Page 21 - January February 2016

Texas Pacific Lines – A Slice of South Western USA in HO
Part 2 – Bringing It All Together
A Diversion
Literally, there was a diversion in my planning, both actually and in model form. Thamesiders had on the table an invitation to take the Essex Belt Lines to Alexandra Palace in March 2013, to fill a space 70 feet by 40 feet. In other words, we could, if we had all the modules available, set up a complete oval with fiddle yard plus another half layout tacked on the back and 30 feet of branch lines off one end. We had two years to get this ready. Could we do it? As Bob the Builder would say: “Yes, we can.”
I, foolhardily it seemed for a while, committed to build a new corner section that had switching potential. I had the materials and an idea of a track plan to achieve a reasonable location where industries could be served. I therefore elected to build an L shape configuration 5' 2" × 17' 2" (the 5' 2" × 5' 2" is the Essex Belt Lines corner module standard). The boards were built as follows: one 5' 2" × 2', followed by three 4' × 2' boards then a final 3' 2" × 2' board. For transportation, I built an additional plain 2' × 2' board to bolt on to the last board to pair up with the first board.
I set the boards up in the garage and played around with the track until satisfied with all the angles and turnout positions. The tracklaying, wiring, ballasting and scenery followed using the same techniques and materials as for Rosenberg. The industries were modelled largely from scratch materials – Evergreen supplies at The Hobby Box in Uckfield (10% discount for NMRA members) took a real hit over the ensuing six months. Some kitbashing of Pikestuff/Rix structures was also employed. The industries created, from right to left, are a scrap yard (bottom right), a paint manufacturer, a waste paper processor, a Coors distribution depot and finally a lumber mill with a hidden siding behind to receive lumber loads in and empties out. On the other side of the tracks, at the front, there is a fruit and vegetable produce centre.
The passenger depot and interlocking tower are by Walthers and are just the kits assembled and painted in a South Western/ Santa Fe style.
When building a number of the structures I employed a technique I had seen Lance Mindeim use on his latest layouts, images of real structures, or rather parts of them. I came across a website that is used by computer games graphic designers who can download images of parts of real life including walls, windows, doors, flooring etc right up to whole buildings (see www.cgtextures.com). I downloaded doors and concrete block walls (which I pasted into MS Paint to make longer runs). Images were then copied into PowerPoint where I stretched and shrunk the images to a suitable size for HO. They were printed out on matt photo paper, cut out and glued to plasticard where needed, using permanent adhesive spray from Hobbycraft. Examples are the docksides and all the doors on the produce centre structure – photos of real rust and weathering are unbeatable!
I used the same resource to find images of tar paper roofs and fruit crates. I cut the tar paper images into strips and applied them randomly, with varying shades of grey, to the roof of the Coors distribution/waste paper recycler structure. I wrapped suitably sized fruit crates around balsa blocks and glued them inside the open doorways of the Dillon Produce Center. Another wheeze was to download photos of timber and from Google images of lumber mill interiors – these were glued on the back wall of the low relief lumber building.
I managed to complete the task with a month to spare so that the boards could all be tested with the existing modules in a dummy run two weeks before Ally Pally 2013. Over that weekend it all worked very well and I was pleased with the effort I had put in to do it. Now it was homeward bound and back to Texas Pacific Lines.
Mike Arnold
Dillon Takes Root
The modules were named Dillon, after a fictitious town (city?) in Texas that was featured in the award-winning TV college football series “Friday Night Lights”. The palm trees I had planted on the passenger depot building platform suggested its location as West Texas but for the lumber milling business it had to be located somewhere to the North East of Houston in timber-growing country, towards Longview. I could also resist the temptation to use my stock of palm trees no longer, despite the Essex Belt Lines standard befitting Middle America (Rule 1: Arnold, no palm trees).
Now to fit it in, or would it be just for shows if it would not fit? I knew I had a problem because the cabin is 14' 2" deep and my
boards at the left-hand end added up to 14' 4". I could reduce by 2" the additional 4' × 2' board I had between the two corners or could I fit it in, in another position? I then resorted to graph paper and cutouts of the various boards to see how, if at all, it could be juggled in. There was but one other way, AND it also allowed me to run a large staging yard down the middle of the room. By inserting reverse loops at about 36" radius I could fit Dillon in some 10 feet into the room, just to the other side of the double entrance doors. Bingo! Dillon had landed.
Fixed boards or benchwork was built to create the link between Rosenberg and Dillon but a gap 2' wide needed to be bridged. That plain 2' × 2' spacer board for transportation slotted in beautifully. It is now home to a 90 degree crossing with the Santa Fe (BNSF), justifying the tower I had built at that end of Dillon. This cross route will be cosmetic only and leads into the staging yard yet to be built down the middle. Benchwork was again built at the other end of Dillon, taking the tracks into the front corner and round to meet up with the tracks at the West end of Rosenberg. The delta junction was then put in to feed into the yard from that end from both directions.
As I could not accommodate the 4' × 2' twin river board I had built, I have now started to re-create this in part with one river span only, using a Central Valley kit plus a BLMA concrete segmental bridge on a gentle curve. This has a long way to go still. Next to that I have designed a lift-out section that plugs that part of the layout to the benchwork. I need to add another lift-out section at some stage to the benchwork at the left-hand end, as we all get older and crawling on hands and knees becomes a very distant memory!
So Dillon is a diversion avoiding the staging yard yet offering plenty of switching for operations. It was almost a diversion from the work in hand building Texas Pacific Lines if I had not been able to fit it in. Wiring has all been added and my Digitrax DCC system has been operating it as one power district despite the increasing preponderance of sound-fitted locos from my collections and guests who bring theirs. Although it is far from finished, it does offer now continuous run, passing loops in three different locations plus limited storage at the throats to the staging yet to be built, and of course switching and some classification in the small yard at Rosenberg.
Operations
I do recall when I had Pueblo Falls as an exhibition layout (and when set up at home in my garage) I loved to watch the trains roll by – I hated switching; found it very tedious. But at Derby one year Tony Martin MMR gave me some tips on how to get more enjoyment out of it. That was coupled with seeing what the RS Tower boys were doing, and Martyn Read gave me an Excel spreadsheet format he used for car cards. I took that away to my laptop and started creating car cards for all the freight cars I knew that I might switch. The card cards are very simple. At the head is a small photo/image of the car for (hopefully) immediate recognition followed by details of the car reporting mark/number and then its load and where to go when empty.
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