic" dogbone loop through the Saybrook Scene.

So far, so good.

But then I did some more research and discovered that there were 71(!) trains through Saybrook in a typical day. And a funny thing happened: I started to actually care about those trains. The more I learned about them, the more I realized I wouldn't be content just having them being "generic" trains. I certainly couldn't represent all 71 of them, but I could at least have them come from the correct direction (eastbounds coming from the west and vice versa).

The final nails in the coffin of my complacency were my friends Randy and Tom who did a little impromptu ops session in Saybrook to see how the locals would interact. And while it was nice that the (mostly) prototype track layout in Saybrook operated (mostly) prototypically, "a few changes" were recommended. Worse, it became quickly apparent that the "generic" staging arrangement I had would have to be totally rethought and redone.

So, last Friday - when I thought I would push north to Essex, Randy and I instead ripped up most of the mainline in Old Saybrook and just-about-all of the "East End" (New London) staging.

The pictures tell (most of) the sad story...

ProTip: If you're modeling a prototype railroad and want it to operate prototypically, do your best to have your track arrangement follow the prototype - even if you don't (yet) understand what all the tracks do. In my defense, I'd only intended for this area to be "generic" bit-player support for the rest of the layout. But now that I really want to operate it according to the prototype, my track arrangement has to follow suit.

In the case of Saybrook itself, we had to swap the two crossovers so their orientation would reverse and we had to add an additional crossover to allow eastbound trains to get to the proper tracks. That required almost all of the mainline track to be removed, reconfigured, and replaced.

One consolation (other than the much-more-prototypical layout and operations): I finally got around to gluing down all the tracks behind the station (using my soon-to-be-patented weighting method).

The staging yard is undergoing even more extensive surgery - the entire throat has to be reconfigured. Again, since it was just supposed to be "generic" staging "from the east," it just fed the westbound mainline tracks assuming the westbounds would become eastbounds as they went around the west loop of the dogbone and came back through the scene.

Now, the yard will be able to feed - and receive - from both east and west. And it will be a full and equal complement to the "west end" staging yard I just finished.

Speaking of which...

 It really is finished - Pete came over Monday and wired it all up while I was working in Saybrook and (the other) staging and trying to repair all the damage that had been done on Friday get back to where I can operate again - this time, much more prototypically.

So this is the condition of the east end staging as of now. Still LOTS of work to be done. Suffice it to say that it won't be ready to operate by this Friday as I'd hoped. But, in the long run, it'll be worth it. And I only have to do this once, well, er, um, twice - right?

Saybrook is in much better shape. I finished redoing all of the trackwork Randy had started (a real pain considering all the precision required in locating turnouts and holes for turnout motor actuating rods), but I still need to rewire everything and reinstall turnout motors (Tortoise now, rather than MicroMark). And since I doubt all this (re)construction will have made it magically disappear, I still expect I'll have to address the shorting issue once everything's back together.

So, why take a perfectly good, large section of a layout and redo it? Well, if you're a prototype modeler you're not going to be completely happy if that section isn't as prototypical as possible - and operates as prototypically as possible. Besides, the real railroads change track arrangements all the time as business and needs evolve. So why shouldn't we?

Starting Essex

My trackplanning process is very, um, visceral. There's no computer involved. No paper & templates. For a anal Type A person like myself, my process is very right-brained. I basically just mock things up and do what looks right.

Ok, it's admittedly not quite that Zen. But almost. For Essex, I'm using the same process that I used for the rest of the layout. The benchwork is positioned and built according to where the aisles need to be and where the benchwork has to be to support the turnback curves. Click here for that process.

Once the benchwork is in place, I top it temporarily with masonite, cardboard, or whatever will support the large sheets of paper I draw on:

Make sure you tape the paper in place.

The above pic shows the paper in place and the pre-cut turnback curve plywood subroadbed positioned at the end of the peninsula. Now it's just a matter of connecting the end of that curve to the point where the track will go through the wall to Saybrook, drawing lines that represent track centers.

But how do I know where to locate the track? Typically, I'll use Sanborn maps to give me a good idea of the track layout. But even Sanborn maps aren't perfect, depending on your era and when the map was produced (click here for how I discovered that little tidbit). In the case of Essex, I have an additional resource - a scale map that Max drew up some years ago:

That's a LARGE map of the Essex track layout over by a LARGE valuation map of Middletown.

So, feeling fully prepared with reference maps, I was all ready to start drawing track centers with my Sharpie when I remembered all the track relocations I've had to do on earlier sections of the layout to accommodate structures. Sooooo...... my next step in "track planning" is going to be  . . . wait for it . . . Structure Mockups.

Yes, having an idea of what buildings you're going to want to include goes hand-in-hand with deciding what track to include given the space that you have to work with. And having at least a rough 3D version of those structures to plan around will also give you a much better visual sense of your space and how everything will look/work together. This step isn't that critical when you're talking about "hinterlands" like Rocky Hill (though even there I bumped out the fascia a bit to make more room for the station & freighthouse), but Essex has a lot of buildings - most of which are still around today - so it's critical to get it looking as "right" as possible.

So, before I do anything more in the basement, it's back to the workbench to build some buildings....