Construction Photos and Updated Plans

My contractor has been busy and the new wall are studded in, the old bathroom removed, the new half bath roughed in. I'm waiting for the electrical work to get started.

Here are some pictures.

New wall between the garage and the train room.

Track Plan I - Levels 1 & 2

See my Givens and Druthers (Part I and Part II) for the space I have available and my goals with this layout design. I found out that there isn't room in a 9-1/2 foot wide space to have a peninsula with a blob on the end with an 18" radius. That leaves an around the room design. I've operated on other layouts that had duck-unders and movable bridges, and I'm not getting any younger, so I don't want any tracks across the door.

That leaves an around the room design going back and forth. To represent almost 50 miles of railroad I need to use multiple levels. I saw a clinic at the Hub City MER/NMRA convention about using narrow shelves for a layout and how this can avoid many of the problems associated with multi-deck layouts. This will require modification at two stations, Barber and Statesville, because the wyes at those locations are important to operations.

It looks like this will have four or five visible levels. The top level, which is above head height,is the west staging yard, representing Oyama Yard in Hickory, NC. I'm calling this Level 0.

West Staging Yard

Modeled Area - Update

After starting construction, I decided that have a shelf devoted to only one train a day in each direction wasn't a good use of space. Also, I have a bunch of the Fox Valley Models Siverside coal gons on order. I dropped the portions of the C&NW branch to Gastonia, and filled in the missing section of the S-Line through Claremont and Catawba.

See the previous post for more details.

Givens & Druthers III - The Trains

The Southern Railway Carolina Division Employee Timetable #13, dated March 31, 1974 showed 18 trains on the S-Line. These included two passenger trains, which only ran on Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday, two rail-highway (piggy-back and autorack) trains, two unit coal trains, eight freight trains, and four local trains, of which only two ran on the modeled segment of the railroad. The passenger, rail-highway, and unit trains and one of the westbound freight trains were first class. All other eastbound trains were second class. Westbound trains were third class. Below are excerpts of the timetable schedule:

Givens & Druthers II - The Prototype

The Southern Railway's S-Line runs westward from Salisbury, NC, through Asheville to Bull's Gap, TN. Most of my early rail-fanning in North Carolina involved the section of this line between Hickory and Asheville. An article in the January 1981 Model Railroader about the Southern's Asheville Special made me think about including that on the layout. The Asheville Special stopped running in 1975. The locomotives that I was most familiar with on this line, EMD GP38-2s and SD40-2s, were purchased starting in 1972, so I decided on 1974 for the time period of the layout.