I enjoy imagining what kind of a layout I can build whenever I take control of a space. Even when I’ve worked in office cubicles I didn’t hesitate to sketch up ideas for shelf layouts that I could fit in, even though it might have been bad for office morale to slack off of work so brazenly. But I seem to be ensconced in my current classroom for the foreseeable future and the Inglenook convinced me that a model railroad would be a legitimate and appropriate educational tool. For some kids, maybe better than just appropriate.
My school is located in Oakland, California, just a block and a half from the old terminal freight house of the very picturesque Sacramento Northern (which ceased operations in 1957). The SN electrics rumbled through town down the middle of Shafter Avenue in our otherwise quiet residential neighborhood.
For some other wonderful old pictures of the line, visit:
http://www.eastbayhillsproject.org/
http://www.oberail.org/page/sacramento_northern/
Modeling the SN in our neighborhood is a very appealing concept. Kids could walk a block to Shafter to view, photograph and measure the actual homes and then use the 7th grade math curriculum concepts of scale, ratio and proportion to build replicas. Doing the research to backdate the scenes effectively would connect the project to local history and their social studies curriculum too. I often take them for walks around the neighborhood with photographs dating back to the nineteenth century to stand at the camera’s vantage point and observe how things have changed.
I even have almost enough room to model the entire SN terminal “complex” exactly to scale, with Shafter Avenue running north along the long blackboard wall of my room, exactly parallel to the prototype ROW a block to the west. (This image from a Charles Smiley source).
Dreaming big, I realized I could continue around the walls with layout elements that continue to parallel their prototypes: crossing College Avenue, the 4% grade up to Lake Temescal, Montclair, then a hard left turn through a deep cut (right where a corner of the wall makes a left turn necessary!) finally up Shepherd Canyon and the old tunnel to Moraga and points east. A perfect fit! And the actual ROW literally wraps around my classroom (though getting farther and farther away). Much of the old roadbed into the hills is visible and walkable.
This dream preceded the Inglenook, and I’d begun to acquire appropriate rolling stock including a beautiful old brass steeple cab with a dated mechanism and some LaBelle kits.
But I changed my mind. As I thought about how to structure operations so that a large number of students could participate simultaneously, I realized that it would be difficult to do that with the SN. Some of the math content I want to incorporate revolves around sorting in yards, meets, junctions, and TT&TO operations in more traffic than the SN ever ran. Plus, although I love the idea of following a prototype and I want their modeling to take plausibility into account, I also want to have a free hand to include freight customers that might not have been prototypical but that provide interesting scenarios for math lessons.
Too bad. Maybe someday.
Instead I decided to go freelance, and tailor the plan to both the features and experiences that would be easiest for me to work into the math lessons and activities, and the available space in the room.
My starting point would be to figure out where the trains we were assembling on the Inglenook were going to and coming from.
Jeff
