The JACALAR RR

Subway tunneled!

And, here are similar shots, after digging out the subway







Note - track is still loose, needs to be centered and glued, of course.

Wondering whether to leave these two turnouts, or just extend the flex track from the table to each of the yard leads. Will also add more non-stall tracks, plus an engine house, here.

 

Yard shots - going towards the town

These shots show more of the yard as we head to the right, towards the main town area of the layout (note - these are pre-grading)

 

Town to Hill area (includes station)

Here's where the yard empties out to the town area, and leads out to the foothills, continuing clockwise around the layout. You can see the grades on here

Where you see the pencil marks, to the right of the turnout in the center, is where I need to still dig out a grade. I will lower that set of tracks, leading into the mountain area, so that I get more depth (and be at the height of my pull-out bridge)





And this is the foothill / river to mountain area



This is where I started deviating from my original track plan. I eliminated a leg and widened the central curve. I've also added an extra turnout.

 

Mountain Area - to bridge

Here's where we'll be up in the mountains. The big white square will be a mining operation. The river will flow between the two curved tracks at the bottom





I still need to lower the whole mountain valley area (the area between the raised loop). The tracks will then go through mountain tunnels, to the bridge.

Here's a bench level view:

 

Tunnels and bridge

Here's looking towards where tracks will tunnel through mountains



And, finally, here's the pull out bridge, with an additional turnout to handle the three tracks now coming in



Everything is, of course, still loose, with elevations still needed to be finished.

The track still needs to be weathered and have the feeders attached and dropped, as well, so this was more for fit/proofing of the layout than actually having track down. But I love being able to actually see how this will play out.

 

Umm, no. I cut that out of the 2" blue foam. Made a 2% slope, then cut the section that I needed, and, with a hot wire cutter, carefully cut all the wedges. Only took about 30 minutes, and was a lot cheaper than going and buying another WS riser set!

One thing I did learn - blue foam is "at dimension" (i.e., 1" foam = 1"; 2" foam = 2"). The pink stuff isn't. 1/2" pink is really 0.6" thick!

 

Up close and personal, not so perfect. But, they do the job, and will get covered, anyway.

 

Thanks Bob. Of course, I've done nothing UNDER the bench yet, so there's still all the wiring, etc. Still a lot of work to do before the first current flows through those rails! But, at least now, we can see what this undertaking is going to result in.

 

Thanks Jerry - I did have a lot of fun with this progress over the weekend. Laid the initial track on Saturday, got most of the grading in on Sunday, and did that custom blue riser, today.

There was method to my madness on bringing out the Daylight consist. Hand pushed the cars through the turns of the subway, to make sure I had more than sufficient clearance for the single, double articulated and triple articulated cars. Once I started taking them out of the box, they all seemed to leap onto the track.

 

Sandro,

The design requires only two AR units, one on each loop through the turnaround areas. Doing that, all the other areas flow naturally using the same polarity.

Very good question, though, because at first blush, one thinks to keep the loops at the same polarity, and tries to auto-reverse the connecting pieces.

 

No new pictures this week. My Nikon D50 died -- the LCD display says "Err", and the manual and on-line info all say "return for Nikon authorized servicing". grrrr.....

Wouldn't have made much difference, as the progress this week has been utilitarian. Put in some shelving above the layout, as well as shelves underneath to hold the power / command station / etc. Also been slowly installing the main bus lines, but need to take it easy, as the underneath-the-bench twisting is re-aggravating the pinch nerve in my neck from a few months ago.

 

Panel Designs

Having to take a bit of a physical break (see above), plus of course, work (so that I can earn enough money to pay for all of this, plus college for two girls), so spent a bit of time designing up what the ops panels will look like. Have divided into three sets:

This is the big panel, for the yard:



Here's the panel in the Town / Hill area (to the right of the Yard, rotated 90 degrees clockwise)



And here's the mountain/river area, along with the liftout bridge. The big red button will be pushed whenever the bridge is out, which will also light signals on the tracks, turning them red. (Again, to the right, clockwise 90 degrees)



I plan to print these out on transparency film, reverse image, which I will then mount onto a nice piece of board painted white. That way, all the printing is underneath the film. The green dots (and the red/green) are LEDs, the red donuts are the push buttons.