Allegheny Eastern: Clean Slate

[kelticsylk]

Today I added the missing crosspieces and drilled all the holes for the bolts. All of the sections are now bolted together and the time has come to print out the full size plan.

After running a couple of test prints (3 or 4 pages) I realized I had to address the width of the roadbed. This dimension is set in the Print function of XTrkCAD and isn't visible until the plan prints...

I had the dimension set at 6.5" or there abouts, thinking that was a good size for a four track main. What I didn't know was that the program uses that dimension for every track. It's not smart enough to know I meant "overall".

I kept reducing the size until it looked right and ended up with a final dimension of .75"...

The line I will use for the jigsaw cuts is marked Roadbed Outline O.D. It's a little wider than the ballast strip is. I want to be able to bring the scenery right up to the track.

Setting the roadbed width will also give me the dimensions I'll need for the helix. I will use the same lines to cut out the pieces.

I'm not going to attempt the threaded rod usually used. Instead the helix will have a "core". There really is no way to get at the helix from the bottom (storage underneath) so I'm going to have to access it from the outside. The "core" will serve as a support for the helix with additional supports around the perimeter. I am hoping to seal the thing in a removable transparent cover to keep little fingers from getting to the trains.

I plan to begin pasting the plan to the plywood top tomorrow and work on the roadbed for the helix as a starting point. Without the spiral the layout can't work. Besides I need the continuous loop to have some trains running when the family gathers at Christmas. The grandkids will be disappointed if I don't.

Two things I'm trying that may make the cutting the roadbed easier...
A - The plywood will be screwed down to the bench work so it won't wander while I cut.
B - I'm using laminate blades in the jigsaw. These blades cut on the downstroke so they won't pull up the material.
Hopefully this will result in cleaner cuts.

Regards,
Frank Musick

[kelticsylk]

Started working on the helix area today by laying out the full size plan for the area...

I had started to glue down pieces with wallpaper paste but stopped when I realized the paper wasn't gonna work. Too many wrinkes. I'm going to try thin cardstock to prevent that.

The XTrkCAD drawing prints fine but requires some trimming. Takes a while. Once I trimmed all the pieces I could fit them together so that everything would line up.

Top of the helix at Gallitzin. Helix track and roadbed outline are dotted lines and don't show up well.

Helper loop

Bottom of helix at Spruce Creek.

I had planned to build the helix using trapezoid shape panels because I was worried about waste. There are a lot of drawbacks to that idea. Too many joints for one. Instead I'm using separate 4' x 4' plywood sheets. Each sheet will have a full 360 degree section of the helix. This will minimize joints. It's a bit hard to describe what I have in mind so I'll post more photos of the construction process.

Regards,
Frank Musick

[kelticsylk]

I went with card stock instead of paper. It does help with the wrinkles and lays out better than the paper. I'm using wall paper paste to hold the pieces of the plan in place. I got a gallon bucket but I don't think I'm gonna need it all.  Gluing down 40 sheets of card stock used hardly any. I'm wondering if it can be used for scenery and other items.

The helix is laid out and ready to be cut. There are four 4' x 4' plywood sheets in that stack. The top one with the plan pasted to it will serve as a kind of template for the other three. While I was pasting the plan down it occurred to me to make the approach tracks part of the helix "structure". I think it will allow me a better vertical transion at both ends. It will also offset the seams a bit.

Printing the plan out is pretty straight forward (unless you forget that you set the page quantity to 4 instead of 1). It also uses a LOT o' paper. I believe there are around 190 separate sheets. Each sheet has a bit of a margin that has to be trimmed before it's pasted to the layout. Takes a bit of time. Now that the helix is laid out I started to lay out on Row 1, working from the roundhouse.

Each row (excuse the fuzzy photo) is about 16 "pages" long. There are about 21 rows. Quite a bit of trimming to be done. I cut off the margins with a steel rule and a utility knife blade. I lay things out ahead of time before glue so I know where they go. The coordinates that print out on the plan are a great help in keeping all the "ducks in a row".

All of this does not get as tedious as it sounds. At least not for me. I take breaks when it does and go do something else..

I'm going to cut the helix out next.

Regards,
Frank Musick

[GaryHinshaw]

Go Frank go.  Making a lot of good progress there. 

FYI, in my version of XTrackCAD (for Mac) the print dialog has a box called Ignore Page Margins.  If you click that, each page will print to the border of the paper so you won't need to trim them. 

It looks like you have a good solution for mounting the paper on plywood.  I chose a somewhat different approach: I tape the pages together in a butt joint, and temporarily tape the joined pages to the plywood.  I then poke small holes into the plywood with an awl, following the centerline of each track.  After that, I remove the paper and join the holes with a pencil line.  (This gives me a clear centerline to follow when I'm laying cork for the roadbead.)  For cutting the plywood, I marked some tick lines on my jigsaw that were a fixed distance from the blade (1 inch in my case).  I could then line a tick mark up with the track center and cut the roadbed a fixed distance from the center line.  This way I didn't have to worry about keeping the paper affixed to the plywood while trying to saw.  It looks like you have that situation under control though.

Cheers,
Gary

[kelticsylk]

Gary,
I used the "ignore page margins", but still have about an 1/8" or so to trim off. The pages don't always print square. Sometimes they shift a bit going through the laser printer. The trimming squares them up. It's a mixed blessing.

Frank

[DKS]

Frank, couple of suggestions. One, spray cement avoids the wrinkled paper problem. An alternative is to lay down a layer of tracing trasfer paper, tape down the plan, then draw over the centerlines of the track. Pull everything away, and you have a perfect copy on the ply. This is the technique I use.

Also, in looking at the prints, I see some really tight curves. In this pic, that loop at center left looks like it's about 6-7 inch radius! Is that some sort of illusion, or is it really that sharp?



I'd also be a bit concerned about the adjacent S-turn...

[kelticsylk]

I tried the spray adhesive on an earlier incarnation. Don't like working with it (or spray paint) for a number of reasons. Wanted to paste down the cardstock and use it rather than tracing or making holes for charcoal dusty thingie method. I'm also afraid I'll loose something in the process of tracing, etc...Since the laminate blades I'm using in the jigsaw cut on the downstroke I don't expect the cardstock to pull up (famous last words).

That radius on that curve is about 7 inches. It's the Gallitzin helper loop. It's the biggest radius I could reasonably fit after trying a bunch of arrangements in that area.

Since the helpers will be going EXTREMELY slow through the loop I'm hoping I can get my 2-8-2's through there. A earlier plan had a 10" radius loop but that was before I realized the aisle between SLOPE and Gallitzin was incorrectly drawn a foot to narrow.

The mainline curve outside the loop IS tight...12.5"...

Thanks for pointing that out before I glued everything down. The minimum radius on the layout is supposed to be 18" (except at Blair Furnace and the Logan Valley traction tracks). Looks like I have to rework this area again. Most of the other curves have broad easements but in the Gallitzin area I had to drop the easements to get everything to fit.

Frank

[kelticsylk]

I got up this morning a bit too early and rather than have my neighbors wake to the sound of power tools I fooled around with other things. After breakfast I went out to the garage and pasted down some more cardstock...

The first two rows include part of the plan for the engine facility,,,

When I deemed it late enough I went started getting out the power tools. While I had been gluing down things I remembered cutting circles with my router for some other project. I got out the router and built this contraption.

It's simply a yard stick with holes in the right locations to place the router. The thing is pinned to the center of the helix on the plan. You just push it around and VOILA!...

You also get these nifty plywood discs...

Not sure what to do with them yet, Lamp table? Hmmmm....


Before finishing the third panel I accidently knocked the gizmo to the floor.  The yardstick broke and now I have to fix the thing.


I did a few other things and then took a shot at correcting some boo-boo's on the plan that Dave Smith spotted...

Took a bit of reshuffling to Bennington and Gallitzin but the helper loop is now a full 10" radius and the inside eastbound main curves around it at the layout minimum radius of 18". Had to move the backdrop and a track in Blair Furnace but nothing else on the plan needed to be changed. All I have to do now is print out the change and paste it down. Thanks to Dave, I caught BEFORE that area was laid out.

I should be able to finish cutting out the helix tomorrow and start assembly. I have an idea of using those discs to form the core of the helix...
I thinking I can stack them spaced 2" apart and then form a wrapper around them. Not sure what material to use yet...Has to be less than an 1/8" thick. The helix then slides over the core and gets properly aligned, spaced, etc... I would like to use an outer wrapper of transparent plastic to save the trains from little hands (and unattended adults)....

Crude drawings, but you end up with something that looks like this...

Regards,
Frank Musick

[kelticsylk]

Revised Gallitzin to eliminate some tight curves. Ran the simulation of the plan in XTrkCAD just to make sure all the routes were continuous. Couple of tweaks but they were taken care of.

I ran four good size trains, two passenger consists of about 10 cars pulled by A-B E-units and two freights of about 20 cars each powered by A-B-B-A F units. The operation stayed pretty much the same as before with the towerman at ALTO and ANTIS trying to keep the trains on the correct main. The tower at SLOPE has some slack periods and then things get hopping when two westbounds show up. The pushers have to be switched to the correct track for their trains and the switches reset for the main before the trains get underway.

At the top of the hill,  AR handles westbound traffic while UN takes care of eastbound (I think). In reality there was probably a lot of things happening in this area. On the layout the operations focus on getting helpers off the westbound trains as quickly as possible so they can be on their way. Once the mains are clear eastbound the helpers are sent back down to SLOPE as fast as the limit allows. Most of the time helpers (snappers in Pennsyspeak) use the eastbound freight main. On occasions when the eastbound freight main is occupied by a train heading down to Altoona the helpers are switched over to the eastbound passenger main for the run down the hill.

Although the simulation has no steam I turn the helpers (diesel road switchers) on the turntable for their next assignment. On the layout I hope to have L1s "Mikes" handling this chore. The PRR used various classes in helper service, including K4s Pacifics, but I'm a tad short on steam power at the moment.

One of the things I have noticed during these ops sessions is that the helix is almost always occupied...

In this screen shot there are three trains running on the "west slope" (official designation for the helix) at the same time. This is a frequent occurance. The only trains visible on the rest of the layout are a coal drag and a helper descending the "east slope".

I'm pretty sure the layout can handle more than four trains at a time (even if I can't) I could stop some on the helix, but it takes so long to negotiate that may not be a problem. A low speed limit on the helix may be a better idea. Have to experiment a bit.

Anyway, it looks like the revision will work and I can print out the change and paste it down...I'll have to buy more cardstock first. This thing requires a lot of 8.5 x 11 pages.

Regards,
Frank Musick

[Dave V]

Just a heads' up, back when I had 11" radius curves I had to modify my GHQ L1s 2-8-2 significantly (i.e., moving the tender shell back on the frame) for those 11" radius curves.  I had no luck at all on 9.75" radius.  As built they work on 13", but just barely.

[DKS]

I think you have a chance to increase the helper loop. If you slide the background to the right just a couple of more inches, then shift the crossover on the mainline down to the bottom, you can open up space for a nearly 12-inch curve. It would also greatly ease the S-turn.

This is really sloppy, but it gives you the idea; maybe with more careful tinkering, you can get the curve even broader:

[kelticsylk]

Arrgh, should have visited the forum BEFORE I printed out the revision. Oh well I can just flip the cardstock over and reuse it.

I found out that the wallpaper past works REALY well when I had to pull some sections that didn't line up...


I'll take another look at the plan, Dave.

[kelticsylk]

The helix parts is cut and I'm ready to start building. I joined the sections and glued them up so it's one continuous board. While the glue set on one side I started playing with the risers on the other side...

I was hoping to make the approaches at Gallitzin and Spruce Creek integral parts of the top and bottom but I ran the router too far and blew that idea out the window. I did manage to break a router bit so it wasn't a total loss

I currently working on some changes the "Daves" suggested at Gallitzin...

Regards,
Frank Musick

[DKS]

Just a follow-up--the siding that follows the backdrop has a chance at being a little more useful, too. The way it's drawn, the runaround is so short it's almost not worth it. Now you can lengthen it considerably since the whole siding is much longer.

[GaryHinshaw]

I'm confused about your helix sketch.  It looks to me like you're going to enclose both the inner and outer radii as drawn.  How will you get to a train mid-helix if it stalls or derails?  Granted, if the outside is clear, you'll be able to see the problem, but...

As one who needs to build my own helix, I watch with interest.