There have been a couple of mentions of what people are doing for winter projects (in the Northern Hemisphere, that is ). I have been considering rebuilding the Greenvale industrial area for some time. This part of my layout started about 15 years and 3 houses ago. I needed a bedrooom sized layout, and found one in "Track Plan to Share a Family Room or Bedroom" in the September 1992 MR. I built it as a mirror image to the article track plan.
Over the years, I never really ran it except for the main line loop. I finaly realized the problem was a switchback getting to the Dragon Products cement plant was causing a bottleneck.
It may have been OK for the rural sawmill in the original plans, but really could not support traffic into a large industry like Dragon. The following photos demonstrate. An RS-11 with 2 cement hoppers foul the points; and a 44 Tonner with 2 hoppers justs fits
George In Midcoast Maine, 'bout halfway up the Rockland branch
I had originally thought of switching the locations of Dragon and Suburban Propane, and reworking the track accordingly, but it just did not feel right. I decided that a rework of the track plan and benchwork was needed. I started planning by stitching together about a dozen photos of Greenvale using Photoshop Elements to make an "aerial photo" to help my planning.
Fron this, I used Photoshop Elements to color code what I was going to do with the layout. The yellow area is the South Greenvale Curve that I rebuilt in 2011, I have removed that intact, and will re-use it somewhere else on the layout. The blue area was removed completely. On the red, I have removed all track, buildings and scenery.
I started the demolition about a week ago
My plan is to connect the Dragon lead to the old high line, and run them out on a pennsula about 8 feet long. It will include a passing siding to better switch Dragon. I have a scale house kit that I bought and did not have room for; I now can use it. The old branch line will go to staging behind the backdrop, representing Augusta, ME. The pennsula will end with a staging yard
Schematically, this the before and after track plan:
I will post more as the project continues...
For the past month, I have been cleaning up the Dragon Cement yard area, laying out roads and RR ROW, and building a scale house kit
The kit is from Builders in Scale; I have had it for a long time, as it did not fit in the previous Dragon plot plan. I built it with both the rail and truck scale pads. The RR scale had non-working gauntlet tracks.
This is what Dragon looks like now. I need to paint some roads, add approach ramps to the truck scale and lay track to the RR scale.
Also, need to get to the lumber yard and buy a couple of 1x6s to make L-girders