Gibbon, Cozad & Western - "The 100th Meridian Line"

[GaryHinshaw]

I like most of what you have there in Cheyenne, except that a) it's too short, b) the yard entrance is on a sharp-ish curve, and c) the turn-back around the roundhouse looks 'Model Railroady' to me.  (Sorry, you asked.   )

If you're thinking of nuking Green river, you could put Cheyenne where GR is, which would let it be straight and stretch out a bit more, then have Cozad and Gibbon lie east of Cheyenne.  The current Cheyenne location could then be east staging, possibly with a massive grain elevator along the front (inner) side of the peninsula.  Something like:

   ________________________________/
 /                     Elevator
|                                                                         /
 \ ___________________________________/
   \                 East staging                                /
     \________________________________/

Food for thought.
-gfh

[C855B]

Originally I was thinking just arrival/departure with opportunity to move power around, but it won't take much to make it a working yard - mainly longer switching leads on the right end. Move the crossovers up a little, maybe. It currently somewhat resembles the real Cheyenne, which is not really a classification yard, that's what North Platte is for. Anyway, I think my prior mention of Cheyenne's "excuse" was that it was to be primarily an engine facility, which is all that stuff between the yards. If I can use it to re-block, that might be a good thing.

That reminds me, there's not enough of a switching lead/tail on the south end of East Yard. I'll shorten the switcher pocket at Pico Rivera and make room for a yard lead.

[C855B]

I like most of what you have there in Cheyenne, except that a) it's too short, b) the yard entrance is on a sharp-ish curve, and c) the turn-back around the roundhouse looks 'Model Railroady' to me.  (Sorry, you asked.   )

Agree with all of the above, you were reading my mind. I hate the curve around the roundhouse, that's what I was referring to about "spaghetti". I was thinking - for only a few seconds - to cut back on Afton Canyon for an extra 6-8 feet for Cheyenne in its current relative position.

Problem with moving Cheyenne to the Green River lobe is it requires the full width of the benchwork. That means I lose Wasatch Canyon, and also the upper deck for the branchline on the east side of that lobe. But that's not all bad - the vision on Wasatch was fading a little because the gradients required to make Curvo work made it the entire focus of that side of the lobe, there wasn't much room to develop anything else around a feature-rich prototype.

Let me continue to contemplate this. I have a version in the works that cuts GR, puts Wasatch on the east wall, leaves Cheyenne mostly intact but mitigates the curve from Hell, then creates a lobe going up for Cozad, etc. Let's see if I can get a couple of feet to help with the curves on the Cheyenne yard entrance.

[GaryHinshaw]

FWIW, I like the layout of the service facilities you have in Cheyenne.   

[C855B]

Thanks. Helps when you've been there and toured the facilities.

New thoughts... Green River will be axed in favor of putting Curvo on the tip of the lobe and developing Wasatch a little more, then maybe blending it into a snippet of Sherman Hill as it wraps around into (the translocated) Cozad. Eases the gradients and gets more mainline running. With that lobe now with heavier topography front and back, I'll move the branchline wraparound one lobe to the left. Not ideal since the branchline operator will have to go down Aisle 5 and then up Aisle 4 to follow his train, but I don't want the shadowbox to constrain the scenery on the main level.

It looks like I can squeeze a couple of feet bending Afton to the left and narrowing the entry to that aisle and the next, and with that then extend the Cheyenne lobe just enough to get the curve off the back wall of the roundhouse. I will still have to deal with the "model railroady" curve, but could then put some separation between the main and the yard lead. Also, I can do Ye Olde Scenery Trick of having a highway bridge break-up the arc, as the prototype does have a major bridge (US85) a stone's throw from the roundhouse. How convenient!

A couple of feet might be able to reduce the sharp curve on the right, and I'll push the main to the right to curve under the branchline (good excuse for a high-bent trestle!) and soften the approach angle.

A side note... I am getting a little more comfortable with narrowing the aisles to ~3' at the pinch points around the lobe ends. One factor is that I am no longer considering keeping the scissor lift once building construction is done. Even though I am now practiced on the thing, control is still coarse and the joystick is very touchy, with little range between barely moving and OHMYGODSTOP(!!!) [crunch, whimper]. There is no way it's going to be used around benchwork.

[Specter3]

If you are ditching Green River and bringing Cuervo around to the end and the entire penninsula is going to be heavy scenery, I would thin that penninsula quite a bit, thicken up the wall shelf and put Cheyenne on the wall with Cozad  and Gibbon on the climb up to the second level that will occur on the lobe formerly occupied by Cheyenne. The only downside is reach on the single sided yard and loco facility but since you are not classifiing there it can be done with four or five arrival and departure tracks on either side of the loco service areas.(i have not seen them for real so I dont really know what you are trying to represent. Probably wont get a full roundhouse in that kind of reach but it does put everything back in order map wise.

As for not wanting to shadow box in the large scale scenery on the penninsula with the branch deck, i understand that, but the upper deck does not need to be deep there. It can simply be 6-8 inches with basic scenery and traversing that long run will really give the branchline operations the feeling of being wayyy out into the boonies.

[3DTrains]

While the following is Horribly Oversized, here a friend's version of Cheyenne, which represents the west half, steam shop to CP-511 (his also curves as yours does):





Perhaps this will help with designing your version.

[C855B]

No progress to speak of. Things have been insane at work, plus everything with the layout building has been anything but trains - mostly outside work, including a botched paint job that is taking days to correct. But there is good news on another front...

I stopped by city hall today, and the development manager mentioned they were researching a "trainwatching platform of some sort". I rattled off Rochelle, Folkston and Horseshoe Curve. This came out of the blue, but I like to think that my talking up this idea a while back planted some seeds. By all indications they're serious about doing something, and relatively soon. There has been a lot of positive development downtown plus quite a bit of "train interest" civic activity, so they're expanding on this theme, evidently. Neat!

[C855B]

Three weeks since last report... no interior progress, no trains other than watching the 1:1 stuff whilst toiling outside. The calendar is dictating our priorities now. We have been working (to exhaustion) on grading and cleaning up the lot for seeding the lawn, trying to get it established before the first frost, roughly Halloween. Five weeks and counting.

Exterior painting is controlled by the calendar, too. We seem to be over the hump on progress for two walls, but I'm afraid the north wall won't happen until next spring since we have to replace several panels. I have no helpers at the moment, and, also, the replacement panels have the same bad paint behind the aforementioned "botched paint job" and need to be scraped and wire-brushed before they go up.

Railcam is live, but still not outside, seeing that it will be mounted on the north wall. Within the next week or two I will come to terms with what it will take to get the north wall fixed. If it in fact looks like spring, then I'll mount the camera outside before the weather turns, and take it down when we paint. If anybody is curious, the railcam can be viewed at http://www.railfancentralia.com/railcam.html. You'll need QuickTime and a non-IE browser to see it. Normally it looks at my tool storage area, but I just checked and it appears it might have been knocked out of position while we were moving stuff around. Anyway, you won't see much of anything at this writing seeing that the inside lights are out.

When the grass is planted and the painting in some state of doneness we will return to interior projects. Still much work remaining before starting benchwork.

[reinhardtjh]

No big whoop, but when I tried to look at your tool storage I got a logon prompt.  Just in case it wasn't intentional.   

Firefox 18.0  Mac OS X 10.6.8

[C855B]

Thanks for checking, John. No, it's supposed to work. If you got a logon prompt you somehow got to the camera's HTTP page (and I'm curious to know how).

Try this URL in QuickTime:  rtsp://railcam.railfancentralia.com/axis-media/media.amp

EDIT: At the moment I can't get to the control page, so I'm thinking somebody is bogarting the channel. There is a new web crawler out there that specifically looks for cameras, so all it takes is a couple of hackers hammering on the entry page to mess up the access. It looks like I'm going to have to obfuscate the admin stuff a little more than just a login lock.

[packers#1]

Railcam works for me

[C855B]

Thanks, Sawyer. Yeah, the stream access seems to be OK. I just tried it from IE on my old Dell and it played fine. When I get over there this morning I probably ought to reboot it.

[Specter3]

I knew from the start this would be a project of large proportions before the first piece of benchwork was cut. I look forward to all of your posts, model rr and building renovation alike.

[C855B]

Gosh... thanks! Sometimes the motivation can sag a little on a project of this scale, especially when stuff takes 4-5X longer than you expected, even given our renovation experience.

Today was in fact a red-letter day - after weeks of grading and raking, with several days of showers in the forecast, the lawn was finally seeded. All we have to do now is sit around and watch grass grow. (Yeah, right.) The whole neighborhood has been watching this process and frequently a passing pedestrian would compliment the progress. It really was an ugly lot, and everybody including us is now eagerly waiting for the park to magically appear. There's a bunch of work left to make it park-like, but that's going to wait until after next spring's over-seed.

Robyn is exhausted, however. I pushed her hard today, her task spreading the straw over the seeded areas... maybe a half-acre. Took her three hours.

The rain has its downside - painting the exterior is on hold. We must have 24 hours of no moisture after applying, be that fog, dew or rain. So, painting has proven to be an excruciating process, but we have learned much about painting metal buildings, our own abilities with a brush (mine - great, hers... well, needs work), and the special paint we have to use. The airless sprayer works fine for the big surfaces if I don't use too aggressive of a tip, or try to start-stop-start around trim, lest I get sags. Adding insult is the usual problem with true reds, like we have with models. Reds are transparent, and it's taking three and sometimes four coats to get full coverage. Lesson learned is we should have done a gray first. But it's too late at this point, we're committed.

Anyway, where the painting is done, it's "Oh, wow!", so we're still a little pumped about it.

Other good news is we have new help in the wings. There are a few projects on the short list that require a couple of strong backs, and with help we can knock those out in short time. If we can't paint in the next week or so, I'll rejigger the task order to make headway on inside stuff.

One upside of concentrating on the exterior work... it has required very little in the way of construction supplies. Our Lowe's bill has been remarkably small the past couple of months.