Why the change?

For those following along, it seems like my modeling experience is one step forward and two or three steps back, but each time I catch up to where I was before a major change I'm happy about the results.

The last version of the layout utilized existing bench work to save time and money (or so I thought). This led to compromises in the track plan and design that bothered me more over time.

The construction of the sections wasn't great as they were original to my first attempts at building the SLRR, and included upgrades to shadow box design. The vertical posts between the valance and fascia were ugly and distracting, and the general poor construction and alignment of sections caused issues with track work and operations.

The design was claustrophobic too and didn't make the best use of the space I currently have to work with.

The track work was generally poor and I overcomplicated the wiring underneath the layout.

I also did a lot more research of prototype paper mills and railroads in general which led me to find efficiencies in track work.

What I've Learned

1. Patience - makes everything turn out better in the long run (planning, wood working, purchasing etc...).
2. Research - if prototypical design and operation matters to you - which I learned over time that it does for me, than thoroughly research the prototype before engaging in track planning. The more I learned the more I changed the track plan, leading to 30 or 40 different iterations. I could have saved myself a lot of time. Most layout planning books and experts here say this, but for some reason I didn't follow the advice. 
3. Track Planning -  (this is more for relative newbies like myself)
   1. The mill won't receive a full set of loads for all spurs on the same day, and empty them all on the same day. Different loads will come and go throughout the week. The interchange yard could be serviced by various trains on the same day or different days. All this means the interchange yard needs much less car capacity and can be smaller than my previous versions.
   2. Multiple car types / loads can be unloaded in the same spot at different times - requiring less track.
   3. There can be multiple spots for different commodities on the same spur.
4. Min Radius and Equipment Length - After reading the first MRH edition I've become a fan of being able to couple and uncouple anywhere for more prototypical operation. I'm a fan of building more complex bench work sections to facilitate larger min radius based on my largest rolling stock.
5. Sectional Bench Work -
   1. Before assembling sections, screw end plates of adjoining sections together and use a drill press to drill holes for alignment dowels / pins and bolts.
   2. Use materials that resist expansion / contraction.
   3. Invest in tools and time making benches / jigs to construct square / accurate / level etc... bench work (or invest money in someone else who can do it for you).

What's New

The layout space has been rearranged, but the general location of elements in relation to each other is still the same.

1. Layout - much more open concept.
2. Operating Concept - I'll explain in a separate post.
3. Interchange Yard - double ended, with less tracks.
4. Rotary Dumper / Wood Chip Loads - removed.  
5. Much larger minimum radius (40").
6. Bench work - 'C' shaped plywood shadow box style construction. I'll explain in a separate blog.

Operations

I've modeled the operations of the mill roughly off those of the mill in West Point, VA. Posts about that mill on various online forums were the only detailed sources of information that I could find about load types, numbers of cars, daily operation, etc... for a pulp and paper mill using the Kraft process, like the one that inspired my layout.

I basically cut the car loads of the West Point mill in half (to create reasonably sized spurs and yard tracks for a model railroad) and scattered them across a weekly schedule roughly based on the online posts. I say roughly, because I don't know what days of the week different loads / empties were received / shipped or what days of the week the plant operated. 

The general scheme is this:

- The mill is serviced daily by a local (me manually adding / removing cars from the layout).

- A plant owned SW1200 switches the plant daily (I believe the WP mill didn't have its own switcher, but I like this concept).

- The mill receives loads / empties in 'bulk' and then ships loads / empties daily as they are used. 

- The table below is what I think the schedule could be. I'll look to have JMRI replicate and automate this schedule.

I'm open to advice on the schedule if you have any.

Outstanding!

Joe,

I love the trackplan, it's a fantastic example of a serious one industry layout.

Will you have an extension to ues in the top left corner for pulling cuts in that direction, or is that off limits to the industry crew?

Extension

Thanks Bill,

There will be a 30" long bolt on extension sticking out through door and into the hallway with a re-railer on it during operations.

That will remove the need for excessive run-around moves with loaded box cars, empty pulp wood flats, etc... to get them into the outbound tracks.

I'm in the early stages of getting into operating rules. The premise from the last layout, of the whole industry being at the end of industrial track which connects to a mainline off the layout, is the same for this one. In my mind the track leading out the door curves to the right and connects to an East / West (right / left) mainline. One or two other industries connect to this industry track between the paper mill and the mainline (this is similar to the prototype that inspired my layout - to my knowledge a local and a plant switcher operated on that track).

Great Concept

Joe, you have a designed a really nice layout with lots of operating potential. From what I can see the track plan looks very realistic and should provide many hours of operations. You are 100% correct to take your time and get the foundation right, time spent in the initial construction will pay off with smooth operations and a trouble free layout in the future. One note to consider is to plan for powering the turnout frogs, either through switch machines or a frog juicer. It is more important to have the frogs powered on a switching layout as you operate at very slow speeds and a power interruption will cause sound decoders to cut out and also lead to erratic operation. I look forward to following your progress.

Tom Klimoski

Georgia Northeastern Model Railroad 

rotary dumper

I was looking forward to seeing how you progressed on the rotary dumper.  See that it has made its way out of the plan.  Did you get far with plans for it?  Was it to be operational?

Glen Frix

Lessons Learned

Tom, 

Good advice on powering the frogs. That's one thing that I didn't do with the previous layout and I did have issues running at slow speeds through the frog. I'll be powering frogs through a switch machine this time around.

Glen,

A working rotary dumper would have been an interesting piece to the layout but I decided to remove it from the plan for several reasons:

1. Generally speaking, mills that receive both pulp wood and wood chips are huge, requiring a lot of additional space for track to model the dumper and pulp wood operations realistically (both the unloading locations and storage tracks for unit wood chip / pulp wood trains. Every time I tried to incorporate both in my various versions of the track plan it felt forced and unrealistic to me. The paper mill that inspired this layout was a little smaller and only received pulp wood anyway. 
2. I do want to incorporate little bits of automation on my layout - switches, operating loading doors, etc... but those are relatively easy compared to a functioning rotary dumper. Those who have automated dumpers have either scratch built them completely from brass and other strong materials that can handle frequent use, or did a significant amount of kit bashing to the Walthers kit to make it strong (a lot of the plastic parts in the Walthers kit seem to fail over time). I would also guess that they have educational backgrounds that made the construction more manageable. 

So I decided to take a simpler approach. 

Great revamp

It looks very promising.  It looks and feels like you have put all that thought into this layout. A huge pulp and paper mill make an excellent choice for a modern industry layout. The size and operation of this design will give it the feel of being a massive facility.

I like  the tough choices of no rotary dumper, a great eye catcher, but difficult in every other aspect. Plus the decision about curves and radius. I am looking forward to your progress on this layout. I had a large paper ill on my previous layout, with many switching spots, but this is so much better designed and researched.

so my first question is this.... why is your profile picture upside down?

Operations

Joe...I think your car count and frequency seems to be reasonable idea for starting operations.  I used a similar approach for my Spruce Falls Pulp and Paper mill, modeling the operations after what I had observed at the Tembec mills in Iroquois Falls and Kapuskasing Ontario.  While I don't quite have as many loading/off-loading spots as you do, I opted to randomize the spotting of cars via Mike Rose's switch list generator which was featured in these pages.  I have roughly about half of the number of car spots as you do, and adjusted my incoming storage tracks to equal this number of outgoing cars. My only problem is that I installed my storage tracks at the far end of the mill, which means that I have restricted myself on when the switcher can operate, since I may have a conflict when the KLR goes to pull a train out over the single track running through the mill.

rotary dumper

totally understand.  While very cool to have, it takes a LOT of time, detail, and almost above all, SPACE to do it right.  Glen

Photo

Thomas,

Thanks for the comments. Not sure why my profile photo was upside down for a couple of days but it seems to have corrected itself.

Track Plan Update

I've been making good progress on the track work and wiring for the layout recently so I thought it would be a good idea to post an updated track plan. This should be the last revision, but I've said that before. The original thread post now has an updated plan.

After tweaking my operating scheme I realized that I did not need a full interchange yard to have a good operating session. I could get away with one inbound and outbound track of sufficient length. That allowed me to save space and remove one of the sections. In the future I may add a full interchange yard at the bottom of the layout to "store" all my rolling stock.

When I started seriously looking at track I decided on Code 70 Micro Engineering and Proto87 turnouts. The two manufacturers have compatible track (tie height, rail profile) and the Proto87 turnouts can be curved where needed. All turnouts are now #7 and a few curved #9s.

The geometry of the track and buildings also bothered me a bit. There is a prototype for everything, but most paper mills seem to have a somewhat linear layout with most of the buildings oriented in one or maybe two directions.

Lastly, while I was installing the photo backdrop I goofed and ended up with a large wrinkle / tear in one area. To cover that up I needed a tall structure. Fortunately, coal fired power plants are tall structures that you can sometimes find at paper mills. So now the paper mill receives coal and you won't be able to see the blemish on the backdrop.

So the plan has been modified and simplified somewhat from this:

[attach:fileid=376474_28_0qfd/wBMh+R/woA//9k=]

I think your choice of

I think your choice of modeling a paper mill is a good one. So many different car types and switching moves. Here in the Fox River Valley area of NE Wisconsin there are many paper mills. Trackage everywhere. It's fascinating to watch operations.

Agree with Hans

I have been following since you 1st posted about Domtar. Central Wisconsin also has many still operational mills. Part of my layout has a Paper Mill taken from portions of the mill in Wi. Rapids, Mosinee and the closed mill at Brokaw. The mill offers many variety of moves and is a 24/7 operation. Thanks for sharing.

Tom

Digging the new blog format!!!

It all looks good Joe, keep up the good work.   Looking forward to what's next.  

Oh yea, you have to keep the inverted avatar, it's you signature now...............

Steve

Inverted?

I thought he'd moved to Australia.

Looking forward to more updates, wherever they come from.....

Scott Chatfield

Update and Adding Weight

I have decided to combine all of my separate blog posts for the DOMTAR Pulp and Paper Mill into one. I will only update this one going forward. I have linked all of my previous blogs at the top of this thread and updated the track plan.

Today I tried adding weight to tank cars by drilling through the top and adding sand. I am weighting my cars to the NMRA standard plus 2oz as discussed in Joe Fugate's 'Run Like A Dream' book.

I was able to gently pop the lid structure off of this Athearn Genesis 13,000 G Acid Tank car fairly easily with a pair of tweezers. The lid is sitting on the car to the right. I then drilled a small pilot hole through rest of the tank lid structure using a pin vise.

I then gradually increased hole size with progressively larger bits in a battery powered drill until the hole was large enough to fit the end of a small squeeze bottle (11/64ths). For more control next time I think I will use the drill press.

I weighed the car and then filled a cup with the correct weight in sandbox sand to pour into the car to reach my standard. The sand had been baked in the oven for two hours at 250F and sifted. I needed 2oz of sand to add to this car.

To transfer all of the sand from the cup into the tank I had to fill the small squeeze bottle two times.

Despite the small diameter of the holes involved the dry sand grains filled the tank car in a couple of minutes. I had to stop and shake the sand level inside the tank several times to keep it from overflowing out of the top.

This process made a bit of a sandy mess on the workbench and the car. I was able to blow most of the spilled sand out of the metal walkways and off the wheels. The wheels did need a clean though. I think I will take the wheels off for my next attempt and protect some of the details at the top of the tank with painters tape to reduce clean-up requirements.

Finally, I used a toothpick to apply a few small dots of CA glue on the inside rim of the opening and glue the lid back in place.

The car looks good as new. I reached the target weight without having to patch holes, sand, and paint the car again.

I didn't apply any glue to the sand mixture in the tank car to hold in place. I don't think it is necessary, but if I want to in the future I can easily remove the lid again. The sand doesn't make any noise or shift noticeably during operations.

I don't think I could have added much more than 3oz of weight in sand for this size of tank car. If you have a heavier weight standard you will have to substitute the sand for something more dense.

Here is a picture of the tools and materials I used.

1. Kitchen Scale
2. Test Track
3. Sandbox Sand
4. Funnel
5. Squeeze Bottle
6. Tweezers
7. Hobby Knife
8. Pin Vise
9. Round File
10. Drill Bits
11. Power Drill
12. CA Glue
13. Toothpick

Hopefully I can remove the lid from the rest of my tank cars this easily. I am also going to try popping the sliding doors off of the bottom of my hopper cars to weight them in a similar way.
 

More Car Weighting

I tackled the weighting of a few different car types over the last several days. Like above, this is probably nothing revolutionary, but it might make the decision to drill through nice rolling stock easier for someone else to make if they can see the process.

On the left is an Athearn RTR 16,000G Slurry Tank Car.

In the middle is an Athearn RTR Trinity 5161 cu.ft Covered Hopper which will get its reporting marks changed to CN and be used for Limestone service.

On the right is an Athearn RTR 20,000G Acid Tank Car which will get its load changed from Hydrochloric to Sulfuric Acid.

It was easy to pop the sliding bay door off of the Covered Hopper. But I chose the wrong door at first and found a metal screw. After popping off the second door I drilled through the first layer of plastic into the bay and then through the metal weight in the interior. Filling with sand was easy through the large hole. I used CA glue to put the sliding doors back on and held them in place with an elastic band while the glue dried.

The 20,000 G acid tank car has a convenient detail on the bottom (I'm not sure what is on the prototyep) that can be popped off and a large hole drilled through as well.  

Then I realized that there are two screws holding each coupler box to the body of the car of each Athearn RTR tank car, and that only a 3/32" drill hole is required to get sand to flow in at a reasonable rate. I can remove the screw, drill a 3/32" hole through the car that is a smaller diameter than the screw head, fill with 2oz of sand, and glue the screw back in place as a plug, in less than five minutes. Removing the force of one screw doesn't appear to affect the coupler box. It looks glued on in some places.

I drilled out the hole on the right in the picture below of the slurry tank car.

I have several Athearn RTR 30,000G tank cars that I will be using for Tall Oil and Turpentine loads with the same detail on the bottom. They should be easy to weight also.

Making Progress in JMRI

This morning I finally cracked the code in JRMI for the most complicated car moves on the layout.

I posed some questions to the forum on this thread here: https://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/40687

about what the basic set-up of locations, routes, track types, etc... thatI would need for my layout. In that thread I talk about the basic solution that works for me.

Then I set out to tackle moving cars inside the Paper Mill from the 'Interchange Tracks' to the D05 - the Clean-Out Track to D12 - Paper track with D11-Paper handling overflow from D12.

I did this by first creating my own distinct type of box car (so that the recycled paper box cars that I add later won't get sent to the wrong tracks) that I give a Load called 'Dirty' coming out of the Universal Industry with spur tracks that is my 'staging'.  The cars are loaded with 'Dirty' but what that really represents is an Empty box car with waste dunnage that has to be cleaned out.

A train from the Universal Industry sends cars from a specific spur at the Universal Industry (that only converts Loaded Paper Boxcars to 'Dirty' Boxcars), to the 'Inbound' interchange track at the Paper Mill and drops them off. The D05 Clean-Out track is then set as the only track at the Mill that can receive 'Dirty' Loads. So the local switcher only moves inbound cars from the Inbound track to the Clean-Out track. Then the Clean-Out track has a schedule that ships Empties to D12 Paper. D11 Paper is set as an alternate track for D12. Neither D12 nor D11 have a schedule, but the program (local switcher) still ships their Loaded boxcars to the 'Outbound' interchange track at the Paper Mill to be sent back to the specific spur for them at the Universal Industry.

It should be relatively easy now to add the rest of the spurs and car types to the layout.

Eventually I want to implement this schedule (adjusted from the one I previously posted):

Mystery Short

Just solved a terrifying mystery short today.

Over the last couple of months I have grown the fleet and tuned up all but four of my boxcars. Part of the tune-up included switching to all Intermountain metal wheelsets.

Turns out one of the 33" wheel sets from my bulk pack of Intermountain W40055 was causing the short. Neither side of the wheelset is insulated from the other. I wonder what the chances of getting a wheelset like that are?

One bonus of having a sectional layout is its really easy to find the location of a short. Just start disconnecting sections in a bisectional search pattern from the DCC power source and you get to the right 4' section of layout pretty quick.

New Update

There has been a fair amount of progress on the layout since my last post so I thought now would be a good time to update.

When I moved into this house a few years ago I took down two walls of a spare room to link it with the laundry room and utility room as one large hobby space. During that process I disconnected the outlets and lights in the room that was removed, and I left the ceiling intact. I have now removed the rest of the ceiling drywall, added sound proofing insulation, installed some bright LED shop lights, reconnected the outlets, and patched holes in the floor. I also noticed the improper installation of the humidifier on the furnace by the last owner. Removed it, patched the holes, and then set out to foil tape every joint and crack that was leaking air from the duct-work that I now had access to, thereby solving the cold 2nd floor issue we were having, and the wild swings of temperature in the layout room when the furnace kicked in. The layout space is now much more comfortable and inviting. At the same time I did this work I also moved the light in the utility room over the staging yard so I can actually see what's going on when I'm switching in there. 

The ugly looking exhaust vent for the hot water tank is on the list of future items to take care of.

To further improve the overall appeal of the space the bench work finally got some trim. I used spare 1/2" plywood and a table saw to make the trim and used the blue color from a Domtar engine color scheme from the 1980s for the paint.

At the same time I decided to spruce up the control panel graphics with vinyl sticker paper. It used to be just thick black lines with black writing that was hard to discern visually. I find the track names stick out more now and are easier to read.

I picked up a Digitrax UT4 throttle recently too, pictured above. Finally no more switching with that big Digitrax DT402 in my hand.

My photography skills are terrible so the blue below looks a lot more purple than it is in real life.

Fall protection has also been added in some key areas with 1/4" polycarbonate glass installed using counter-sunk screws with black screw caps to hide them.

On the track work side of things the layout has gone through almost a year of operating with all the track in place. I've now seen all of the changes in temperature and humidity and made lots of small adjustments to eliminate kinks and bumps. I've also done a fair bit of tweaking to my Proto 87 turnouts to get them all running smoothly. My next task related to trackwork is going back and adding electro-magnetic uncouplers in several spots. After operating the layout for a few months I realized I had missed some places for them. Then I want to add operating switch stands.

My fleet of rolling stock has increased dramatically over the last year. I now have over 100 cars for the layout. I think I'm only missing one car type. I want to purchase about 20 more to complete my operations scheme for the paper mill. I have not ventured into weathering, kit bashing, scratch building or super detailing yet. It's all ready-to-run for me so far. A lot of time has been spent standardizing and tuning the new purchases for reliable operation.

My biggest purchases recently were a pair of Walthers SW1200s that I will eventually paint into Domtar color schemes and super detail. For now they can switch the mill as CNs nose to nose once I figure out consisting.  

Lastly, I started putting together cardboard mock-ups for some of the mill buildings. Below you can see a coal unloading shed on the right and a long conveyor from the reclaimer moving the coal to a storage silo inside the boiler building prior to crushing. In the current mock-up, the boiler building is meant to look like it is a larger structure off in the distance (it would have to be twice as wide and tall to put as a foreground building if I want it to be the size of the real thing). Below it is the fourdrinier machine building, paper warehouse, and paper loading track building. There is also a small engine shop underneath the coal conveyor just to the right of the switchers.

That's looking great, Joe!

What are your plans for the mill buildings - Cricut, Styrene scratchbuilds, Kitbashing something, or ???

Blair