Welcome to the beginnings of my freelance Cheverie Mountain Railroad HO-scale layout. Cheverie, Nova Scotia, Canada is about an hour and a half drive from my home in Dartmouth. It is located on the Minas Basin and as a coastal area, is strongly affected by the impressive tides of the Bay of Fundy. It also sits on some of Nova Scotia's most amazing geological formations.
I have been studying the geology of my province for more than 30 years, including rock and mineral collecting following the official guidelines of the Province of Nova Scotia, hiking in all provincial counties, auditing an earth sciences course at Dalhousie University (in Halifax), and I even had one of my daughters become a geologist because of this family interest.
I have made Cheverie the center of my freelance model railroad layout, despite the fact that the old abandoned Dominion Atlantic Railroad tracks did not run north from Windsor through this region. I have set up an area in my basement (eventually I'll have the whole basement for the layout) to begin the layout design. Started crunching numbers tonight in order to compress the real layout region to the size of my basement and to the width of the coastal road that passes through Cheverie.
Here are a few pictures from my field trip to Cheverie today, and of my work area in the basement. First up, gypsum and anhydrite outcrop on the beach. There are several of these.
Stunning rock and mineral combinations.
You never know how deep the mud and clay are ... until you step in a soft spot. Yikes!
And the most beautifully-coloured satin spar (a form of gypsum) I have ever seen. I call this colour salmon.
This is my layout design desk. I have the most accurate topographic maps available, geological data for all of Nova Scotia, drawing and measuring tools, and a working piece of foam to draw features of interest on.
This 10 cm measurement is a kilometer on my accurate topo maps.
When I go to sleep tonight, I'll probably be dreaming about the width of the HO road going through Cheverie versus the size and shape of my basement.
Here is the basement area I will have available for my layout. About seventy of the foam boards on my desk fit into the basement layout area. I have lots to work with.
Coastal highway 215 runs through Cheverie. I will make this road 9 cm wide. The real compass points have been placed along the foam edges. Two gypsum quarries have operated in Cheverie in the past so I am bringing them back with mining equipment and appropriate buildings. Based on historical geological mineral resources data, the approximate locations of these quarries is shown on the foam. A very old church still in use will be modelled. On the southwest side of a small creek there was some core drilling exploration for manganese and barite in the past according to the literature. I will model a drilling crew of five plus their drilling equipment. A track will run SE of the road.
Bedrock for structures in and around layout Cheverie will use real shale slabs like these two gathered from one of the Cheverie beaches. Two colours were collected: gray and brown.
In this section of the layout, the church and private residence foundations will sit on brown shale slabs sunk into the layout base. The gravel parking lot will use crushed shale from Cheverie.
In the materials lab I am going to carry out an experiment with Cheverie clay that I gathered from the beach (during my muddy boot episode shown earlier in this thread). You can see some of this gray clay in the small sealed bag. I have used this natural clay for ground cover and plan to use it to make rugged cliffs and other scenery items, but in this experiment, I am going to investigate how it holds up as road asphalt.
I have drawn a similar section of Hwy 215 on a block of foam and will apply Cheverie clay to dry overnight. The clay in this bag is only a few days old but will stay moldable for over a month (result from running a shelf life test with another sealed bag).
Here is a clay sample from the sealed bag used in the shelf life test.
Clay road section applied with a spatula. Will let it dry overnight. The clay contains larger stones that I removed for this roadway experiment. When building a cliff or other rugged scenery these stones will stay in the mix.
It's 2:30 am and I woke up with an idea on how to connect the two Cheverie gypsum quarries on either side of Hwy 215. The highway will pass over a bridge. The basin-side quarry will haul its gypsum under the highway bridge by dump truck to the NE quarry for crushing and loading into hoppers.
Sanded the surface of the hardened clay and applied some black paint. Looks promising as an asphalt road surface so far.
Very happy with Cheverie clay as asphalt for the paved roads. Can also use this technique for roofing.
Two subterranean conduit bundles will be run to distribution boxes EEP #1 and #2. These independent conduits (within a bundle) will supply electrical, electromechanical and pneumatic energy to lighting and animation devices on this panel. These conduits are not associated with the track power.
Field trip to Walton today so I can complete my layout planning for two more foam panels NE of the Cheverie panel. The freelance revival of the old Walton barite mine, mill, and gypsum quarry are located at the end of my layout to the NE. The Cheverie Mountain Railroad Yard will be nearby.
The folded shale cliffs in Walton, Nova Scotia are a sight to see. Very easy walk along the harbour beach and you are looking into the distant past of the planet Earth. There is also barite, gypsum, and pyrite to be found in good quantities.
All that crunching under my boots is a superb ground cover of small thin pieces of shale erroding off the cliffs from the action of extrordinary Bay of Fundy tides. All of my rail beds and ballast will be constructed from Walton shale.
Large thin sheets of shale will be used in the Walton area of the layout for building/structure bedrock.
Field trip into Cambridge, Nova Scotia today allowed me to finish my second layout panel that lies NE of Cheverie (Panel 1). There will be a ficticious shale factory that makes shale products for local, provincial, and international markets. A rail line will run to the back of the factory where one or two containers can be loaded for shipping to the Fairview CN Intermodal Port in Halifax.
There will be lots of horses and cows on the Minas Basin side of Hwy 215. An old shed and woodpile will be modelled after the prototype (I took pictures). The farmhouses, barn, farm outbuildings, old shed and shale factory will be built on real shale plates collected in Cambridge.
Last night I attended the craft night at the stained glass store and watched my friend and others work on their pieces. Some of them were using aluminum L-blocks to hold their pieces on a plywood base. I bought a pack of L-blocks to use on my roads. I measured out fixed weights of Cape Blomidon sandstone powder, Walton shale particles, and fast drying wood glue and made shoulders that look like the real thing in the Cheverie area. Will let the shoulders dry before removing the L-blocks to see how they look. Will need to make my own curved L-blocks (possibly out of cardboard) for the road curves.