After a couple months I am back to building. Sometimes life gets in the way of model railroading and the last couple of months have certainly been that for me. I hope to be working more regularly and posting more frequently for a while now. This pictures shows the benchwork for the staging deck. The taller legs in the middle are for support of both decks and reach to the extant of the upper deck back drop.
It has been a busy week since the last post. I am working on building shelves underneath the layout. This should let me unpack stuff and get it out of boxes. Everything from freight cars to tools and track has been packed away since we moved here 3 years ago. Hopefully by the end of the month all that will be done and benchwork will start to go up. In the mean time I am working to finalize the track plan. Since I had uploaded a track plan last year a lot has changed. I had a chance to do track plan consult with Donn Winn with the Layout Design SIG during the NMRA Virtual Convention last July. He was very helpful and several great ideas. One of the biggest changes after talking to Don was to remove the narrow peninsula that had the staging yard and Sandpoint yard. The staging got moved to still lowered deck. This compromise allowed for among other things to wider aisles and a larger minimum radius on the end of the remaining peninsula. Minimum radius is 33 inches which occurs only in the helix and at the end of peninsula or a few industrial spurs. Other locations have minimum of 40 mainline and 36 on the branch. The lower deck plan is here. Aisles are now 5 feet with only 1 pinch point the peninsula and the west wall. Only 1 switching pint ( the LP sawmill) is very close to the pinch point with mostly scenic running on both decks.
The new train room is finished. It is finally ready for benchwork. One of the things I built in was a workbench and spray booth. his has been quite a project with several delays over the last year. Lumber prices and shortages wreaked havoc on the schedule as did the contractor having to quarantine his crew due to due to COVID. Followed by a back injury and an illness on my part while working on the interior. I hope to start benchwork in a couple of days. I also hope to post a new and revised track plan soon as well. In the mean time I hope everyone has a Happy New Year and Happy Railroading in 2022.
It has been a while as I have been pretty busy working on the new train room trying to get it ready for winter. I finally finished drywall mud and am ready to paint. This is a huge step as the next big thing is to get the heat pump installed so we can continue to work on the inside not that we getting
frost most nights.
As I posted before I am from the Inland Northwest in the area that I am going base the new layout. However my wife is originally from Pennsylvania. So I wanted to do a Pennsy train in honor of her. Since it is already a "fantasy" train, I thought it would also be an opportunity to do something different in terms of motive power. So here is the first piece of that. This is a Bowser AS616 and will be the only Baldwin in my fleet. I installed Tsunami 2 in it and it looks and sounds great. This is only my 2nd unit from Bowser the other being a C636 in SP&S paint and stenciled for BN. They are both nice locos and I will be buying more Bowser in the future. I really like that train phone antennae the Pennsy used. Another unique feature it allows me to have.
A couple of weeks ago I purchased a couple of Intermountain autoracks. A couple of months ago I purchase a couple of the new Walther’s Proto autoracks. So I thought I would do some comparison.
Firs off they are both excellent cars. Paint is crisp and
well done with clean lines.(Walthers is BN and Intermountain is the UP) All the labels and stencils on the cars is legible
and well done. I would call it a tie here. All couplers were at the proper
height and the wheels were all in gauge on the NMRA gauge. Both cars are very
free rolling and have excellent wheelsets. Weight is 6.6 oz for the Intermountain
and 8.8 for the Walthers. NMRA recommended for a 12 inch car of this size is 7 ¼
So Walthers wins there.
The sides of both cars are well done. Walthers did an
excellent job but Intermountain went above and beyond with those see through
sides. Hand brakes, roof, and underbody details are pretty comparable between
cars. I think another tie here. The ends are another story. Intermountain has
the opening doors but they seem to be pretty fragile I would not be opening them
very often. I also had some difficulty getting the one I open closed again. Intermountain
has couple cut levers and the Walthers does not. Neither have air hoses.
Because they are fixed I think Walthers has better door detail as you can see door
latches and other items that are lacking in the Intermountain cars. On the
other hand the Walthers car has a little flash the should have been cleaned up
at the bottom of the door. You might also notice some bare plastic that got
missed in painting in the photo as well. I think Intermountain did better on the river detail as well.
Over they are both excellent cars. I do think the Intermountain
is a little better car in terms of detail. One thing to keep in mind in there
is a significant price difference as well. The Walthers is MSRP of $64.98 vs
$99.99 for the Intermountain. I would point out though that I got them both from
Model Train Stuff online and paid $53.99 and $69.99 for the Intermountain.
Although I will be changing out the Walthers couplers for Kadees so there is a few bucks less difference in the end.Bottom line is they are both good cars and I will probably buy more of each in
the future. I need another dozen or so of these cars and I will probably buy both brands again.
After a couple months I am back to building. Sometimes life gets in the way of model railroading and the last couple of months have certai...
