SP's East Portland "Produce Row"

[pdx1955]

More cork roadbed going down in the yard. I'll use cork sheets in the engine terminal area to the left.

[pdx1955]

More progress to date after getting more cork roadbed. Found out that our only local hobby shop closed so either have to drive a couple hours round trip or place an order...sigh. This is the East Portland section with the produce warehouses and the waterfront.



Got the central dividing backdrop up that will support a coved backdrop on this side. Still need to cut the hole for the staging track connection shown by the switch and put up the sky extension (laying in the river) that will support the other end of the backdrop and the east span of the double deck Steel Bridge.



Meanwhile,  I'm recycling the wood from the old layout into an 3-rail O gauge layout built high enough so I can work underneath and allow  a leg of the N layout to fit below as well. This layout will just be a couple of layered disconnected loops with generally realistic scenery (vs postwar grassmat  style). The irony here is that some of this wood dates back to the early 80's and my first O layout attempt which got recycled forward into multiple N layouts and back to today...

[pdx1955]

Completed the upper deck with the new O 3-rail layout , which now allows me to move ahead on the revised module version. Got the backdrop attached to the end cap that sits underneath the other layout, so I can finalize what fits or not. Here you can see this going on for three modules at once.






 

[pdx1955]

Been a while since I posted here last, but have been working on it here and there. All of the modules have a consistent look with black painted fascia and now with completed backdrops.
Also.to add some interest, I plan to add a second era in the early 1970s with some name and some key structure changes to make this into NP/BN in south Seattle.  Brooklyn Yard becomes NP's Stacy Street Yard for example. The Grand Avenue viaduct becomes Aurora Avenue. It obviously will be relatively generic in this era, but the mishmash of early BN and Amtrak is quite attractive and plus it allows me to purchase some new stuff as manufacturers seem to have moved on from the 50s.

[OldEastRR]

Glad to see more news on this layout, I like it. . I'm wondering how you'll do this two-eras thing. Will you have a basic set of cars that cover the intermediate era ('50s?) that stays on the layout permanently, then have two sets of interchangeable cars, one of pre-'50s, and one of '60's+, which you take off and put on the layout depending on your choice of time frames?
Back a few decades when the "layout that can change eras" thing was a fad (at least in MR), I built a small 2x4 foot layout that did that. But not just the engines and rolling stock -- I changed buildings, street surfaces, open lots into factories (and vice versa), signage, autos, etc. Where a street had stopped at the rail ROW in 1948, for the '70s I had a big approach ramp up to a four-lane bridge now taking the road over the trackage -- easily emplaced or removed when I changed eras. I had small "For Lease" and "For Sale" industrial property signs that I'd put on the big factories when I switched from the late '40s to the mid-70's, and they had no rail service. I even had a small freight depot on a spur, For the '40s, it had a C55 track section with PC ties  every 3" holding it together, and spiked down over glued-down wood ties. When the '70s came around, both the freight depot and the spur were removed from the layout, leaving only the brick-paved drive that used to serve it and the ties where the track had been. It was a fun project for a while.

[pdx1955]

I had actually considered doing the 70s on this layout in addition by replacing some structures with freeway overpasses, subbing/ removing others or ignoring certain spurs. This new idea is still the 70s but a modified locale. Luckily the SP and the NP had a friendly relationship so you would see a lot of each on the other's lines, so I have a good quantity of NP and other relatives. I used to model the late 60s on another SP line , so I saved a lot of the applicable NP equipment.

I've already identified certain car types that would work in both eras like general service flatcars and tank cars. A complication for the SP is that they renumbered everything in the mid 60s, which I won't worry about, but I'll still need to procure some 60s and 70s Hydra-Cushion labeled boxcars for example. I'm already adding some more modern mechanical refrigerators and covered hoppers as these were more prominent and are currently available.  This additional fleet will be added when I want to run the BN equipment and removed when use the SP stuff.  One advantage to this smaller footprint is that it only had about half of the freight car need, so I can keep both eras without a lot of extra space.

[pdx1955]

Finally moved a freight car project close to the finish line. Finished decaling the first batch of 1950s cars, namely a bunch of 40 foot SP B-50-15 class boxcars in MOW, general service and Overnight schemes plus a Traincat SP S-40-10 stockcar. Still have to add the trucks and couplers and do some weathering,  but the complex work is done. Also, have a batch of hogfuel boxcar conversions and 12.5K tank cars in progress.

[pdx1955]

Second batch of freightcars out of the decalling stage got the dullcote treatment tonight. These are the SP B-50-12 hogfuel (woodchip) conversions and kit bashed 12.5K O-50-11 and O-50-13 tank cars. The tank cars started as Bachmann triple domes which have the right length and diameter tank with Intermountain dome parts added after the original domes were removed.

[pdx1955]

Posed a few of the newly completed 1950s period freight cars on one of the modules. From left to right: Hogfuel/woodchip 40' boxcar conversion,  general service and Overnight B-50-15 boxcars (these are a couple of the Out of the Box Models pilot run cars; details are not as good as they could be but they work for now), and a couple of kitbashed 12.5 K tank cars in early and mid 50s schemes.

I should note that this represents completion of a project started around 2017 or so, although the painted cars have been setting in a box from about 2019 (these were originally assembled on work trips and were intended to be decalled that way too but that never happened.)

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Oh man, love the flex of all custom stuff.