Over river, underbrush

To start off, here's the real Tenbridge, seen from the Tennessee Riverpark near Chickamauga Dam, followed by my roughly one-third size version:



Obviously it's not an exact replica; the idea is just recognizeability, without taking up 12 feet of basement space.

I have had to suspend operations to do more landscaping, which I should have done a long time ago. I put it off because I wanted to run trains and try out the Filemaker freight traffic system.

Anyway, I have been putting down wisps of polyfiber, spraying them with hairspray and dusting with grass powder. This makes pretty convincing underbrush and especially kudzu, that Korean vine that has taken over so many hillsides and roadsides in the Southeastern U.S. There is a ton of it in Chattanooga, draping dead trees and making them into gigantic topiary sculptures during the summer.

Here's an example of how fast the stuff grows: I was out one summer looking at trains on the CSX tracks near Cromwell Road in Chattanooga, and found it growing right up the roadbed and over a rail of the main line! Between the rails were lots of cut-off ends of the vines. So it is was growing over the rails between trains! At least that's what it looked like.

So here's how some parts look right now. None of the industries is totally finished, but some are getting close. The two big destinations on the main line, Little Katie Snacks and Dixie Flour, have not even been started yet.



First off , here's Ergon Terminaling. The dry-bulk loading equipment is in place, as is the main office/warehouse, pump house for the big storage tanks, "asphalt" drive and walkway out over one of the barge bulkheads. I also weathered the bulkheads with some rusty pastel and filled them with riprap.



Next up is GEO Specialty Chemicals, with its buildings weathered and the settling pond completed. The settling pond (note the outflow pipe from nowhere) was painted with Folk Art Acrylic paint (el cheapo) and is being glossed up with acrylic gloss medium (expensivo). The box car contains drums of sulfuric acid, being used in the reactor to make aluminum sulfate out of fly ash.



Moving right along, here's Commercial Metals Inc., which takes in gondolas of scrap and loads it on barges. It was the first industry to be completed.



Here's a big closeup of Tenbridge again.



This is Colco Furniture, with its plastic-pellet unloading dock in place but unweathered. If you look closely, you can see that the back section of the factory is nothing but a big hunk of 2X4! The front is half of a plastic factory kit that I split down the middle (the other half will be Rock-Tenn Corp.)



Finally, here are two views of the branch line where it crosses North Chickamauga Creek on the light-duty trestle. That's the main line crossing in the background. The switcher, an MP15-DC, has not yet been painted in Norfolk Southern livery. I would like to get another one to lash up, but that's far down the road. The tanker is an empty, headed for Ergon Terminaling. Note the acrylic-gloss water!



The trestle is completely scratchbuilt out of 1/8 dowel and strip wood. The close-spaced-tie bridge track is from Micro-Engineering, the same thing I used for Tenbridge.

Car-forwarding with Filemaker

Way back when, I made a card waybill system with the little library-card pockets and the card with four waybills that you flipped around to start a new "cycle" of car movements. With this railroad I started doing that again, but pretty soon I hit the point of saying, 'Come on -- this has GOT to be easier on a computer."

So I opened up Filemaker (Mac) and got to work.

Now I have a database of all my freight cars (30 of them so far) that includes roadname, number, car type, an image of the actual car, eight different destinations, loads and receicers (the equivalent of two of those old flippable waybill cards), and a special index number (1-8) that determines where each car is in its eight-destination cycle.

Through some creative script writing and querying, I just need to open the database and run a script called "Increment Cars." Each car's index number increases by one (except if it's eight, in which case it pops back to one). Then I can view the database as a form, and see where each car needs to go next from where it is now.

Here's a screenshot of one of my cars in the main database:



When the script is run, it looks at the "stage" number (right underneath the image), then uses it to look up the right destination data from the list. It then uses that info to populate fields called "Current Destination," "Current Contents" etc., and presents the info along with that of all the other cars in a different query form or "layout." The result is a tabular list of the day's movements that I can sort, print out and take down to the basement, and which looks like this:



Note how each car is now listed with current contents, destination, current location, etc. Now I just need a giant plasma monitor for the basement wall! Actually, it is best just to take the laptop down there, because then I can just sort the list according to my needs. Need to find out which cars are headed out of the North Chattanooga branchline today? Sort by current holder. Need to see how big the incoming branchline train will be? Sort by current destination. Want to see all the cement hoppers and sort them out? Sort by car type.

The labor-intensive part was entering all that destination info from a few dozen freight cars. But once that's done, all you need to do is enter each new freight car purchase into the database, and that's really kind of fun. Also, if you find yourself having traffic problems, you can tweak the the "stage" values for various cars, and stagger what is going where, when. It's the equivalent of flipping just one of your waybill cars to a different destination and changing the cycle.

One year later: Let there be railroad

It's trite, but how quickly a year goes by these days. More than a year. I have been busy with just about everything but this record of the construction of the CTC Railway. And despite the inaction on the blog, the railroad has grown enormously. It is tracked, ballasted, rock-molded, painted, blanketed with what must be thousands of trees, airbrushed into fall colors, and is now having its industries and structures built.

I also bought a used Prodigy Express DCC system, and got two new DIgitrax DCC decoders for my Atlas SD60 and Atlas MP15 for Christmas (how many guys have a beautiful wife who is a great mom and who also buys them decoders?). The last engine, the GP38-2, already had a Lenz decoder in it that I am having a tough time figuring out.

I have even made a set of car-forwarding waybills for my 26 freight cars, been dissatisfied with it, and created a new system in Filemaker that lets me add new cars and destinations easily, print out reports and use them to run an operating session.

As of this writing, I have about a half dozen industries "open for business."

One of these days I will throw the blog open to public view. Guess we're getting close, now that there is a lot to look at.

Here are some pictures. Refer to those earlier, long-ago posts for how I came up with the industries.



Building Tenbridge pylons, looking south.


Same, looking north.



This is looking down on the interchange yard area, with the long-ridge divider blocking the staging tracks back against the wall. I think I took this to show the span of Tenbridge (Walthers double-track bridge kit) and the towers (scratchbuilt from Plastruct and cardstock) sitting and waiting for installation.



Here's where the branchline rounds the hill on Moccasin Bend. This was at the foam-smoothing stage, when I was sculpting the landscape and carving drainage ditches, etc.



Here is the same scene months later, with rock and scenery in place and track being ballasted.






The plate-girder part of Tenbridge was scratchbuilt with Plastruct and basswood. Even the plate girders were scratchbuilt out of sheet styrene with thin strips glued on. That took a while, but I could not see paying a lot for pre-molded plate girders when they can easily be made.



Here's the two plate girder sections of Tenbridge on the work table for painting.



The whole deal, with roadbed in place, looking "south."



Daughter paints the foam, turning pink into olive drab in one day!



Tenbridge coming together! Still need to put the towers with their counterweights in place.



This is the south end of the interchange yard, where there is a little swamp full of dead trees.



The branchline crosses North Chickamauga Creek on this wooden trestle bridge. The concept is based on a little wooden trestle that crosses South Chickamauga Creek in reality. The real North Chattanooga branchline doesn't cross any streams to speak of.



Here's Tenbridge, relatively complete, with the water done and the riprap on the shore installed. The riprap is just road gravel picked up near my house, held in place with matte medium.



Here's a closeup of the riprap on the north shore, under the bridge.



This view is from the south end of the interchange yard, looking north. The staging tracks are at left.



Newly laid and glued ballast at Colco Furniture Co. in Red Bank. Looking back, I really wish that I had not used any roadbed on the branchline. Too late to change that. I would have liked to have that light-duty branchline feel.



This is Signal Mountain Cement in its first stages - nothing but pieces of PVC pipe and parts from an old HO coal facility. It's looking a lot better now but still isn't ready for its close-up.



Here's Ergon Terminaling, still under construction. The barge bulkheads are made of the middle layer of some "fine gauge" corrugated cardboard that I steamed apart. The oil/asphalt storage tanks were cut from a wide cardboard spool. The pipes are electrical wire from household conduit, bent and straightened to shape and painted white.



This is GEO Specialty Chemical so far, a manufacturer of water treatment chemicals. The buildings are scratchbuilt, but I based the big one on Pikestuff's modern warehouse. Many of my buildings are scratchbuilt replicas of commercially available kits. I can find reference pics online, then draw up "my version" on graph paper.



Here's a nice view heading into the interchange yard from the south. A sharp right curve and you're in the yard.



Finally, for right now, here is Chattanooga Brick and Tile in Red Bank. The pallets of bricks are just little wood blocks, appropriately painted.

Still more about creating the landscape

I spent today's session laying the last of the roadbed supply, then went to get more before work. Plenty to do tomorrow, now!

I also did some more carving, mostly forming the river shore on the branch line right by Commercial Metals and Ergon Inc. I cut the 1" foam at an angle to form bits of river, hopefully enough to suggest a large body of water lying just "beyond the layout," and put in the actual river surface in the form of foam core board that I had lying around. Will post pictures soon -- we're due for a progress gallery.

To blend the banks into the water, I used lightweight spackle. I have been using the same stuff to form "fillets" between the track-level ground and the bottoms of the foam hills, in order to blend them together a little bit and not have these abrupt corners. It doesn't stick to foam all that well, and is kind of like trying to spread cake frosting on a floured board. But with a very light touch it is workable, and it sticks and sands well when it dries.

The ditch-carving described in the last post will take quite some time, as it involves a lot of thinking as well as a lot of doing. Where would the water drain here? Does this look realistic? Am I overdoing it? I am also trying to add a little texture and "undulation" to places on the foam board where things are just a little too flat and table-like.

Getting into the finer points of foam carving

The holidays are over, the rough building of the foam terrain is complete, and I am even well into -- shock -- the laying of the cork roadbed. In fact the whole branch line is roadbedded, thanks in part to the help of young K. and C., who have learned how to soak, cut, curve, glue and pin the cork. A valuable life skill, to be sure.

I am now stopped due to lack of materials, as we're down to one more piece of cork and the purchasing department needs to make a trip to the hobby store.

In the meantime, however, there's plenty to be done.

The laying of the roadbed has enabled the carving of ditches, which has led me into all kinds of other interesting fine landscape shaping. Yes, a lot of that has been done already, but this is much finer detail stuff.

The best way to carve ditches, so far, is to roll a small rectangle of rough grit sandpaper into a cylinder about the size of a cigarette butt. You then simply rub it along the side of the roadbed (after the glue's dry of course), making pass after pass until you're down to the depth of ditch you want. Then get a square of finer sandpaper and smooth the whole thing down.

The effect of this is wonderful. The roadbed suddenly seems like more of a part of the landscape. The landscape thus begins to "embrace" the railroad in that wonderful realistic way. Instead of a track glued down to a board, you will now have a transportation route traversing a landscape with its obstacles.

Progress on terrain and turnouts

All things are continuing apace.

I am up to seven Fast Tracks turnouts, and am thinking I should really wire one up one of these days and give it a hot test with a real locomotive. I have been testing them as I make them with a voltmeter, and in two cases have had shorts that it has taken some time to resolve. Both times they seemed due to solder creeping across the gaps in the PCB ties.



It has gotten really fun to make them. The grinding of the points and frog is no longer such a mystery -- I just needed to acquire that skill of filing. The soldering is the best part, very satisfying.

I have made the mini table saw, incorporating the Dremel, with which to cut my new sheet of 1/32 PC board, which arrived very quickly. Tried it out on some 1/16 scraps given to me by a friend, and it works fine. Ground PCB smells horrible, though, like formaldehyde. I hope it isn't bad for humans. I think I will be doing the PCB cutting outdoors, on the patio.



A friend of my son who is interested in the whole process has been helping with the terrain-shaping, surforming and sanding away. Here are some pictures:


This is the "West Blob," with what passes or Signal Mountain and a fictional tunnel. Chickamauga Creek is on the left, the branch line in the foreground.


This is the future site of Ergon Terminaling. The cardboard rings will one day be storage tanks, and are there to maintain a vision of the completed industry.


Here's a view down Stringer's Ridge, with the branch line on both sides.


The branch line rounds the end of Stringer's Ridge. This is a fairly true-to-life geographic location:



Here's where the interchange yard will be. The long ridge will be its backdrop, and will serve to mask the staging area behind.


Finally, this is the "East Blob" with its mountain and the future location of the railroad museum at the foot of the hill. The folders are the turnout "kits" I described: pre-cut ties and rails for assembling Fast Tracks turnouts.

Making my own N-gauge turnouts

Well, I took a big swing at turnout-building over the weekend, using my new Fast Tracks jig. It's for building #7 turnouts with code 55 rail, which, as I discussed in my last entry, is the standard for my layout.

Let me tell ya, it isn't easy!

Or let me qualify that. It isn't easy at first. It involves some skills and techniques that you may not have yet. Your first few efforts will be where you make your mistakes.

But that being said, even my first, mistake-ridden turnout is still going to be usable. The jig is excellent, and by the time you get to the soldering stage it gets really fun. The hardest thing for me was learning how to use the point-forming tool; I took a few unadvisable strokes with my file and shredded the end of one rail, and it can be hard to know how much to take off.

The experience I gained from just one turnout was amazing, though. Suddenly I knew what had to be what length, knew the trick for filing the gaps in the PC board ties, had a handle on how to get the frog point soldered together without having three hands.

My total output for about 5 hours of work was two completed turnouts, but that's not all. I also started making "kits" to assemble more, getting the ties trimmed, frog points made, stock rails and guardrails cut, etc. to assemble five more turnouts. So it should take only a couple more hours till I have seven. I think this is a good approach. Each of "kits" I am putting into a small manila envelope, and doing it this way really lets you master each of the turnout-building tasks.

The instructional videos posted on the Fast Tracks site are very helpful, as is the user's guide, but remember they're all in HO. N poses some unique challenges.

There's one more matter to discuss here: Cost. In the long run, the Fast Tracks jig will save you money. No question. If you're willing and able to do the work, you'll get unlimited, high-quality units that get cheaper with every one you build. You could even sell them on eBay, they're so high-quality.

But the materials cost money. I have already ordered my own sheet of 1/32 PC board from an electronics supplier, and plan to rig up a little homemade table saw with my Dremel (armed with a cutoff wheel) to cut it into strips for lower-cost ties. A 12" by 12" sheet of the copper-clad board costs $15, and should make LOTS of ties. The rail I'll probably order from somewhere closer by, to save on the shipping from Canada.