East Tennessee & Western North Carolina RR ("The Tweetsie") branchline in On30

[p51]

Over the weekend, I was busy with a bunch of detail stuff.
I took a couple of coaches I bought it a show for next to nothing, Christmas patterns, and turn them both into Maintenance of Way cars. I didn't really need them, and I probably won't use them in any op sessions, but I just wanted to mess around with them because I had almost no money in them.


Take a look at the soda bottles in the pallet, each was an individual piece. That took quite a while to get those together...

I also added a LOT of new detail, including some tarps, tarped loads, damaged oil drums, and several other things...


I also ran my trench locomotive:

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[p51]

Did a couple of new videos last night:

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[Hawghead]

Lee,

Is there any chance  you could go and edit the early pages of this thread and upload the original photos that have been blanked by photo bucket.  I sure would like to see the early development of this layout.  I understand if it would be to much effort.

Thanks,
Scott

[p51]

Is there any chance  you could go and edit the early pages of this thread and upload the original photos that have been blanked by photo bucket.  I sure would like to see the early development of this layout.  I understand if it would be to much effort.

Scott, that'd be a pretty large effort to do that, something that rates pretty low on the priority list, sadly.
Darned photobucket. I pay to use Flickr now...
These aren't sequential, but you'll get what you're looking for here if you have the time: https://www.flickr.com/photos/53587910@N05/albums/72157668176638961

[Hawghead]

Lee,

Thanks for posting the link to the pictures.  I know it would have been a lot of work to update the thread and I was just hoping to get an idea of the size and the track plan.  From the surviving pictures in this thread, the layout seems much larger than it is, you've packed a lot of railroad in a small space without creating a bowl of spaghetti, great job.

Scott

[p51]

Over the last couple of days, I've been playing around with some lighting ideas...

I really like how this turned out:

I know it would have been a lot of work to update the thread and I was just hoping to get an idea of the size and the track plan.  From the surviving pictures in this thread, the layout seems much larger than it is, you've packed a lot of railroad in a small space without creating a bowl of spaghetti, great job.

Thanks! Maybe these will help, Scott:

[p51]

These photos aren't the best quality, but yesterday I added a Pyle steam-powered generator to the roof of my Baldwin 'trench' Class 10 locomotive. The Davenport copies all had generators by the 1940s, so I figured this needed one as well.



And as an afterthought once the glue and paint was drying on the locomotive, I took the rest of the castings I had (mostly small hand tools and such) and made a scale work bench from scale lumber, trying to make a 'field expedient' bench of the type I often saw in my own Army days.



Later, I took these better shots with my 'real' camera:

[p51]

Over the weekend, the 796th Railway Operating Battalion ready their 2-6-2T for another day's duty...


Meanwhile, some of the tools have been spread out for some much-needed journal work on a boxcar:


Nearby, the wheeled vehicles for the unit remain silent for now, safely secured within their motor pool area:

[Ed Kapuscinski]

That thing is crying out for a tiny bit of repaired battle damage.

[p51]

That thing is crying out for a tiny bit of repaired battle damage.

If it had battle damage in Tennessee in 1943, something would have really gone wrong with the large war games at the other end of the state in that same timeframe!

[johnb]

If it had battle damage in Tennessee in 1943, something would have really gone wrong with the large war games at the other end of the state in that same timeframe!

not if it found someone's still...

[p51]

not if it found someone's still...

The funny thing is when people visit my layout for the first time, they often ask where the still is.
For a layout that takes place in Tennessee in the 1940s, you'd think a moonshine still would be a requirement. The problem there is that while at least a few relatives of my parents were moonshiners, any moonshine still they would have had would have been way up in the woods where nobody could see it until they were standing next to it. My Dad spent a great deal of his youth hunting and trapping up in those hills and he confirmed that he never once stumbled across a still that was being used at the time or had been used recently. Mom told me she once saw parts of a busted up still when she was a kid but never anything else like it.
There's also the W2 era rationing issue. You'd need a lot of rationed supplies to make moonshine and with many of the young men off fighting the war, turns out that moonshining wasn't that big a thing in that place and time as it wasn't practical to make it then.
I'm actually disappointed that putting a moonshine still out where a visitor to the layout could see it would be so incorrect as I was looking forward to building one (as I know exactly what it would have looked like back then from photos I have of found stills in the 30s).

[nuno81291]

You should make a very small diorama of a still in the woods. Haven’t seen one done but could be a neat way to scratch that itch while keeping it more prototypical.

[p51]

Last night I decided to test the pulling power of my new locomotive. I put almost all the freight cars on the layout behind it and it only slipped once I put a passenger car onto the end of that. Once I pulled that coach back off, I had 14 cars in tow, making it the longest train I’ve ever run here:

I'm quite sure the real Baldwin Class 10s couldn't pull that many cars.

My ET&WNC ten-wheelers, I’m sure, could handle this with ease but I’ve never pulled more than about 6-7 cars behind one of those.

[p51]

As part of the Army presence, I finished several 55-gallon drums, and dozens of Jerry cans.

This Tamaiya kit included several German cans, so I glued them in rows together, with American cans on each end, so it wasn't obvious.
The empty drums are made by Tichy Train Group.
I added some hand crank pumps to a couple of the barrels, but I don't remember who made those.
I also designed a small open sided structure, which will sit roughly where all these drums are sitting. It will provide cover for a workbench, and several loose items on the layout, including most of these drums and cans...