Tehachapi Upper Tunnels on a Shelf Module

[Ian MacMillan]

Looking very nice. This is gonna be a nice layout to just sit an railfan on.

[robert3985]

Hi Ed,the work looks great. I need to span a 5 ft opening to my work bench area and was thinking of using the 2" blue foam glued together.
Will this sag if it has no bottom support. I plan to make this a lift out section.

 thanks Flagler

Flagler,

I'm not Ed, but in my experience 2" blue foam, even glued together, will sag after a while...especially in a long span, which 5 feet is.  I suppose that the amount of sag depends on how many layers you're going to laminate, but, sag it will. 

I'd buy aluminum L-girders or C-girders or I beams at The Home Depot to take care of the problem and put the Styrofoam on top or imbed the girder(s) in your foam structure.  Depending on the width of your lift-out section maybe just a single aluminum structural beam would suffice.  I'd get a piece that has at least a 2" cross section in the vertical.

The aluminum beams will stiffen your lift out section and not add much weight, but if weight isn't a big deal, 1X4's (premium pine...not cheap full-o-knots stuff) would work as well.

If your span was half of what you're planning (30"), I'd say go for it, but 60" is too large a span for just Styrofoam IMHO.

[Scottl]

I agree, I'm a big fan of foam as a structural element, but it needs some support over spans of that length.  Even if you did not have sagging, the risk of accidental damage is very real in that case.

Nice work Ed- I'm enjoying watching this come together.

[ednadolski]

Thanks everyone, I'm glad to see your responses!   Let me try to go thru some of the points:

Sag with foam like this is definitely a concern.   In fact you might note in the pix, there are a few 2x2s stuck under the foam boards for temporary support.  Adding the front & rear fascia panels might provide some stiffness, but I'm not counting on that, esp. for a long span like this.  My plan has always been to build some sort of underlying shelf or support, but I haven't quite decided on what since I'm not yet sure what the final installation will be.  If I ever integrate this into a larger layout, then I'll fit it in with whatever structure I build for that.  Flagler, I think even a short span of a few feet for a lift-out will need some kind of structural support, either built into the lift-out panel itself, or in the surrounding structure.

Bob, on those long tunnel liners you mention, will they include an interior roof?   How then do you plan to ballast the track inside the tunnel?   In my case I'm thinking to put down at least some ballast even in the tunnels, otherwise it could look funny if peering in from the end.  Except for the railheads it would all be painted black like the rest of the tunnels.  Seems too that the tunnels could be a good place to hide feeder wires.

Ian - railfanning is the goal, but I'm not too sure about sitting 'on' the layout -- with foam construction, that would be more catastrophic than even the 1952 Tehachapi earthquake! 

Gary for the scenery along the front I wanted to try some carved foam, as I wanted to see how that works out on a layout.   Likely the rear hills will be foam too, with plaster castings for the rock faces.   I'm kind of envisioning some of the techniques that I had seen on some of the recent Pelle Soeeborg books -- even tho those are HO, seems to me they ought to scale down nicely to N, and some of his 'mountain' scenes are to me reminiscent of Tehachapi.

M.C, glad you're liking the curves, but the credit for those has to go to William Hood, I'm just trying to do a scaled-down copy what he did!    BTW this is (very) roughly about 50% of scale size.  The sharpest curve is that one in Tunnel 16 at about 24" radius, and that one is partly in the tunnel where a viewer won't see the entire curve at once.  So I'm optimistic that even really long autoracks and flats ought to look good, and that this module won't be the constraining factor in terms of the ability to run really long trains.

Cheers,
Ed

[robert3985]

Thanks everyone, I'm glad to see your responses!   Let me try to go thru some of the points:

Bob, on those long tunnel liners you mention, will they include an interior roof?   How then do you plan to ballast the track inside the tunnel?   In my case I'm thinking to put down at least some ballast even in the tunnels, otherwise it could look funny if peering in from the end.  Except for the railheads it would all be painted black like the rest of the tunnels.  Seems too that the tunnels could be a good place to hide feeder wires.

Cheers,
Ed

Ed, I'll be painting, weathering and ballasting the tracks on the inside of the tunnels before laying the carved liners over them.  Yup, they'll have curved roofs and be painted sooty, seepy concrete like the prototype which is only about 20 minutes from my home (I've taken several hundred photos of them over the years).  They also have guard rails, and I'm thinking I'll be gluing and spiking them in place so's to be robust, using Andy's long etched SS spikes.

So...twin bore tunnels with superelevated curves each about 18" long, painted, weathered and ballasted with guardrails and complete tunnel liners carved from 3" high density Styrofoam...it's a project!

Incidentally, I do hide four track feeders inside these tunnels.  GMTA 

I think you'll really like using Styrofoam as a scenery base.  It gives me exact control as opposed to hardshell plaster scenery base.  I'm also carving it to represent the unique Echo sandstone formations in Echo Canyon, using my homemade hot-wire knife, and various other carving tools and texturing schemes.  I'm not going to have a lot of plaster carvings on my rock formations, and those that I plan on doing will be lightened with generous amounts of microballoons since my layout is portable.

I'm also finding that shortening the LDE's to about 50% still makes for long, impressive scenes, and the scale width makes the observer's eye not notice the shorter lengths. I attempt to do minimum scenes of 12' or longer.

I'm really looking forward to seeing you detail the hell out of this LDE.  I am planning on being both amazed and inspired.

[Flagler]

Thanks for the Tips on my Lift out section to all who replied.The width will be between 12"-16"

[ednadolski]

I'm rather overdue for an update on this thread.  My apologies, my time has gone into some other efforts, including the coupler pocket project.  But anyways, I've been able to get together another sample of track, this time featuring the Minitic #0311 ballast sample that Lennart had so graciously sent to me -- thanks Lennart!    This track is the Micro Engineering Code 40, painted and weathered, and with the rails extending over a section of concrete ties that were taken from M.E. Code 55 flextrack and glued in place with Pliobond.  Here are the pics:







To my eye this ballast is noticeably finer than the HO AZRM ballast that I has used on the previous samples.   The color seems a shade darker,  however I think the difference is hard to see in person, unless they are right next to each other.   This sample track is also lightly weathered with some AIM powders (Medium Gray and a bit of Dark Gray), lightly brushed onto the track areas.

Ed

[robert3985]

Ed.  What a fanatic.  Keep it up...excellent innovation and work!

[NARmike]

Ed;
One solution to the sagging metioned in previous posts would be to use steel stud as a frame. I have used them on my layout sections with great sucess. They are readily available, cheap and extremely light weight. My sections are 30" x 90" with the stud spacing at 15" alolng the length. Not only do they provide the strenth needed to prevent sagging (I tested them by laying on them  ) but they also give someting solid to attach legs to and make connections at the interfaces.
I've detailed the construction of the section bases here: http://nscalenar.blogspot.ca/2011/11/module-build.html



Mike

[svedblen]

]To my eye this ballast is noticeably finer than the HO AZRM ballast that I has used on the previous samples.   The color seems a shade darker,  however I think the difference is hard to see in person, unless they are right next to each other.   This sample track is also lightly weathered with some AIM powders (Medium Gray and a bit of Dark Gray), lightly brushed onto the track areas.

I'm not sure that I can see that the minitec ballast is finer than the AZRM. The difference is more "theoretical" than "real" I guess. The stones in the minitec might be a little more "edgy". If that is more or less true to the prototype I cannot tell.

If you do not mind, I still think you should avoid ballast on top of the concrete ties. That might be prototypically correct but I agree with Jim Kelly, who in his book "Trackside scenes you can model" (Kalmbach), has included a picture of a real Kentucky coal-marshalling yard where the ballast partly covers the ties. Mr Kelly advises against modeling anything like that, and bluntly says "Folks just think you have done a sloppy ballasting job". Just my two pennies 

If you still decide to leave ballast on the tie tops I will secretly applaud you. But don't tell anyone 

/Lennart

PS But well done of course

[GaryHinshaw]

Looks really good Ed.   I think I lost track of which sample you want us to compare this to; but in an absolute sense, it's muy bueno.  Of course, the most important thing is that it look right to you under layout viewing conditions.

I'd be curious to see a long shot down the tracks.  I think I agree with Lennart that clean tie tops look more "convincing" whether or not it is more accurate.  I'm struggling with the same question myself: the stretch of track I ballasted on the east slope has a slight "overburden" and when I look down the tracks, it looks a bit too heavy, even though it's close to "correct".  I think I'll scour it off a bit before I apply weathering.

Cheers,
Gary

P.S. The concrete looks a tiny bit pink in your shots... Probably a slight color balance issue?

[robert3985]

If you do not mind, I still think you should avoid ballast on top of the concrete ties. That might be prototypically correct but I agree with Jim Kelly, who in his book "Trackside scenes you can model" (Kalmbach), has included a picture of a real Kentucky coal-marshalling yard where the ballast partly covers the ties. Mr Kelly advises against modeling anything like that, and bluntly says "Folks just think you have done a sloppy ballasting job". Just my two pennies 

If you still decide to leave ballast on the tie tops I will secretly applaud you. But don't tell anyone 

/Lennart

PS But well done of course

First off...who give a rat's weenie what other people are going to think...'specially if they're wrong?

What I do, is keep prototype photos handy for my own reference and also to hand to those who are uninformed about what I'm modeling.  It's much quicker to just hand the naysayers a photo, than waste time 'splaining to them the reason for something you've done that's different, but prototypical.

By the way, if you haven't noticed, Ed's all about "prototypically correct"...nothing less will do.

Just my two bits worth.

[svedblen]

First off...who give a rat's weenie what other people are going to think...'specially if they're wrong?

Sure Bob, everyone is having it their own way. Some give a weenie, some don't. Just offering som friendly tips. 

[robert3985]

Sure Bob, everyone is having it their own way. Some give a weenie, some don't. Just offering som friendly tips. 

Haha    Yup, some do, some don't.  My advice was and is friendly too. 

Although I am perfectly aware that "everyone is having it their own way", I am not the one encouraging Ed to lower his standards to please uninformed onlookers with any "friendly tips".  Quite the opposite.

I have admired Ed's work for a long time.  I would bet my last package of Railcraft Code 40 that he will not heed any such advice. 

[packers#1]

What I do, is keep prototype photos handy for my own reference and also to hand to those who are uninformed about what I'm modeling.  It's much quicker to just hand the naysayers a photo, than waste time 'splaining to them the reason for something you've done that's different, but prototypical.

This occured to me as well; I think that roughly borders a quote from Tony Koester as well.
I'd leave it if it looks right, take it out if it doesn't. Whichever works best, really