Layout tour

West end of Atlantic yard and the East Nishnabotna River bridge. Staging is just out of view to the right. The junction with the Atlantic Spur is behind the green storage tanks.

Atlantic yard looking east. Material stored under the layout at these two locations will be gone once the Atlantic Spur is built.

East end of Atlantic yard in the upper right corner, Wiota on the right side of the peninsula, and Anita on the left. Backdrop down the middle should be going up early next year.

Adair’s West Central Elevator looking west. On the far left is the mainline leading back to staging, completing the loop around the room.

IAIS 4th Division

Joe , itseems to be progressing nicely. Can´t wait till the end, probably soon.

Ole P

Ole

Thanks very much Ole.  Most of the time this feels like I'm crawling, but laying, sanding, and staining the ties actually seemed to go faster than I expected.  Even though I'm about six weeks behind my self-imposed schedule, I'm hoping that means I can still meet my end-of-year deadline to have the mainline portion of the layout operational.

WOW Joe I'm impressed. I

WOW Joe I'm impressed. I haven't used hand laid track since the 70s, although, I have always thought it looked better then flex track. Maybe everything will settle down by next summer and I can take a trip to that end of the state. Would love to see your work first hand and also do some train watching in the area.

Nice work

Greg

Greg

Thanks very much Greg. It’d be fun to have company again when you can make it over. 
It’s tough to match the detail in commercial track, but fortunately for me, I can’t make that stuff out anymore without an Optivisor. I really thought about using commercial track this time but eventually landed back on hand laying since it gives me more flexibility. I like being able to work turnouts into curves more easily than I could if I was working with the commercial offerings. 

It is nice to see your

It is nice to see your progress Joe. I am looking forward to seeing more.

Jeff

You have been busy. Looking

You have been busy. Looking very aesthetic in the flow of the track work. But the looks of things are you hand laying  a large percentage of trackwork?

Phil

Great progress, Joe.  I'm

Great progress, Joe.  I'm loving that long mainline, although I guess no matter how long it is, I'd always want a bit more haha.  It sure beats my back and forward 22 feet or so.

Best wishes,

Mike

Nice progress Joe...

Like the others have said, I'm looking forward to seeing the trains rolling on the IAIS again.

Thank you

Thank you all very much for your encouragement.

Thanks Phil.  I'm trying to leave a lot of "breathing room" in this layout for more generous curve and turnouts, and hand-laying makes that job a lot easier.

Everything on this layout is hand-laid except for staging and 6' of the mainline extending west from staging in Adair.  I only chose the latter because it's the deepest scene on the layout (24") which can be really challenging when trying to lean over the track to eyeball alignment.  It's not so deep that I couldn't have made that work with handlaying there, but I had 2 sections of ME code 83 flex track that weren't doing anything anyway, so it made sense to put them to work there.

Ha!  Same here Mike.  We can always use just a little bit more.

I'm looking forward to having you back again for sure Allen.

Looking great!

Hi Joe, Your layout is looking great! I think you are making good progress on your layout. As others have said, your nice smoothly flowing track work is second to none. Like you, I am looking forward to the day you can run your first train all the way along the main line. Remember building a layout is a journey not a race, so don't worry if you miss a self imposed deadline to have something done. As long as you are making progress you are moving in the right direction.

Thomas Klimoski

Modeling the Georgia Northeastern Railroad

Great to see progress Joe

Joe,

As many have stated, its great to see some progress and handlaying track gives that smooth flawless transition that you don't get from commercial track and turnouts.  It will also help having lots of trees and scenery materials from the previous layout to expedite scenery once the track is done.

Looking  forward to the progress. 

-Neil Schofield 

Thank you

Tom, thanks very much. You’re absolutely right about the deadlines. I Need to be careful about getting wrapped up in them, as it’s really easy to let quality slip in order to move things along more quickly. I appreciate the great reminder.

Neil, thank you as well. That’s a great point about reusing trees and scenery materials. I brought them with me but didn’t think about the associated time savings. 

Motivational

I'm perusing back copies of paper magazines and just came upon your spread in the 2011 "Model Railroad Planning". Why does that seem like some forgotten ancient past now?

As a man that basically "kitbashed" my current layout from old left overs combined with some of the newest and greatest hobby offerings, I'm looking forward to rebuilding into a version 2.0 using many techniques and ideas gleaned from other modelers via MRH and elsewhere. I'm sure I can make it much better than it is with what I've learned.

Your explanations of the evolution of your railroads both past and present is truly interesting and helpful and I'm enjoying your progress reports.

Kent

Thanks very much Kent.  I understand what you mean about the old layout.  When I go back and look at pics of it now, it seems like another lifetime.  While I miss the enginehouse area and High Bridge, I wouldn't change a thing about the layout move/sale, and I think I'll enjoy this iteration a lot more.

I think you'll really enjoy your rebuild as well.  There's something very liberating about hitting the reset button and having a chance to do things according to our latest best ideas and techniques.  I'm still making mistakes and falling short of my ideal, but I think my overall personal goal is higher than before. 

An example of such a mistake is that I just realized that superelevating my prototypical curves would be key in recreating the look of the associated scenes, so I'm going back and addressing that now.  Fortunately, two of the unprototypical curves are in towns, where I felt that superelevation would look out of place anyway:  At the east end of Anita and along the east yard ladder in Atlantic.  The third is the turnback curve at the end of the mainline peninsula, but it was already naturally superelevated when it was built for the old layout thanks to the Homasote splines twisting inward slightly, and it retained that twist in the rebuild.  There are some gentle curves along that part of the prototype that are superelevated, so the precedent is there, but horseshoe curves in Iowa are pretty rare.

I really appreciate you following along on the new layout, and I'm glad the updates have been useful.  I'm currently waiting on my Arizona Rock & Mineral ballast order that's due to arrive next week, and I'm excited to get back to ballasting.  Until then, I'm updating my operations program, RailQuik, for the new stations and customers on this portion of the railroad.

Ties

Looking good.

I like to take a piece of 60 grit sandpaper and drag it across the ties roughly parallel to the ties to raise some grain and cracks before the final staining.

I also like to use Fiebings shoe leather dye to stain the ties.  It gives a nice silvery grey that looks like sunbleathed wood.  Then a dark walnut stain can be used on a few ties here and there to look like new ties that have been spotted in.

Dave

Hi Dave - Thanks for your thoughts on the ties.  If I hadn't already stained them all, I think I would have given your suggestion a try.  However, since I'm this far, I'm planning to go ahead with Plan A:  Ballasting (as soon as AR&M comes through with my order), then weathering individual ties with Pan Pastels.