First off, a little introduction for those who don't already know my story. My name is Joe Gartman, I am a Locomotive Engineer for BNSF out of Bakersfield and work over Tehachapi. I am a life-long model railroader, started in N scale, played around with HO for a while in my teens, but never left N scale. Built my first real layout when I was in high school, think I learned more while I was tearing it apart than I did building it... My modeling focus has always been on the Southern Pacific. Originally, I was modeling the mid-1980s and some mid-1990s era equipment, mainly in HO. The more I researched and learned about the railroad and railroad equipment, my interest quickly traveled backwards through time and found a home in 1967. I narrowed that down to July due to the abolishment of timetable operations and display of train numbers in the indicators on June 28, 1967 and the last of the ALCO PA units were retired in September, 1967, F units were plentiful and the SD45 was brand new. This also opened up the liberty of not having dedicated lead units for scheduled trains, etc.
I have always liked the lumber industry and an article I read on the Toledo Branch about 20 years ago spiked my interest further. The branch runs between Albany and Toledo, Oregon and was home to numerous lumber mills and the large Georgia Pacific paper mill in Toledo itself. The Portland and Western operates the branch currently and the paper mill is the last major online customer.
Between the Espee focused websites and the great content of the Morning Sun books and Tony Thompson's excellent works, I have read a lot of material and looked at thousands of freight car photos. My goal is to replicate, as closely as I can, the equipment that was in lumber/paper service in 1967. That, coupled with accurate motive power, operations and industries all tied into a layout that does a reasonably faithful job of representing the Toledo Branch within the limits of the space I have. I have been engineering my equipment fleet over the last 15 years to accomplish this.
Enough of that, time to lay out my railroad for you. I obtained a spare bedroom to work with a couple of years ago. Original planning had some criteria to meet: the layout was to be operations oriented with all visible trackage in a linear walk-around fashion, staging separate from the visible trackage, needed to be an SP branch line in Oregon and most of all, be movable since I am only renting the house I am in.. I wanted a town at the end of the branch, at least one outlying industry and a little scenery and bridges in between. I was not sure if I wanted to focus on the Toledo Branch or take elements from several branches and compile my own branch, but after studying the valuation maps and especially the 1960 station map for Toledo, it was settled. Toledo fit the upper deck quite well and by moving the paper mill to the “wrong side” of the tracks, I was able to fit in almost all of the industries in Toledo.
Construction is mostly ¾ inch plywood. I had some modular bench work frames fabricated from ¾ inch plywood that were given to me, I decided to break them up and reuse the lumber. I came up with a bench work plan that fit well, allowed access to the window and left enough room for my workbench. It is arranged in a somewhat horseshoe shape that runs along two walls and extends onto a peninsula. The bench work is open frame with risers to the sub roadbed and was built in three sections, joined with carriage bolts and ½ inch dowel alignment plugs. Backdrops and fascia are Masonite, furred in with 1x2 pine. Track work is a mix of Micro Engineering code 55 flex track, hand laid turnouts and derails and hand laid code 40 in most of the industry/auxiliary trackage. As of this writing, about 90% of the visible track is in and the rest should be over the next few months.
The staging yard is on a lower level underneath Toledo and has the main line, a runaround track, three storage tracks and two engine tracks. The track leaves staging and enters the visible portion on the back side of the peninsula passing under the Highway 20 overpass. The 3 G's Lumber Company mill that was at Wrens is modeled here. The track continues around the peninsula with Tunnel 24 at the end of the peninsula, though the tunnel itself is not in place yet. The track exits the tunnel and crosses the Yaquina River twice on a pair of timber trestles. The track then runs into Toledo, which is along the two walls. Robert's Lumber Company is at the edge of Toledo, then the track splits into main, siding and back track. The GP paper mill is located along the backdrop and is accessed from the siding. The back track comes off of the main towards the fascia, with the engine track and spur for the GP plywood plant at the far end. The back track and siding tie back into the main. The house track and Standard Oil spur come off of the main beyond this and the main swings around 180 degrees to the end of the branch with the wood chip dump for the paper mill. I added a continuous loop, utilizing a helix under the far end of Toledo that connects back into the staging yard. The station map showed a track that connected into a logging line at one time, I decided to use that to escape to the helix, which comes off of the far end of the siding and will vanish behind some trees. Operations are done in a point-to-staging fashion, with the continuous loop only being used when I just want to run a train, or have company over that wants to see my “train set.”
This thread will be mainly focused on my progress from now on, but I will toss in some construction photos and a few bits on how things got to this point from time to time. I toss in a couple of "overview" photos to start. These were taken when I painted the backdrop blue. A lot has changed since then, but these show the bench work well.
And one more, Tunnel 24 will be to the right of the photo.
