The Milwaukee Road in Chillicothe, MO

[milw12]

As seen in a recent weekend thread, my newest flavor of the week is the Milwaukee Road in Chillicothe, Missouri, during the early-mid seventies. After the Weyerhouser module ran into some operational and modelling walls, I was looking into a new prototype project. Chillicothe hit all the right check marks, and other than hometown Twin Cities railroading, the Milwaukee in Missouri is a close second.

Here's a rough, not to scale sketch of the Milwaukee passing through Chilllicothe, with best guesses as to the industries:



And this is the stylized Chillicothe (read: "selectively compressed") to fit my 12"x75" shelf, plus 4' cassette:



As an aside, I attempted to keep the industries colors similar between the two images for clarity into the thought process.

I dropped the top-most (east-most track) and shuffled some of the industries onto the remaining track, and added a crossover for better run-around moves. I imagine it's somewhere on the mile-long passing track, but I needed it a little closer to home

In reality the lumberyard took up all of the inner industry track but did not fully utilize it, so it was easy enough to condense and add select industries from the other track. Traffic appears to be pretty light anyway, so it's an easy fix. I'm keeping the same order and orientation of the industries, so operations will be as close to reality as possible given my considerations. I figured off some rough measurements that my module is at 70% compression, but should capture the essence of the town. Naturally Chillicothe (and railroading in general) will be more prosperous on the layout than the reality of the seventies to keep operations busy, the grain elevator being rail served still, etc. These are the compromises I can make and still sleep at night.

A '76 industry list, with the Milwaukee highlighted for a start. The BN [CBQ] and NW [Wabash] ran on the other side of town, the Milwaukee skirted around to the east.



I need an older list, because a few obvious industries are missing. That's definitely a grain elevator but it's not listed, among others. Best guess is that they are truck served by my time frame. And plenty seem like  they'd be served by a team track/laydown yard.

As of Labor Day weekend, this was the current progress, as posted in that weekend thread:





As seen, the layout is wired for DCC, using an NCE Power Pro with an always awesome Protothrottle. Tam Valley frog juicers are wired to all frogs, and I included a programming track near the freight house.

Over the past week, I mounted the cassette:



Which allowed for the first op session, switching the lumber yard and team track:



It's good to jfrt 

Lucas

[C855B]

It never dawned on me that "the other RR" in Chillicothe was originally the Milwaukee. Last time we were there we had lunch at "Wabash BBQ" which appears to be in the old Milwaukee depot.

[Bryn]

Lucas,

Looking forward to seeing this layout progress!

[packers#1]

Very cool project; the Missouri North Central in town was one of the little Missouri shortlines (the other being the one in Mexico, MO, whose name I cannot recall) that really got me started onto how cool modern shortlines could be. I like the trackplan and execution you have going and can’t wait to see more!

[milw12]

Thanks for the kind words all!

Four posts in and it's time to derail my own thread Honestly I got a little intimidated my the scope of this project- it's the kind of layout that I would want to get right using the best of my abilities. I felt some practice was required first, plus I was tired of breaking-in and running my trains on a unitrak loop. So a few months ago the test loop was born. I'll dump some progress photographs here as it doesn't really warrant an individual thread- plus it'll lead right back into Chillicothe at some point.

For this little 24"x40" layout I was heavily inspired by Caleb Austin's C&O layout, Dave Foxx's 'peanut,' DKS's small layouts, Ed K's kidney, Chuck Gieger's series of 2x4's, MiNi-Modutrack and more, basically using what  I've seen on the Railwire over the years.















Lucas

[Missaberoad]

Very nice! You're definitely on your way to capturing the look of the southern half of the Milwaukee in the 1970s... 

[Bryn]

Lucas,

Great choice of colours, the dried long grass is especially effective. I agree the idea of a test piece is the best way to go, that loop of track will be useful for years to come!

[BOK]

Nice work, Lucas and great scenery.

A little continuous, railroad has a lot to offer plus it lets you run trains for relaxation. Looking forward to maybe seeing some structures added?

Keep up the good work.

Barry

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Oh man, I love this.

[chuck geiger]

Wow thanks for the props Lucas.

[Vince P]

Coming along very nicely like the way it's turning out

[skytop35]

Looking good my friend !

[Jim Starbuck]

Not sure how I missed this thread before.
Beautiful work Lucas!