An Operating Session with Paying Customers

Every year, there's a mini-convention on model railroad design and operation in Santa Clara. It takes place the weekend before the superbowl. Saturday is filled with talks -- discussions of the problems someone encountered building their layout, history of a real place being modeled, or stories on how to make running the layout seem more realistic and fun. On Sunday, everyone's invited to one of the model railroads in the area to join an operating session.

Operating sessions are a lot like role playing -- you take over a particular job on the model railroad, and do that job as if it were real life. It's fun because you can solve problems, pretend to do real railroad work, and see what happens when everyone works together. I've operated on different layouts for at least four years, and each one's different. On Rick Fortin's layout, that meant sorting boxcars for eight hours in the yard, and figuring out what order to do work to make sure each train was made up in time. On Dave Adam's Colorado narrow gauge, I got to dispatch -- controlling how trains went between towns. On Dave Parks' B&O layout, I got to manage a yard and add or remove hoppers full of coal as trains passed.

This year, I decided to return the favor; my layout's going to be one of the open layouts. Four people will get to spend a few hours shuffling boxcars at the canneries of the 1930's Santa Clara Valley and hopefully get some appreciation for the era and the way railroading was done. My layout might not be the largest layout open to guests, but hopefully it'll be a fun experience.

I've spent the last few weeks cleaning up -- tuning cars and locomotives, fixing problems in the track, improving instructions and labels, and whatever else might make the experience better. In the week before Christmas and New Years, I managed to shanghai four friends to do a trial run and help me figure out what needed to be fixed before the paying customers arrived.


Mark Gurries comes around the bend to find San Jose blocked with two trains already switching industries.


Dave Falkenberg uncouples part of the train before switching Del Monte Plant 51.


The only big issue was stalling locomotives. The track got dirty quickly, and my small steam locomotives would hit the dirt and stop. Mark suggested modifying the decoders in the locomotives with "keep-alive" capacitors to give the train a chance to coast past a bit of dirty track. I took his advice, and also cleaned all my freight cars' wheels in hopes of cutting the amount of crud that could be carried around. Fingers crossed. Thanks for the help, guys!

Real California Scenery!

Latest progress: scenery in the hills. This is the east end of the Glenwood siding. I'd never been sure how I'd put scenery in this area; the track turns a corner and goes into the upper staging yard, so I never thought I had room for anything interesting. In January, I realized that the real line out of Glenwood crossed the nearby Bean Creek, and eventually entered a tunnel as the track headed towards Santa Cruz. Having a creek and tunnel scene sounded perfect; I'd have a focal point for the scene, and I'd have a way to hide the staging yard.

After a bit of work with the saber saw, I had space for the creek. The rest of the work happened in fits and starts; I finally put in several days of effort to finish the rough scenery, paint the backdrop, and add ground cover and trees.


Here's a picture of the whole scene; the road in the background represents the Glenwood Highway leading towards Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz. Simple ground cover, trees, and the backdrop are done; the bridge's foundation obviously needs work. To the left, the road and track are separated by a field, with large trees lining the road. There's also a railroad section house on the left bank of the creek.


With this scene done, it's time to move onward to the summit tunnel and the redwood forests!

So... How Are We Doing?

Well, it doesn't look like I'm making progress, but I am. The layout's slowly moving from "rough" to "trim" work -- from all the structural work such as benchwork, track, and wiring to scenery and structures. West San Jose now has the PG&E gas holder placed at the north end of the yard, just across the Alameda underpass. In Campbell, Campbell Ave. is starting to look like a main street with buildings going up on the north side of the street.

Gas holder, West San Jose; D. O. Curry Building, Campbell Ave., Campbell.

The Del Monte Plant 51 cannery building's in place (with warped roof over the platform), but the building's basically complete. It's located across the tracks from my layout's temporary West San Jose depot Compare the model photo with the photo at right from San Jose's Diridon Station a few years back.

Plant 51, West San Jose. Left photo from my model railroad; right taken at Diridon Station, 2001.

When I was growing up, my father took me hiking on Mount Tamalpais. Getting there, we'd avoid taking the touristy route along Highway 1, but would instead wind through residential neighborhoods on the ridge overlooking Mill Valley. I'd see all sorts of houses clinging to the hillside, sometimes up on stilts, sometimes dug into the hillside. For my Glenwood scene in the Santa Cruz mountains, I placed a similar building on the hillside overlooking the tracks and the new semaphore signal. It's not complete -- the stilts are temporarily in place, unpainted, and unglued, but with luck it'll hold on the hillside til I can get more time to work on it.

Here's a pair of overview shots to show progress:

Getting Non-working Track Working Again

Thanks to an insane time at work during July, I'm taking two weeks off for R&R. Some of the projects include:

* Installing my first working semaphore signal

* Building the hillside behind Glenwood

* Rebuilding the track at Alma.


The track at Alma's been the most effort. Right behind the Los Gatos scene, the track climbing through the Santa Cruz mountains sits about five or six inchest higher than Los Gatos . Before, the helix would climb away from Los Gatos, and then would suddenly double-back across the rear of the Los Gatos scene on a narrow strip of plywood. I knew I wanted to treat these as separate scenes, but I wasn't sure how I was going to separate them. Worse, when I'd first laid the track, I'd done the bare minimum needed to get trains running on the second level. This meant the Alma scene floated on a narrow strip of plywood above... well, nothing. It didn't help that the scene was at the rear of some deep (30-35 inch) benchwork.

It was finally time to deal with this scene. I needed better support for the track, and I needed some structure for attaching the Los Gatos backdrop. My solution was to take out the existing roadbed, build something like a small shelf layout that would take it's place on the bench, then drop the new shelf into place. Here's the before and after photos:


Doing the work at the bench was a great choice; this track never was well-laid or sloped correctly, and I was able to finally get things right. I also added Tortoise switch machines to the two turnouts on the track, and it was much easier to adjust them on the workbench instead of during gymnastics-like bends on the layout. I also took the chance to start putting in scenery.

One of the reasons for doing all this work was to add a new switch at Alma; there's now a switch on the siding that will lead to a steep siding climbing up above the helix. My plan is to add a mercury mine and town on top of the helix. (There weren't any mines around Alma, but a couple valleys south of Los Gatos creek canyon held the richest mines in California -- the New Almaden mercury mines.) We'll see how it goes...

First Ground Cover Goes In!

It's a day to remember -- the day the weeds finally came to the layout. I've added basic ground cover to the area around West San Jose.

Here's a couple photos showing the work. First, here's a photo of the West San Jose passenger platform. The passenger car was used as a temporary station in the early 1930's after the track was raised on an embankment and before the new San Jose (aka Diradon) station was built.

Looking the other way from the San Carlos St. overpass, you can see how the tracks near the station are raised above the level of the Del Monte Plant 51 spurs.

Here's also a photo of a train going over the Alameda overpass.

It's Almost Too Quiet...

It's been a quiet few months; after the burst of effort needed for the LDSIG meet, I spent the winter and spring building freight cars. I needed a bunch more reefers, but I've wanted more detail than the typical Athearn / Accurail car. I really love the Red Caboose Pacific Fruit Express R-30-12 refrigerator cars, but the plastic grab irons and steps quickly get broken in operation.

The solution? Buy a half-dozen Red Caboose cars, and bend wire grab irons to take the place of the plastic ones. Red Caboose still sells these reefers, but they're undecorated and need painting. I also used the opportunity to paint the roofs black as they would have appeared in the 1930's.

The other fun project was an automobile car. Most of the freight cars in the 1930's were small, but the boxcars used for shipping the (relatively light) automobiles and buggies could be huge -- 50 feet long and 2 feet higher than surrounding cars. Tony Thompson's SP Freight Cars volume 3 has photos of a bunch of these, and the A-50-2 -- a 40 foot automobile box -- caught my attention. (One of the neat photos of this car shows it after the ends were repaired; the SP didn't bother to repaint the cars, but just the modified ends, leaving strong boxcar-red ends surrounding weathered wood sides.) This seemed like a fun car to scratchbuild; it used the Bettendorf underframe fabricated from I-beams and used also on the PFE reefers, and the smooth-sheathed walls simplified construction.


I drew up some plans of the car, but decided to test my accuracy by building an O scale version of the car. It was a fun jaunt into another scale, and the completed car now sits on my windowsill at work.

Here's the completed 40 foot O scale car next to a Westerfield 50 foot Union Pacific boxcar.

There's been some other work on the layout (such as building some fast clock kits), but nothing serious. I need to put some effort into the layout again...

LDSIG 2006 Santa Clara Meet: First Open House

This weekend was the annual Santa Clara mini-convention on layout design and operation -- a weekend of presentations on layout design, operating sessions at nearby layouts, design critiques, and layout tours. I opened my layout for viewing on Saturday night, and probably got a good thirty or so people visiting during the evening. This was the first time I'd ever showed my layout to more than just friends, and the comments and suggestions made it all worthwhile.

It's also been a great kick-in-the-pants for the last few weeks as I put in minimal scenery, got the layout operating much better, and in general dealt with all the little niggling details that made the layout that much more viewable.

Some of the particularly helpful projects:

* A couple of stretches of empty space were replaced with flat fields of plaster. Though the area wasn't scenicked, some hastily planted buildings and fences hinted at where a farm would soon be placed.

* My lovely wife spent a good part of a weekend sewing minimal drapes to hide the underside of the layout; while the 15 yards of good fabric was a bit pricey (even on sale), the cost of the velcro to attach it to the layout was equally bad. Luckily, I now have some nice heavy denim drapes in pullman green -- a good color for the SP, and a great color to complement the scenery.

* I spent several days just cleaning track. A battery-powered Dremel tool with a wire brush did fast work of lingering dirt on wheels and track. I also found the foolproof way to test the track was set a balky 0-6-0 switcher at one end of the layout and see how far I could get before it stalled.

* A non-railroad friend kindly kept the trains running all evening as I talked with visitors. With a single-tracked mainline terminated with a pair of reverse loops, operation really requires someone observing what's going on.