I'm planning a new layout.

[mrconductor55]

Sorry for the vague title. I am 16 years old. I got into model railroading ten or so years ago. I dismantled my set a few years ago, and began to do lots of railfanning. I just got a job and lots of space to start a new layout, half of my basement. I've been trying to decide for a while what to model. I knew that I wanted there to be lots of switching with an EMD end cab switcher in an urban envirenment. Finally I came to a conclusion. I am going to model my favorite local railroad. The Central Illinois Railroad's Lumber District.

The Lumber District is an industrial branch line that serves a handful of customers on the Lower West Side of Chicago. The line runs for about 6 miles, bringing cars between over 10 customers and BNSF's Western Avenue Yard. Three Railroads would be featured in this layout, 2 of which would for the most part be static. I would have a few BNSF geeps laying over in the yard, I may use dummies. There is also a Metra Station on the north side of the yard. I will have a Metra F40ph, and a few bi-levels run in a loop the length of the yard. Possibly even stopping at the station automatically? But mainly the switcher.

Sorry that this is a bit disorganised. Traffic on the line is extremely varied. Some days there are only a few cars, some days there are 25 cars coming downhill(never that much uphill). Traffic includes scrap metal in gondolas, bricks in boxcars, frozen food in reefers, sugar from Domino Sugar in covered hoppers, lumber on occation, various other stuff, a few times a month.

I know the crew members personally, and the company is very railfan friendly. Sometime this week, I will go out and follow them up and down the line, photographing the entire line, spurs and all.

One thing I'm having trouble deciding on is how to model the incline into the yard. The climb starts very gradually, going on for a mile or so, then it becomes very steep and curves into the yard. Here is a shot I took of their freshly painted SW9/SW1200 roaring uphill with 10 cars in run 8. This was the engine's maiden run.

Looks like CB&Q doesn't it. THis shot was taken on Halloween. The engine's maiden run. 20 or so railfans gathered to photograph this engine, with its crew, who are also railfans, dressed in 1950's attire (striped overalls and such). THe trackage is ex CB&Q, so this was done to reflect the line's history.



Anyway, I'm in the very early planning stages, I probrably won't break ground until early next year, but I have plenty of money saved up to start with. What do you think?


PS: THe company is expecting a big increase in traffic, which might entail putting another one of their SW9's and some out of service trackage back in service. SO I may be running two CB&Q esque switchers MU'd. I am not sure of the actual grade of the hill. I will try to figure it out. Whats the max incline that I should run. About how many cars could I haul up X incline?

Also, I have never had locomotives custom painted before. Does anyone know of a place in the chicago area, or a good place for me to ship them in??

Thanks

 

[UP2CSX]

Whoa! First, welcome aboard. I know you want to get started but we need some basic information first. What scale are you planing to use? How big is the room? How big do you expect the layout to be? Are you planning one big table or an around the room shelf layout?

You talk about a grade up to the yard that's about a mile long. A mile in HO scale is a little over 60 feet or 30 feet in N scale. Do you have that kind of room? You should try to limit your grade to no more than 2%. That means the track has to run about 50 inches to rise one inch. How high will this yard be compared to the start of of the grade? If, for example, the yard will be six inches higher than the start of the grade, you will need at least 150 inches, or almost 13 feet. That's just for the grade not the yard itself. More layouts are sunk by having too steep a grade than probably any other reason.

On a 2% grade, a pair of switchers could probably handle 15 cars. You can steepen the grade to 4% but now you'll be limited to 6 or 7 cars and be working your engines to the max every time you run the grade. The other issue is that, the steeper the grade, the less useful it is to the rest of the layout. You can't locate any industries on it because spotted cars will roll away. You end up with a big ramp and not much else.

There are several members here who do custom painting and I'm sure they will chime in.

There are two things you should do first. Read the Beginners Guide, written by one of our members, Chip, aka, Spacemouse. You can find it at http://www.chipengelmann.com/trains/Beginner/BeginnersGuide01.html. The other thing is to download the freeware track planning program call XtrkCAD from http://www.xtrkcad.org/Wikka/HomePage. There's a tutorial available at the site and it will take you a few hours to go through it and get proficient with the program. Once you are, you can start doing your track plans with the layout in the space you have to work with. You can post copies of your trackplans here and we can give you advice in the good and not so good points of the plan. If you do this right, you'll end up with a good running, realistic, easy to maintain layout. If you just jump right in, you'll spend a lot of money and hate what you built in six months.

Nice picture of that SW, BTW. You might ask the crew about how they have the fuel rack settings calculated. Even Alco's don't usually smoke that much.

 

[mrconductor55]

Thanks for your reply,

First, That shot was staged for the group of railfans that were there to see the engine on its maiden run in Q colors. Engineer Vahey wanted it to do that, so he ran it uphill in run 8 with 10 loaded cars.

I am doing HO Scale like my last layout. This will be a big linear switching layout with the Metra commuter train running in a loop. I don't plan to model the grade exactly. It may be around 5 feet long. As most of the grade is un noticeable.

As for the paintjob. They keep 2 units on this branchline, both SW9's. The one pictured below is the 1206. It is painted in a CB&Q inspired scheme. The only difference is instead of Burlington Route on the Cab, it reads City of Chicago. Instead of way of the zephyrs and everywhere west on the hood, it read Central Illinois. Their second unit is in rough shape, covered in graffiti. It has been out of service since March. Its rear traction motors are fried, and only notches 1, 4, 7, and 8 work. It also has a bad habbit of catching fire. They want to rebuild it, or bring their third SW9 in to be MU'd with the 1206. One of them will be painted in this same scheme.

I also plan on using XtrkCAD to design the track plan.