Monk Subdivision Staging Yard Conodrum

Monk Subdivision is progressing at a decent pace right now. I’m currently fine tuning the staging yard design and cutting plywood for it. In the recent days, I did a few experiments with tracks that completely changed my approach to what I’m about to do.

 

The biggest concern about the hidden staging yard is that vertical clearance is minimal. We are talking about 6” at best here which isn’t close to any recommended practice.  The answer is simple, how do you deal with access, derailed equipment and cleaning the tracks? I wish I had more vertical clearance, something close to 10” or 12”, but it isn’t possible. I have no place to spare for a helix and I want to keep my grade under 1.5% at any cost to maintain a good performance for my steam locomotives. With that known, I have to design my way around that hurdle.

 

The first thing is to make the foreground and background on the upper deck partially movable so I can access the tracks in case of an incident or simply for maintenance. This is even more important where turnouts are located. If possible, I wish to put turnouts where they will be easier to access. On the left, it means I can place a few ones under the hill in the foreground. The hill will be a good excuse to have an access slot in the fascia so we can visually monitor what’s going on in the staging. Other turnouts on the left will be located after the big curve because they will clear the lower cabinets on the wall. I certainly don’t wish to see any complex wiring and controls there. On the right sides, all turnouts are located against the wall and before the curve because this is where access is best at all time.

 

Another big issue is that my staging yard will need to be built partially on a grade on both sides. It means most of the yard throats will be inclined. I did some tests with Rapido Super Continental coaches (my longest and most capricious cars) and it works fine if the grade is constant and turnouts are far from vertical transitions. We can consider that a done deal.

Revised staging plan

The next issue is derailment. These things are frustrating, but even more when they happen in hidden places. For this reason, a lot of rerailers will be installed on every hidden track to minimize risks. They cost almost nothing and I feel this is a much needed insurance.

 

Speaking of unreachable areas, I created alcoves in the upper deck to follow the track flowing curvature. This is both for aesthetics and to provide a shelf, but also to make my life easier when handling trains in the yard. I will install a fiddle track that will be built at the bottom of the left alcove. Trains there will be both visible and easy to handle. The spot will be useful to build or break trains there, creating new consists without having to fight under the upper deck elsewhere. I can also serve as a programming track or to stage the local freight train. This is the only train that needs to be frequently changed. This track will be good enough to handle it and I’m planning to install a series of drawers under the layout right there to make staging easier.

 

Now, the last big issue to take care of... Turnouts are a real paint in the proverbial place. You get short, you lose power, train derails… it’s the main source of problem on a layout. Now, imagine using them under in hidden places! I can already imagine the disaster. My original plan called for the use of old PECO Code 100 Streamline turnouts salvaged from our second club layout. They are almost brand new and in great shape, but I found out they run a little bit rough with modern cars, particularly the Rapido ones that start dancing on the frogs. I also tried with old Blue Box cars and I got the same results. It’s also very noisy. The turnouts are fine, but on a grade, I don’t trust them. I did the experiment again with Peco Code 83 turnouts and the ride was much smoother and quieter. I knew I would have to think twice about using the Code 100 turnouts. Worst, I found out I hadn’t enough of them to build the staging yard, so I had to make a decision.

 

This decision is simple, I won’t use Peco Code 100 turnouts… and will upgrade my design with Peco Code 83 or Code 70. I prefer more reliable components to be honest. I see the problem at the club layout and don’t want them replicated here. Speaking of turnouts, I’ve come to appreciate Peco’s new unifrog design. I like the idea of being able to upgrade the system later on. The reason is simple, I have many old DC locomotives I want to use and Unifrog give me the chance to make it possible to run both DC and DCC. Also, the Unifrog design comes with continuous solid rail points instead of hinged ones. Much more reliable for electric current and less prone to derailment.

 

For these reasons, I’ve redesigned the yard to only use Peco #6 Unifrog turnouts. It comes with a price tag, but I know you can’t go cheap with turnouts. Many will comment that at this point, I should invest in Fast Track jigs and build my own turnouts. That would be a great idea, but it comes with a serious caveat; I both suck at mechanical stuff and plainly hate mechanical stuff. I may understand the general principles, but I’m terrible at implementing them. A fifty hours spent at the benchwork to build 25 turnouts  I know will be less than great doesn’t seem appealing to me. Bear in mind I totally respect people building their turnouts. We all know it’s the best way to go, but it’s a red line I’m happy to draw knowing my strengths lies elsewhere.

 

With that said, I’m happy to report the new staging yard is now fully revised and ready to enter the building stage. It will be quite a challenge since I want to implement servos for turnout control, insulated staging tracks and IR detection for a control board that will let me know what’s happening. In the future, I'd like to program the staging turnouts with an Arduino board to make things more intuitive and simpler. I'm not closing the door to automation either since the layout is rather simple.

Staging capacity

This is the most important criteria at the end of the day... How many trains and cars can be staged at once. Since Monk Subdivision saw a lot of traffic back in the days, I wanted enough tracks to hold them all. While I do intend to model mainly the early 1950s, I'll use the layout to run anything in my collection from the 1960s to the 2010s. For this reason, I'll probably run consists made of 3 to 5 locomotives pulling about 30 cars when I'm in the mood for it. Also, some trains on the subdivision were really long. A good example is the Cabot, a passenger train from the late 1960s which can easily be 16 to 18ft long. It's high on my priority list and I really wanted it to be possible.

Using an employee timetable from the 1950s, I've come to this tentative staging scheme which could hold about 140 freight cars and 22 passenger cars at once:

Staging 1:   242 (230) 38 cars (#700 fast freight)

Staging 2:   188 (176) 31 cars (#700 fast freight)

Staging 3:   206 (194) 34 cars (#400 2-10-2 manifest)

Staging 4:   131 (119) 20 cars (#400 2-10-2 manifest)

Staging 5:   127 (115) 19 cars (Fast passenger)

Staging 6:   120 (108) 20 cars (Fast passenger)

Staging 7:   98   (86)   14 cars (#400 2-8-2 manifest)

Staging 8:   95   (83)   14 cars (#400 2-8-2 manifest)

Staging 9:   72   (60)   10 cars (local passenger)

Staging 10: 72   (60)   10 cars (local passenger)

Hindsight 20/20 Post Mortem

When Hunter Hughson contacted me to present a clinic about my Birtish-American Oil tank car fleet I couldn't help but stress the fact my research was incomplete and amateurish at best. My work was everything but an approximation of the prototype. But he convinced me there was a place for this kind of work at a RPM meet.

My hope was to provide a basic frame of data and a methodology which could be improved as new information is found or completed by much knowledgeable people than I. I must confess I'm not particularly well versed in searching through ORER, car drawings and specialized book.

However, I've quite impressed with the interest this clinic sparked and a few individuals like Mike Schleigh and Jim Little contacted me to provide more data unkown to me. I really want to thanks all of them for their invaluable knowledge as it has put to rest many questions that I felt I couldn't answer.

First, Jim Little was kind enough to provide me with good color pictures of BA tank cars. As I speculated, the green paint was not olive nor dark emerald but a rather standard dark green. Tamiya XF-26 Dark Green seem to be quite close but some experiments will be required to find the "perfect" match if such a thing exist.

Then, Ted Culotta and others suggested I took a look at Southern Car & Foundry STC-built tank car resin kits. While these kits are out of stock, a few can still be found here and there. The most useful ones are the 6k gals. 5 course radial tank car and the 10k gals. tank car.

The clinic hand out available on Hindsight2020 groups.io has been updated to reflect these information.

Some Action on Monk Subdivision - Benchwork

The Monk Subdivision layout project is moving forward again after a hiatus due to the recent bout of lockdowns in Quebec being phased out. I didn't work on it for almost two months, if not more, and it was time to revisit the basement to push forward with this project.

To be honest, I'm impatient to run trains and nothing more. And if you don't see fancy words such as operations and prototypes, you are an astute reader. For this project, I simply don't care about that since it isn't the main goal. I think each layout is an opportunity to explore a specific set of ideas. In this case, Hedley-Junction and Harlem Station provide me with plenty of action and plenty of prototype oriented modelling. What they don't provide is running trains. Long ones, passenger ones, ones that are prototypically related to the layout concept.

I think I discussed these ideas in the past, but I really like to railfan trains and it doesn't need a lot. Also, I don't see myself building a complicated layout by my own. I just don't have that level of commitment built in me. I'll work tirelessly on short and involved projects, but don't ask me to debug or wire a 40-something turnouts with a clear schedule to respect. It won't happen.

During the last two months, I've been working on other projects and when I started to look back at my old track plan for Monk, questions and observations were made. The first thing was that several technical issues were raised. Building a long curved bridge near a swing gate and out of staging didn't work at all due to conflict with turnouts in the fiddle yard. Making a turntable to run flawlessly is a long and costly endeavour... for something that is seldom used. I do love them, I'm terrible at electronics and mechanics. Monk yard was small, very, very small... too small. And Armagh was cool, but since it's a flat switching district, each grades of both sides were now at 2.4% which I felt was unrealistic and undesirable. If the goal is to railfan, it makes no sense to have such a steep grade because I know many of my steam locomotives are mediocre or passable puller. A True Line U-2-g (yes, I got the upgraded drive version back in the days for a fraction of the price) won't be happy there. The layout must be universal and generic to fit all my needs.

Some benchwork done...

And the swing gate almost finished.

Waiting before moving forward with the project was a good idea because I read a little bit more about Monk subdivision and came to realize a good realistic layout with a modicum of operation was possible. I learned more details about Armagh being the refueling station between Joffre and Monk. From what I understand, it was an obligatory stop for almost every steam trains running on the subdivision. The coaling tower was also wooden and didn't seem to use a raised track, making it an interest small contraption. Armagh also had a nice team track used for a variety of local customers, including pulpwood, produce and fuel. Add to that the coal traffic to the coaling station and you get a clear idea switching the area is just like operating on a well thought switching layout. For those familiar with Trevor Marshall's old Port Rowan layout, just imagine Armagh is the equivalent if it wasn't a terminus.

Who needs more? (credit: C&O Piney River and Paint Creek Subdivision on FB)

Meanwhile, I was also building a 54" long replica of Rivière du Milieu trestle bridge on the NTR, near La Tuque for Yvan Déry's layout rebuilding effort. Seeing such a huge NTR structure made me recognize it was a perfect classic railfanning spot and that it would be foolish to reduce the NTR Abenakis Viaduct to a cramped space in a corner of the layout. I was convinced that if I were to give the impression of a transcontinental railway, I had no other choice but to build a full scale replicate of that bridge and enshrine it on the layout like a jewel. A few discussions with Chris Mears fully convinced me it was the path to follow.

Sketch exploring the role of scenery in a single track mainline design

At this point, you probably know where I'm going on. I reverted back to the initial layout concept and dropped Monk altogether, making Armagh the central scene. This enabled me to replicate a closer to scale Armagh with a 16 feet long siding to stage meets between long trains. This move freed space for the Abenakis Viaduct right were Armagh used to stand. Since it's a bridge, it would be on slight grade, like the prototype too, helping me to create a continuous and gentle scenic grade from staging to Armagh. The new grade is now about 1.6% which seems totally acceptable in HO scale.

A simple scene that speaks volume about the railway purpose

As for the rest of the layout, it's just plain scenery... many feet of mainlines crossing the territory like a ribbon steel cutting through ingrate topography. The layout is now less crowded and much more geared toward railfanning. Minimal radius on visible parts is about 42", which will make long passenger cars not look too silly (they always do!).

Armagh is simple yet packed with action

Two possible versions, the bottom one being more realistic

It also implement a more coherent narrative in regard to the prototype roots of this layout. Just like the real Monk subdivision, the first part is all about climbing and conquering the Appalachian piedmont by snuggling along the topography to keep a constant and acceptable grade for optimal results... After battling the grade through valleys and hills covered in forest, the train reach finally a resting spot to pause, refuel and assess the rest of its journey. This flat spot represent the human contact point with trains... the place were the ecumene can be understood by human settlement, buildings and fields... Then, our train continues it way toward the Atlantic ocean by finding its way through the Appalachian plateau characterized by relatively low hills, marshes and woods before entering staging once again.

A schematic proof of concept

It gives us a 2/3 ration of scenery VS yard, which seems about right to me to keep things simple and realistic. The number of structures to model is now relatively low, but each of them are really interesting. They can also be replaced by other similar footprint buildings to imply a completely different prototype set in a similar region.

Updated track plan and scenery design

As for staging, I've started from scratch too, now envisioning a simple two ended yard with much longer tracks and a possibility for later automation and additional track. The goal here is to get trains moving soon so the layout has a purpose.

Hindsight 20/20 12.0 - Modelling British-American Tank Cars

 I'm glad to announce I'll be presenting a new clinic documenting my effort at modelling British-American tank cars in HO Scale during Hindsight 20/20 Virtual RPM tomorrow. You can register here.

British-American tank cars draw a lot of attention and can be considered crowd pleasers among  modellers and collectors. They were indeed a classic 1940s-1950s sight and many manufacturers offer more or less "accurate" models that doesn't cut it for most of us.

The subject is vast and two different clinics will be required to delve with some depth into this subject. For this Saturday, I will focus on analyzing the historic B-A fleet, documenting its characteristics and paint scheme evolution. These information will come handy to do a comparative study between the prototypes and the suitable available models.

Hope this will catch your fancy!

A Second Life for Athearn 40ft Boxcar?

 Like most modellers, I've accumulated over years countless Athearn 40ft boxcars to populate my early layouts. With time, I phased them out and condemned them to oblivion. Yes, there was a time I tried to improve some by replacing all the grabirons and ladders with separate parts. However, it was long, tedious and maybe not worth the investment in time and resources.

Maybe these cars will be saved from oblivion one day

However, a recent discussion with Chris Mears about what matters when modelling freight cars, we agreed that hyper detailed $60 cars weren't required to build a decent fleet and get a good representation of a real freight consist. Indeed, if the focus isn't a single car but a massive amount of them, only the main characteristics should be adequate: correct shape, correct silhouette, correct proportions, correct colors and decent weathering. Remark I haven't yet mentioned the work prototypical because it doesn't matter that much if the good is the big picture... and an impressionist one. However, I'm not that fond of obvious foobies and we will try to address that question later.

While not bad, many details scream Athearn at first glance

The big question is: what makes a car in a consist scream "Athearn Blue Box"... In general, it's the badly done moving doors with their chunky claws and grossly oversized tracks. In second comes the overly thick roofwalk and in third I would say the thick stirrups. Sure, many other details are "wrong", but they aren't so bad they are obvious at first glance and are decent enough to not be obvious.

Metal stirrups VS filed down stirrups

So I decided to make a proof of concept about how someone could improve an Athearn 40ft boxcar with as little work as possible and with very little investment. Here's my recipe:

Remove the doors, tracks, roofwalk and brakewheel.

First, every grossly oversized details, including doors and their tracks. We no longer have use for them. Plug the top track slots with 1.5 x 1.5mm styrene and sand smooth. The bottom track must also be removed and sanded down until it's level with the carbody.

Bottom track sanded smooth

Filling the top track slot with styrene

Plug the roof holes with the of old roofwalk pins. Add some 0.5 mm styrene bits to complete the roofwalk supports. Sand everything down so the new roofwalk sits flush on all supports.

Plugging the roof holes

Now, it's time to alter the underframe. Remove the reservoir and valve, keep them, but toss the brake cylinder, we no longer have any use for it. Install an Accurail 40ft car brake rigging on the Athearn underframe. You will need to cement a piece of styrene to support the new brake cylinder. Then, reinstall the reservoir in place making sure your invert their original position. Yes, when Irv Athearn tooled these cars he made a mistake and inverted their position due to an error while reading a floor plan drawing!

Add weight to the underframe according to your standards then put the shell back on. Glue a 10ft high, 6 feet wide Branchline Youngstown door (available from Atlas). Add new tracks made of 0.5 x 0.5mm (0.02" x 0.02") styrene strips. Fill the gaps on each side of the doors (bottom) with putty and sand smooth. Over the top track, complete the riveted steel band by gluing in place a piece of 0.25mm thick styrene with punched rivets (you can use Archer resin rivets later if you wish). Also, on each door, at the bottom left, complete the door jamb by adding to small bits of styrene.

This is an Intermountain door, the Branchline ones work better.

Thin down the stirrup steps by removing carefully material. Start by sanding the bevels on the outside with a fine file. Then, remove the bevel inside with a hobby blade. Be careful.

Original thick stirrup step

Filed down stirrup step

Next, install an Accurail wooden roofwalk (from their outside braced boxcar kits). Add small piece of styrene to support the lateral roof walks. I use 2mm x 0.5mm strips glue under the roofwalk and then to the roof. Glue everything in place. If you want more realism, shave off the molded corner grabirons and replace them with Tichy phosphore bronze ones. I think it really improve the general silhouette.

A completed car ready for primer

Speaking of silhouette, it's time to lengthen the brakewheel platform by adding a 1mm x 0.5mm x 8mm styrene strip to make it look better. Finally, add the nice brakewheel that came with the Branchline door in place and your car is ready for primer.

Car in gray primer with Archer resin rivets

Closeup of door modifications

Car in red oxide primer ready for pre-weathering.

When primed, add Archer resin rivets everywhere they are missing: mainly over the door bottom track and over the top track too on the ridge. Add another coat of primer and you car is ready for paint, decals and weathering.

This prepainted car is ready for patch up paint job.

A completed car ready for weathering

Total cost? Maybe too much, but you had fun and you can add more details if you wish. This car, while not perfect, is now a quite decent representation of Canadian National 1937 AAR style 10ft high boxcars built by the thousands from 1937 to the late 1940s. Later designs had different roofs and ends depending on car builders, but the older ones had, just like the Athearn car, 6ft Youngstown doors, Murphy raised panel roof, Dreadnaught ends (albeit 4/4 instead of the rare 5/5 panels on Athearn car) and wooden roofwalks. If you want to model different cars with different ends and roof, ditch the Athearn car and find something easier to bash. Enjoy!