Trackwork

With a lot of the roadbed laid, we are now laying track. I am using Atlas's code 55 track. I really like the look of the turnouts and the height of the track. In the past I have used Peco's code 55 track. Some people claim that Peco track looks more European, though I cannot really see it. The biggest advantage of the Peco track is that the rail extends down into the ties. You cannot see this, but it does make the track stronger and the old Micro-Trains wheels do not bounce on the ties as they do with the Atlas code 55. I will just be changing my wheel sets to low profile wheels.

When using the atlas code 55 track on the Woodland Scenics foam road bed, you need to be careful not to put any weight on the track (so don't lean on it). If you do, you will force a vertical curve into the rails. This can usually be bent back by sliding a small lever under the ties and then lifting while holding the adjacent rail down.

We are gluing the track down using Elmer's rubber cement. Just brush it on and hold the track down for a few seconds while it grabs.

On thing I do that is unusual is to stagger the rails when connecting up flex track. I slide one rail back so that it is an inch or two shorter than the rail with the ties attached to it. I then cut out about 4 ties where the shorter rail is, and two ties off the longer rail. On the next piece of track I slide the rail out from the ties, then thread this rail through the ties of the piece I just laid. I personally believe that this helps eliminate kinks in the rail on curves. Dan puts up with my whims and just keeps laying track.

We solder most of the joints together. We leave some unsoldered to allow for expansion. We do not solder joints on switches in case we want to rescue them someday.

In order to lay the track on the hill we had to build two bridges. The easier one was the stone viaduct that runs over the wye. This is just a bunch of Atlas viaduct kits. They go together easy. To finish them you need to use putty to fill in the gaps between the sections. Once the putty is dry, sand it down and carve in the gaps between the stones. I then painted it gray and then Pete applied a black wash and dry brushed it with some white paint.
The more complex bridge is a double track steel trestle. I bought a Micro Engineering single track trestle, and some of their steel bridge girders and started kit bashing. Paul and I put together all of the girder bridges. I then took one of the trestles and cutoff the top two bents and assembled the bottom portion of the trestle. This left a new top bent that was wide enough for the double track. Paul built another bent to match. Once this was done, I made some wide girders from sheet styrene to support the bridges. I glued these to the top of the trestles. I assembled this on a piece of 3/4" wood as we will need to remove the bridge at some point to paint the back drop. The bridge is mounted on small concrete posts (more styrene) and a sheet of styrene on each end which will form part of the abutments. The track on the bridge is Micro Engineering's code 55 bridge flex track which matches the height of the Atlas code 55 track.

We will be laying track for quite some time to come.

Roadbed

Now that all of the framework is done, I built the roadbed. Since this is an open framework type of construction with lots of hills, I will not be just covering the framework with plywood.

The first layer of the roadbed is 3/8" plywood. In areas where there are towns or large industries, I just used large pieces of plywood attached directly to the joists of the framework. The roadbed that runs between the towns is just wide enough for double track with an additional 1/4" on each side to allow me to glue the terrain to it.
Making the straight sections is pretty easy. Just use a straight edge to mark the wood and cut it. Making curved sections is somewhat harder.

The first thing I did was to use the 3rd PlanIt program to draw a 3" straight section leading into a curve via a transition track. I then printed this out full size. After taping the sheets of paper together, I cut out the curve and used that to draw its shape on a piece of plywood. I then cut out the plywood and using a red marker marked the transition part of the curve. This plywood curve became my template.
Using this I can quickly make pretty much any curve I want. The 3" template is a used to enforce having 6" of straight track between curves. This prevents S curves that can derail trains. Once I had the template, I cut another template. The two templates can then be placed on top of each other and slid back and forth to create small curves.

Once you have the curve shape you want, you place them on a sheet of plywood and draw out the curve. Then a quick cut and you have a 3" straight, a transition, the curve, another transition, and a final 3" straight.
For larger curves I make two copies of the template, and a curve section using the template but skipping the transition part (which is why I marked it in red). I then clamp these three pieces together. By sliding them back and forth you can make curves of greater than 180 degrees. Once I have the curve I want, I make sure the diameter is correct. This sort of ensures a consistent curve. Then I draw lines on top where the pieces overlap. After I cut at the lines I wind up with three pieces of curve, and two glue blocks.
The parts of the curve that were cut off are used as a glue blocks under the roadbed. I glue the pieces of the curve together, clamp it, then screw the block on using 4 short screws. I can then use the clamps somewhere else while the glue dries. When deciding where to put the glue blocks, I had to be careful not to place them over a joist. This prevents sudden 3/8" hills in my roadbed.
For the next layer of the roadbed I usually use cork from Midwest Products. I used up what I had left and headed off to Neal's N-Gauging Trains. He was out of it. So instead, I bought some Woodland Scenics foam road bed. This is the same height as the cork, though for some reason the widths vary. You lay the foam roadbed the same way as the cork roadbed. However splitting the foam roadbed down the middle is not as easy as splitting the cork roadbed. The foam roadbed can be formed into an 18" radius curve without splitting it, so I have no complaints. I used Elmer's wood glue to attach the foam, mostly because that is what I had on hand. I use small nails to temporarily hold the foam in place while it dries. I will also put weights on the ends as they tend to pop up before the glue dries.

While placing the roadbed we discovered that there was not enough room to work on the hill between the decks if the upper deck is closed up. So we are not going to add joists or place roadbed on the upper deck until the lower deck containing the hill is almost completely sceniced.

Framework

Wow, actual construction. I bet you were wondering if I would ever get around to discussing it. Heck I was wondering if I would ever get around to doing it.

My primary guide to building framewok is Linn Westcott's How to Build Model Railroad Benchwork. It is a great guide to building rock solid benchwork.

When we bought the house I claimed one room in the basement. The room is 15' by 30' and was finished with dry wall except for some shelves built from unfinished pine on one wall. I ripped out these shelves and piled up the wood where it sat for 7 years. I then finished the rest of the walls with dry wall. The actual walls of the room are made of concrete blocks. To this someone attached 2" by 4" by 8' studs and put dry wall over this. One interesting thing to note is that the ceilings in this room are 8' 6" high. Yup, you guessed it. The walls do not go all the way up to the ceiling. This leaves me pretty nervous about the strength on these walls. So one of my rules is to not depend on the walls for support. This means all of my benchwork is free standing. It just happens to be right next to the walls.

Once I finished the walls I put in track lighting. I have gotten complaints that there is not enough light to work with. The amount of lights you can put in the tracks is limited by the wattage. I figure by switching from incandescent lights to the new florescent lights I can increase the number of light fixtures. Also the florescent lights are brighter than the incandescent lights. We will see if that fixes the problem. Right now I just tell people to turn the lights to point at what they are working on.

Remember that pile of wood I mentioned earlier? That all went into the framework. Ernie brought over his radial arm saw and we spent a lot of time ripping wood to the right dimensions. What a mess. Saw dust everywhere. We had to vacuum ourselves off before we left the room or we would drag it all over the house. You can imagine what my wife's reaction to that would have been. The wood I had saved was a mess. It had never been properly finished and the shelves were not of solid construction. As a result, I put some rather warped wood into the framework. But what the heck, the Earth is not flat either. I am still catching flack for this.

The lower deck is a lattice framework. The height of the lower deck was determined by the clearance required to store my NTrak modules. No ergonomic studies, no determining the optimum viewing angles. All that mattered was storage. Pretty sad huh? The net result is that the lower deck is about 37" high. On the plus side I did find some really neat shop stools at Sears. They have wheels and adjustable height. They should be great for operating the layout when the time comes. I figure I will need two for the Oneonta yard operators and a couple more for road jobs that are switching along the lower deck.

Most of the upper deck is at 55" high. It just seemed to be a comfortable height. The staging yard is at 60" high because I want to hide most of it from view. To support the upper deck, I built the back leg of the framework right next to the wall. The leg is either a 2x3 or a 2x4 and extends through the lower deck ending at the top of the upper deck. I then glue/bolted a joist to it and a small support brace to give it some strength. The upper deck is of open grid construction to keep its thickness to a minimum.

The construction of the framework went pretty quickly. I took a set of pictures in February and another set in March. This pretty much catches the story up to the end of March.

Construction Crew

The layout is being built by myself and some of my friends. Most of us worked together to build Ernie Poole's layout. Ernie's layout has been open for Railrun and Tour De Chooch. We spent about 10 years or more building it. We are also working on Chuck Tremblay's layout. However since he recently moved, we now have to wait for him to finish the basement in his new house.

We are working on the layout as a team two nights a week. The Monday team consists of:

• Myself
• Ernie Poole
• Dan Boudreau
• Paul Azevedo

Currently we are working on a small area and it is hard to get more people involved. As the work in progress expands we will add the Thursday team consisting of:

• The monday team
• Peter Wisniewski
• Jim Whitehead
• Ed Smith
  
• Chuck Tremblay
• Dan Pawling
  
• Dennis Rockwell
• Bob Pawlak

If you are wondering about the ordering of the names, it is my best guess on how often they will be helping.

I am lucky to have them helping me. They are all talented modelers. Each enjoys working on various aspects of model railroading. One aspect they all seem to enjoy is letting me know when I mess something up.

The Plan

After 20 years of working on this plan you would think it must be great. Well, its not. In fact it is more of an outline than a plan. In the past 20 years I have helped friends with a couple of layouts. I have also toured and operated a number of layouts through Tour De Chooch, Railrun and the Toronto NMRA convention. I have seen things I liked and things that caused problems. I am doing my best to learn from these. We will have to wait to see how I did.

The plan is for an operating railroad. This means schedules, dispatching and card forwarding systems. For operations I have seen that different people like different things. What one person thinks is boring another enjoys. So I wanted my railroad to have a variety of operating jobs. For the diehard yard masters, there will be Binghamton and Oneonta. Oneonta may be divided into west and east bound yards. For the weigh freight guys, there is the westbound local out of Oneonta visiting Sidney, Bainbridge and a fictional paper mill. For the switching puzzle enthusiast, there will be the eastbound local from Oneonta to Cobleskill. For the unit trains there will be a gravel train, a salt train, and a propane train. In addition there is the bridge line trains for people that just like to drive.

The center of the railroad is Oneonta. The line running northeast leads to Cobleskill and then to staging in Schenectady. Southwest from Oneonta are the towns of Sidney and Bainbridge. Once past Bainbridge you arrive at Nineveh where there is a wye leading south to staging in Scranton. The west branch of the wye leads to Binghamton. This wye is a seriously scaled down version of the Binghamton/Scranton/Nineveh main lines. West from Binghamton we have Owego and then on to Buffalo staging.

The layout is a two deck design in a 15' by 30' room. It is laid out in an 'E' shape. Oneonta, Sidney , Bainbridge and Nineveh are on the lower deck with Binghamton, Cobleskill, Owego and the staging yard on the upper deck. The staging yard has three tracks leading into it so it represents Buffalo, Schenectady and Scranton.

The decks were originally to be connected by a three track helix. The tracks were Oneonta/Binghamton, Oneonta/Schenectady and Oneonta/Scranton. Of course Ernie Poole and Dan Boudreau hated it. The helix would hold the longest length of track and you could not see anything that happened in it. Dan had a couple of ideas for a "tipped" helix that would expose tracks here and there while Ernie just said to make a long run along the back of the layout. I was pushing back because I did not want to expose three tracks going to different places running parallel to each other. So after sufficient abuse I got the idea of just combining the three tracks into a two track main. The three tracks merge into the two track main at the bottom of the hill, and then three tracks diverge from the two track main at the top of the hill. So now the worst aspect of the railroad (the helix) has been transformed into one of its most interesting. A 2 scale mile long double track main with a 2% grade cut into the cliffs along the back of one of the walls of the railroad. It will have a lot of traffic because it represents three different hills; Belden Hill, Richmondville Hill, and Mt. Ararat. Almost every mainline train will have to go up and down this same section of track. However their schedules will list it by different names. It will just be up to the dispatcher to keep everything straight.
One important thing I considered when making the plan is where people will be working and will they interfere with each other. You will notice that above Oneonta is the staging yard. And below Binghamton is a narrow section containing the grade. This will keep people from bumping into the yard operators. Also the aisles are about 3 and a half feet wide. This will allow people working the towns on the middle peninsula from interfering with the yard operators.

Other standards that I am using are:

• Minimum 18" radius curves
• 2% ruling grades
• No hidden switches
• Long tunnels will be next to facia and the facia will have holes to view trains in tunnels.
• Short tunnels will be less than 3 feet.
• Passing sidings will accommodate an 8 foot long train.
• Minimize hidden track.
  

I used 3rd Planit from ElDorado Software to layout the mainline. This really helps in that it is very good at laying out the curves and figuring the grades. The details of the yards and the various towns will be determined during construction. Also useful during the planing stages were:

• Track Planning for Realistic Operation by John Armstrong
• Bridge Line Blues by Hal Reiser
• The Delaware & Hudson by Jim Shaughnessy
  

The Prototype

The Albany & Susquehanna was incorporated in 1851 and essentially completed in 1867. In connected Albany NY to Binghamton NY. Its 6 foot gauge track ran through rolling hills and farmland.

In 1869, Jay Gould took a fancy to the Railroad and began a proxy fight beyond what was extreme even in that era. At its height a train load of Erie railroad employees took a train from Binghamton and headed towards Albany seizing the stations along the way. One station got a telegraph message out, and a train load of A&S employees took a train from Albany and headed south towards Binghamton. The trains met (with a thud) at Tunnel, NY. A fight using whatever was at hand ensued only ending when it got dark. The next morning the state militia arrived and put an end to it.

The proxy fight ended up in court and Jay Gould was tossed out. To prevent a repeat of the proxy fight the A&S quickly leased the railroad to the Delaware & Hudson in perpetuity.

My railroad takes up the story in the late 1970's after the formation of Conrail. The D&H was a bridge line at this point with most of its traffic originating and terminating on other railroads. It was dependent on connections with friendly railroads for traffic. With the formation of Conrail, all of these friendly roads were rolled up into Conrail. Since Conrail wasn't about to send traffic over the D&H that it could just deliver itself, the D&H was given extensive trackage rights. This gave the D&H new connections in Buffalo, NY, Harrisburg PA, and Newark NJ. It already had connections with other railroads in Montreal, Canada, and Mechanicville NY.

The major yards for switching trains were in Oneonta and Binghamton. The Binghamton yard handled switching trains coming from and heading to Buffalo and Oneonta handled the rest. This would change later with Binghamton doing everything.

The motive power at this time was also interesting. The D&H had just doubled in size and it got a lot of power from the railroads that formed Conrail. This includes power from the Lehigh Valley railroad, the Reading railroad and the Erie railroad. In addition there was pool power and leased power from the Norfolk & Western, the Bangor and Aroostook, the Boston and Maine and the Union Pacific. It seems you could justify just about any engine on the railroad at this time.

My Model Railroading Background

I grew up along the Susquehanna river in upstate New York. The local railroad was the Delaware & Hudson. So you could say I have been planning this railroad for 30 years. While I was planning this I was active in Northeast NTrak.

NTrak is an N scale modular standard that is practiced by clubs and individuals around the world. The Northeast NTrak club is centered around Boston, MA. The club displays modules at about 10 train shows a year. The modules that I bring to the shows are a set of 5 that form a corner of the layout. It is somewhat memorable in that it features a 6 foot radius curve.

So why the sudden switch from planning to construction? As you would suspect, a lot of it has to do with free time. My son is now 17 and is a typical teenager. My wife has decided to go to Law School and spends a lot of time studying. She has about a year and a half to go. This means I have about a year and a half to get this layout running.

I started building in December of 2007. Can I make it?