and a few UP too

Hey, gang. Looking for some design inspiration for a small shelf layout I'm planning. Besides Pennsylvania, the other location I've long had an interest in is the Pacific Northwest. The Northern Pacific, Great Northern, Spokane, Portland & Seattle and the Milwaukee Road (and other local short lines) are all railroads I'm interested in, but have little knowledge about. I thought it would be fun an educational to explore some of the smaller branch lines (especially end-of-line locations) in that part of the world for a possible small layout.

The small size of NCE's PowerCab DCC system makes it ideal for taking to the workbench - or even taking to a show. But not being mounted to anything makes its ungainly components a bit inconvenient to manage. So I made a foamcore box to mount all the stuff to - and was even able to include the USB interface so I could use the PowerCab for programming.

I've been working on and off since 2014 on a project to model both CN series 878000 and 879000 woodchip cars. These were (and some are still in revenue service) built from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s by Transcona Shops and NSC.

My prototype layout is based on the BNSF Industrial Lead in Seattle. I’ve been hard at work with many aspects of completing the layout, including scratch building 5 new buildings. I’m super excited to get 3 of them painted this weekend.

Two attachments provide some pictures of the layout.  The first attachment has a lumber yard in Barton, a boarding house in a to be named town on the Conn River Line, and a couple of shots of the engine facility at the North end of Newport, Vt.

The second attachment is all of the lower level of Cambridge Jct.  While not prototypical in track arrangement it represents the Central Vermont line from Essex Jct. to Cambridge Jct.  The Shared Trackage/Conn River Line is carried over the state highway on the through truss bridge.

What I find hard, is to be motivated on the layou​t when I'm faced with a bench looking like this.

Controlling model locomotive headlights realistically should be convenient. The prototype doesn’t turn lights off and on with every change of direction. DCC sophistication overlooks this conspicuous distraction.  When I’m switching I want both headlights on.  Changing to non directional lighting is daunting.

I have a locomotive with a loksound 5 decoder and a ProtoThrottle.  Deciphering  the loksound manual and the Iowa Scaled instructions is complicated.