Pictures from November 2020

I believe the framing around the heater and water heater was completed sometime in 2016. It took more than four years to get the drywall up, but here we are with a clean slate. This part of the railroad is the ore yard which is really an approach to the ore dock.

There was some tricky trim work to be done and then more experimenting blending white and blue to get a realistic sky that is not distracting.

Now to block off the water heater without losing access. That should be a trick.

There’s a whole lot more that got done between November 2020 and today (June 22, 2021). I’ll post those pictures later this week.

10 October 2020 – Some focused time with the benchwork and control panel

In an unexpected turn of events, my full-time employment ended as part of a reduction in force. This yielded some uninterrupted time to work on the layout for the past month and progress improved tremendously. Benchwork and a brand new control panel at Iron Mountain are the results so far.

The first step was to prepare the benchwork to support the fascia from Antoine to Powers and Felch Jct. which is where the railroad will disappear behind the water heater. The routes split four ways at this point. The ore line can be switched to the ore yard and ore dock or bypass that for Escanaba (staging). The main line can be switched to go to Escanaba or directly to Green Bay. This loosely follows the prototype in 1962.

The panel must be cut to receive the panel. There is also a Digitrax outlet next to the panel. A car card box will also be installed here.

The Fascia is painted to match the rest of the room.

The panel at Antoine is where the new fascia begins. The logos for the Milwaukee Road and the CNW are wood cuts that I’ve had for years. Nice to finally have a place where they belong!

The car card box is installed. I modify these to hold bamboo skewers that are very good for uncoupling cars. Most of the sidings have uncoupling magnets below the track bed, but it doesn’t hurt to prepare for the worst.

The control panel for Iron Mountain has been prepared in the photo above. This panel was challenging because it shares control with the panel at Antoine for many of the turnouts. This was accomplished by creating new JMRI inputs for the pushbuttons at Iron Mountain, but sharing the outputs from previously deployed Digitrax DS64s. I presented to the Michiana Division of the National Model Railroad Association (NMRA) on this topic in April 2020. One of these days I will post the presentation here.

The photo above shows the completed wiring on the back of the panel. Each pushbutton and LED are labeled. Ethernet cable is used to connect each wire to a punchdown block. This makes connecting the wires on the layout easier and also allows for the panel to be removed for maintenance if necessary.

The layout has 45 tortoise machines installed to date and each of them are controlled by a pushbutton on a control panel. There will be close to 70 installed when the layout is complete. The aspect of the tortoise machine and the turnout it controls is shown on the control panel by dual bulb LEDs that show green or red based on the polarity of the signal coming across the led from the DS64 to the Tortoise machine. I have installed at least 100 LEDs on the layout. Last week I finally found a bad one. The red/green LEDs actually contain two circuits which are directional based on polarity. That little problem cost me a couple of hours as I tested and retested every connection. I finally decided to replace the LED and that was the problem. Nobody is perfect.

Shown above is the panel at Iron Mountain. It works just as it was designed to work in conjunction with the panel at Antoine. This will allow two operators to work together over this stretch of the railroad without needing one to ask the other to throw a turnout. Both operators will be able to see the aspect of every turnout that impacts their work. It will require that operators be aware that these turnouts may be thrown from the other panel.

There is still much to do to complete the railroad to Powers and Felch Junction, but the track, control panels, turnouts, and fascia are complete. The next project will be to complete the drywall and framing to hide the water heater and build the benchwork to support the ore yard which leads to the ore dock. Stay tuned!

29 JULY 2020 – More paint and a test fit to the layout

The past five days have seen the water feature and hydro electric plant begin to take on their final appearance. I did not like the cement piers that I made out of foam. They did not look convincing and detracted from the rest of the water feature. The foam was needed to create the elevation required to meet the legs of the bridge, so I shaved them into mounds and covered them with talus and paint.

I added fencing and detail to the hydro electric plant also. The paint on the fencing doesn’t match at this point so there is still some work to do.

With all of the modifications I had made over the past few months while the piece was on the workbench, I was concerned that it might not fit perfectly on the layout. It turns out that it fits pretty well. The adjustment to the power distribution equipment on the mine side of the river will require the mine tracks to be adjusted, but that should not cause any problems.

This picture looks remarkably like the Photoshop version that I created at the start of this project! Next steps are to adjust the bridges so that they meet up perfectly with the track on the layout and blend the scenery into the layout. After that the piece will be removed for pouring of the water and final scenery adjustments. It will then be brought to a meeting for judging and then place on the layout permanently. We’re probably about two weeks away from running trains again!

21 July 2020 – Two months of progress on the hydro electric plant and water feature

What fun we’ve had since the last update at the end of May 2020. The first photo shows the debarker and chipper buildings have received paint. They are white with steel tops. A later photo will show they’re a little rusty. There will ultimately be a conveyor under the debarker to take the bark off somewhere to be converted into fuel. The conveyor is built, but some modifications must be made to make it fit.

Here you can see that a power distribution grid has been placed to the one side of the Menominee River. This is all proto-freelanced, so I have no idea how they got the power to the paper mill. I do know that the hydro plant is still operating and providing power to Wisconsin Electric, so there must be something like this set up. This will provide a nice transition into the scene to the right of this which is the Groveland Taconite Plant.

Here the guardrails and some signage has been added to the debarking building.

This little building came with the sawmill outbuildings kit. I tried it under the power distribution equipment, but have since moved it to the back of the debarker. I imagine that there are some gears that are driven by the turbines underneath the hyrdro plant and these gears transfer power to the teeth of the debarker. This little building is what keeps this equipment safe and dry.

The hydro electric plant is mostly imagined but I did look at some pictures. I figure this one works by lifting these big steel and concrete panels to let water through. I will be adding guardrails and also H steel beams above the panels with augers and wheels so that they can be adjusted up and down. The stairs are there so that the crew can maintain these panels when needed. In reality it’s all stationary of course.

The guardrails were from another kit and happened to fit. I have more on the way. The cement steps were made by cutting pieces of polystyrene into blocks and gluing them together. It was a bit monotonous but fun.

Painting the plaster was fun. Most of the plaster outside the river bed will be covered with ground goop, static grass, flocking, trees and underbrush, but painting it was good practice and also allows some flexibility when the other materials are added.

I have decided to separate the legs of the bridge from the platform so that I can align the legs perfectly to the cement piers and then adjust the bridge platform so that it aligns perfectly with the track on the layout. This will require that the module be put on the layout. I’m hoping to do this by the end of the month and finish the module well enough to remove it one time and bring it to a Michiana Division NMRA meeting for my friends to see. After that, it will be returned to the layout and permanently installed.

The glue is drying on the talus I added to the lower section. The talus is being painted a mix of reds, browns, and tans. I will add some submerged trees and further adjust the paint on the river bed and then pour that section with resin. I haven’t quite figured out how I will pour the middle and upper sections, but where there’s a will there’s a way! Stay tuned!