North West Great Northern Layout

[NorthWestGN]

The Hobby Smith is still there as well as the Whistle Stop so Portland has two decent stores, we're down to one in Vancouver BC, Intercity Trains in Langley. They bought up Central Hobbies inventory and brought in two of their staff. I was hoping to find a decent store in the Seattle area I could visit in the next few months. I did see Eastside Trains in Kirkland, anyone been there?

I hate shopping online and much prefer a brick and mortar Hobby Shop experience, just another way that I'm old school....

Brent

[NorthWestGN]

A simple bridge plan:



After looking more closely at all the photos I have available, what looked like triple bents on each end of the girder span appear to be double bents ala @wazzou 's bridge posted earlier. I'll have to skew those bents quite a bit from perpendicular to the track centerline to keep the bridge shoes on the smaller bents and will have to slide the girder span slightly off center to keep the rails directly over the girders as much as possible. This section of track has a slight grade in addition to the curvature, about a 15" radius, so may have to build it in place once I get the flex track in from a special order through Intercity Trains... who knows how long that'll take...

Cheaping out on the piles and buying 48" lengths of 1/8" dowel at Home Depot at $ 1.98 each...

Thanks for tuning in,
Brent

[wazzou]

Nice. 
Don't forget that the bent on the top of the double bents is a pony bent.  It is a separate bent entirely.
It is what the stringers under the trestle approach terminate on as it abuts the steel span.
My bridges are entirely built from Styrene and painted, just FYI.

[NorthWestGN]

Thanks for the clarification Bryan, I can see that clearly now on your build and could have sworn it was scale wood, not styrene...nice work!

Printing out the picture you posted of yours for reference while building mine...

Brent

[NorthWestGN]

Hi Everyone,

it's been a little while since my last post and while there's no new construction to report, plans are always swirling in my head. I did attend our largest local show on November 2nd and picked up a few things to push myself forward. One thing that I brought home was a set of smallish concrete Chooch tunnel portals with a very appropriate build date of 1899 that's only a few years away from when this line was originally built.



I had always planned to have a tunnel here, the plywood road bed was left wider here to accommodate portals. There were no tunnels on the prototype but I want to force more visual separation between the lines of this folded loop by adding areas of interest as one would walk around while operating this layout point to point. This may also allow me to extend one track of the Fruitvale yard toward the upgrade track here...possibly a place to load hoppers full of zinc ore...

While digging through my pile of saved magazine clippings and files I ran across this piece of Vintage High Rail ephemera :



Looks like there's room for a decoder in that F unit but I don't think you'd have to worry about a speaker, those gears will provide their own soundtrack!

Thanks for Tuning in!
Brent

[MK]

"...The Cadillacs of Model Railroading"   

[nkalanaga]

For their time they were among the best.  The first "modern" locos I had that could run better than the Minitrix Fs were the Atlas/Kato RS-3s.  I had a four-unit set of Fs wired together, and they would run through even my dirty track.  My father insisted that we heat the house with a wood-burning stove, and the track got dirty quite quickly.

And, no, the Fs weren't that noisy.  Broken in, mine were actually quiet, at reasonable speeds.  They'd whine at full throttle, but my layout wasn't long enough for that!  The gears meshed well enough that there wasn't much noise, unlike Bachmann's coffee grinders.

[NorthWestGN]

From the cut away side view they look like they're all wheel pickup and all wheel drive, I can't recall ever seeing any run...I just assumed they were noisy 

The earliest N Scale loco I remember was an Alco RSD -15 "alligator" which I recall was terribly noisy and geared for the dragstrip.... I did have an Atlas/Kato RS-3 back in the 90's and it was a wonderful runner, smooth and quiet even without the flywheels we've all become accustomed to. My current RS-2 is a split frame Life-Like I picked up on sale back in the early 2000's and it puts my Atlas/ Kato GP30 to shame....

I know Walthers bought up the tooling and released their own version and I suspect the Kato version is very close in design as well as it uses the same Digitrax decoder as the one spec'd for the Life-Like / Walthers versions...

[nkalanaga]

They were all-wheel pickup and drive. Old-school, one side picked up through the axle, metal gearbox/truck frame, and loco frame, the other by back-of-wheel wipers rubbing on a PC board under the motor, hidden in the cats-on fuel tank.  Ran very nicely as long as the wheels and track were clean.

Before we moved into a house with a fireplace, we had an all-electric mobile home.  The biggest source of "dirt" was cat hair.  Cleaning the trucks was easy.  Remove one screw, take the plastic sideframe/gear retainer off, remove the hair, put it back together.  No need to take anything else apart, literally a 30-second job.

[mcjaco]

From the cut away side view they look like they're all wheel pickup and all wheel drive, I can't recall ever seeing any run...I just assumed they were noisy 

The earliest N Scale loco I remember was an Alco RSD -15 "alligator" which I recall was terribly noisy and geared for the dragstrip.... I did have an Atlas/Kato RS-3 back in the 90's and it was a wonderful runner, smooth and quiet even without the flywheels we've all become accustomed to. My current RS-2 is a split frame Life-Like I picked up on sale back in the early 2000's and it puts my Atlas/ Kato GP30 to shame....

I know Walthers bought up the tooling and released their own version and I suspect the Kato version is very close in design as well as it uses the same Digitrax decoder as the one spec'd for the Life-Like / Walthers versions...

My neighbor had the alligator.  In BC paint, no less.  It was noisy as was everything else he had at the time but we ran those early Atlas and Minitrix locos around his spaghetti bowl layout daily, and loved every minute of it! 

[NorthWestGN]

More Research = More Projects

I'm getting a little overwhelmed with potential projects for this layout, the more I research I do the more projects I come up with...

With an eye toward prototype operation and rail traffic in the future I want to model the local lumber industry in addition to the mining and ore production that together were responsible for the bulk of traffic on the line. The modified early hopper for zinc ore I posted earlier service would handle the ore transport. As for lumber and wood products there seems to have been a tremendous range of ways to transport both logs and finished lumber during the 60's. From what I can tell they were still using double door 40 and 50 foot boxcars for finished lumber with a transition to both open loads on staked flatcars and open and wrapped lumber loads on early 50 foot bulkhead flat cars. The boxcars and regular flatcars are not a problem but I've having trouble finding early bulkhead flats...

I may have to do what GN did and create my own...





This would be a simple build I think, and I also still have a Gold Medal Models kit to convert a 50 foot MT flat to a GSC Bulkhead flatcar... I don't need a lot of cars, maybe 3 or 4 BH flats with removable loads to break up the strings of boxcars...

For inbound logs, I can rely on semi trucks, converted log bunk flat cars, skeleton log cars or even gondolas were sometimes put to use. no wonder they got so beat up...

Another product coming out of the mills would be wood chips, the big high clearance 60 foot cars were just coming in but I'd prefer to stick with smaller 40 and 50' cars with my short train lengths and tight curves. Early Chip cars were modified GS gondolas with extended sides, this first composite one has a distinctive bracing pattern on the extended sides, one could add the wooden sides to a Dimitrains gondola or one of the early "Hi-Rail" composite gondolas. Again I only need about 4 -6 cars so not too daunting...



Or add Steel sides to a later MT GS gondola:



And I also ran across this early timber frame chip loader that would work for the tight confines of the center of my layout with what looks like a covered conveyor or piping system up from the mill floor. This was at a plywood mill in Bellingham, Washington about 45 minutes south of my place in Canada and perfect for another small scratch building project:




I better get offline and start building or this threads going to turn into how to plan an operating railroad that exists only in ones imagination... but I really enjoy digging up this stuff!

Thanks for tuning in!
Brent