Hey group, I don't remember ever posting about my current under construction layout but thought I'd just share a basic view of what I'm starting. This layout was under construction at our old home but we moved over New Year's and I'm finally starting to get things going a bit again. We'll see how that plays out. WestRail is a shortline and industrial holding company with perhaps 6-8 individual operations in the southwest. I'm modeling one of those lines, a fictitious ex-Santa Fe branch running from Glendale south about 15 miles or so the north side of the Salt River in the Phoenix metro area. I'll add a link to my blog which describes the premise in detail, but to make it simple, BNSF spun this line off to WestRail as the middle 10 or so miles between Glendale and I-10 were being abandoned due to development and lack of customers. The south few miles served an industrial park, with the BNSF ultimately serving it out of Mobest Yard in Phoenix via trackage rights over the ex-SP main, now mostly a local line for UP. Selling this line to WestRail allowed them to eliminate this job and the inherent complications of coordinating with the UP. My line is the Salt River Division of WestRail, and runs from the interchange with the UP in Tolleson (west of downtown Phoenix) south a few miles to the Salt River, with the primary customers being in the Sunland Industrial Park. Both BNSF and UP solicit traffic from these customers (this goes way back to the early years when SP and SF predecessors in the area struck a deal to share the area rather than compete). My layout in the old house combined two 16"x48" modules with some existing wall-mounted benchwork. When we moved, I brought the modules but scrapped the rest. These two modules form the Sunland Industrial Park and its customers. I then added a roughly 18"x18" corner piece and then a perpendicular 6"x72"-ish extension to provide for staging/interchange with the UP. Operationally, the WestRail crew would depart the industrial park for the interchange with any outbound cars. The interchange will consist of a runaround track and at the very end a wye representing the connection to the adjacent UP line. I will pre-stage the runaround with any inbound cars. Since all customers are facing point switches for the incoming local, I will operate push-pull with RC equipped locos and a center cupola caboose as a shoving platform. At the interchange, I will simply cutoff the caboose short of the runaround, pull my train clear of the switch, unhook my units and have them enter the runaround and couple to the inbound cut. I'd then just reverse onto my caboose and shove south. The industrial park consists of four customers, the largest being Sunland Foods, with the others being a plastic drainage pipe manufacturer, a beverage company of some sort, and a transload track. Theoretically the "main" continues south a bit further, but in actuality it dead-ends at a wall. I'm leaving open the possibility one day of adding an extension on this end of the line for a scrapyard. If I do, I'll repurpose the transload track for this extension and make the "main" the transload track. Below are a few cellphone pics of my layout. The units and caboose were recently completed by Kendall at The Blue Caboose and I think they turned out great. There's some more pics on my blog. http://westrailinnscale.blogspot.com/ Thanks for reading. I hope to stick with it so that I can get something done for once. I first need to replace a switch, tweak the trackwork, and then wire it. I'm doing DCC with a PowerCab which seems perfect for this setup. -Dave
sounds interesting. did you ever consider of using white numberboards with black lettering ? might fit better to the white lettering along the hood.
