UPRR - Pueblo Division - Introduction!

Hey everyone, thought I would take a few minutes to introduce everyone to my new layout.  Brand spanking new actually, I just moved into a new place about at the end of May and it only took about two weeks before I fixed enough sprinkler heads and hung enough pictures to turn my full attention to making proper use of my basement.  With gas the way it is, fishing trips are crimped down anyway so might as well stay cool in the basment and fire that miter saw up.

 For those of you who have not come across my intro on the forums, my name is Pat and I live in Colorado Springs.  This is my hometown, and after adventures in Denver and Nebraska I have come back home where I live with my wife and our two cats.  I spent a lot of time in the airline business in various roles, and spent some more time working for the UPRR before my wife's career brought us back home.  Looks like I'll get to do what I have always wanted to be this fall when I start my new career as a teacher.

 I was introduced to the model rr world by my father (who is a member here and got me pointed to the site) when I was young.  We had a basement full of never-fully operational HO trains.  I used to make trees and butcher old blue-box kits.  Had some failed stabs at pavement roads with foamcore board, baking soda snow, and gloss medium-on-pexiglass lakes.  All in all, I learned quite a bit but high school and college quickly killed off my interest.  Many moons later and I am back, this time taking the old man's prefrence for N scale and the desire to build a decent railroad that looks and works like one.  This is good, as I can keep my immortal soul and still play with trains...sweet. 

After much wrangling with era and concept, I decided to go with a more prototypical tack and model something close to home.  I worked for the UP (a very nasty, evil, most oppressive employer...that somehow still instills pride in its employees) and I have to admit a little yellow paint and diesel fuel managed to seep into my veins.  So UP it is, until I buy and airbrush and get good enough with it to make my own livery someday (see avitar).  The UP and BNSF both run through town, but not much really happens here.  A lot happens in Denver, but maybe a bit too much.  So I decided to go with Pueblo to the south.   They have a lot of industry there, even if it wasnt as much as 30 years ago, but my modeler's license says I can keep the CF&I plant fully open for business, move the quarries to the west a little closer, make the cement plants not quite as monsterous, and pare the yard down to a workable size.  Keep the Arkansas River and the big truss bridge over it too for grins. 

Now I do have quite a bit of space.  I am blessed with a basement that is all framed out, but a little utilitarian to hang drywall and mean it.  Overall space is about 28' long with a 14' depth on one side and an 8 1/2' depth on the other.  Shaped kinda like a really fat L with the stairs coming down right in the crook.  Got a furnace and a HW heater right next to the stairs and the laundry along the long wall; the rest is mine.  With this room I could do a lot, but with my prototype days behind me I would like to keep the whole thing down in scale and have more swtiching and yard ops.  A nice big loop to keep the mainline trains running is cool, but locals and yard jobs will keep the crews busier than the main line runs.  Local trains and yard jobs were more fun for me in he 1:1 world, so that is what we are going to focus on.  Cars come into yard, get switched to locals, go to industry, come back, go out, run around the loops a while, and rinse, repeat.

 This is the first layout I have done in a while too, so we're going to keep this part pretty flat.  With this in mind, I decided to use the narrow part of my basement first, and keep the bigger half for mountians and such in the future.  Also, it is possible that I wont be here forever, so I dont want to make anything too elaborate or difficult to replace.  The house is nice, but the wife and I need to keep our options open since it would be a little small for a family (and an extra bedroom in the basement is NOT an option...that is MY space.)

 Oh, and if I didnt mention this...we are going with 2008 as our era.  I like the old stuff too, but the new stuff is really cool.  It is a good time to be a railroad fan, things are getting pretty interesting on the prototype and this way I can use all my books and timetables and signal charts and not have to retro-fit them to times past.

 After poking with Xtrk CAD for a bit (and I can honestly say I got pretty good at it, modesty aside!) this is what I came up with....

 A nice big yard with long tracks, a modest (but useful) engine facility, lots of industry switching both on the M/L and on two branches, and a continuous main that offers both round and round running and out and back.  Might be tricky to wire that crossover in the dogbone, but that is a battle for another day as I can leave that crossover out for a while. 

 It is pretty close to the prototype too.  The main runs north / south, with the river south of the yard along with the steel mill and the power plant (Comanche).  Lots of local switching in all directions with a 4 different ways to enter and leave the yard.  So if I unwrap the whole thing, it looks like a pinwheel from the yard.  The branch going to the quarry in the upper left is the shortest by far, but it is there and would eventually be my expansion branch up the Arkansas and onto Tennessee Pass.  Or I could expand north to Colorado Springs and on up to Denver since the UP was kicked out of that area.  Either way, that is a ways down the road.

So with plan and dimensions in hand, it was time to get a miter saw and get to it.  A couple of runs to Lowes and a couple of afternoons of a noisy basement and the benchwork was done.  Sorry there is a lack of pics of that, but my camera cord did not resurface from the move until just a couple of nights ago.  I used 1x3's and number 7 deck screws (both were on sale) and used 2x2s for the legs.  Using open frame made more sense for me and I just screwed each frame to the studs already hung on the walls.  A couple of t-nuts on the legs got everything nice and level and I used several 3/8" bolts to secure each frame to its neighbor.  I wrestled with buying 3/8" plywood for a table top, but used the money to buy 2" thick blue foam instead.  I can honestly say I am glad I did that; the foam was plenty strong to shore up all the framing as well as plywood would have.  I put it cross to the joists and glued it on with Gorilla glue (awesome stuff, worth the extra bucks) and any parts of my benchwork that were weak due to my lack of carpentry or design skills were all shored up.  I even decided to skip a lot of the cross bracing I had planned since it came out plenty strong and square.  In the end, the room looked a lot like this.

 Well, with little rolling stock and no track, it was time to find something else to work on.  Cars, engines, and track are all expensive (and I am on a tight budget here before the school year starts up), so onto scenery.  Dunno if any of you have bothered to work out the scenery bofore putting down a single piece of track, but I figured what the hell and it has worked out pretty good.

My original plan was to do the foam thing.  Seen some nice pics on this site of what guys can do with foam and a wire cutter, but I couldn't get that to work quite right.  My carvings looked a little too neat compared to what mother nature puts out there, so after taking a couple of stabs at it (literally, from several knives recently retired from KP)  I decided it was time to suck it up and go buy some plaster.  Back to the basics here; but I did decide to use dryer sheets and I can say I am very glad I did.  They work great...THANKS YOU GUYS!  An awesome idea.

Now, I do have a 2% incline from the end of the yard to the top of Pinon siding (at the top of the track plan) and there is a 2" seperation between the yard and that siding.    I spent the 15 bucks to get the WS foam inclines and I am glad I did.  It was pretty easy to cut out the blue foam so I could squeeze them in there (just traced them onto the blue foam and cut that piece out)  Wound up with a nice smooth grade on a gradual 16" radius spiral curve.  Should be able to handle long trains no problem.  Then I screwed it up by putting plaster cloth over them and messed up the whole gradual part.  Whups.  No amount of sanding makes up for that roller-coaster effect plaster seems to have.  To compensate for that I printed my trackplan out on Xtrk CAD in full size, glued it all to cardboard, cut it out, and made mid-roadbed.  I'll have to put cork on that, so certian parts of my rr are going to have a very built up mainline.  Its ok, this is actually very prototypical nowadays and I think it will look really cool once I buy my track and ballast.  Either way it makes my roadbed smooth.  Gotta be careful not to soak it with glue too often, but if I let it dry long enough between applications it works fine.  This here is probably the part where it is the highest and filling in the sides with ballast will make it look like a long fill eventually:

In the yard I used flat cardboard cutouts and glued them right to the foam.  The mains on the top of the yard are all corked in, and there will be a little slope into the bowl and a little incline out of it.  My yard also has a very shallow grade with the ladder being very slightly higher than the ends of the yard tracks.  The engine facility in the back there is all level.

The rest of the scenery is just WS ground foam, coarse foam, and fine foam in various colors.  I use really thin water and Elmers with a touch of dishsoap in a sprayer and a dropper to get all that stuff glued down.  Works good.  I use Tackyglue on the rocks and weeds in the creek beds.  Tried the WS EZwater and am not happy but I think I can get another layer on there.  After reading the forums here I think I poured it waaay to deep and it didnt come out right.  Redid my creekbed with artists paints and will try again here in a bit.  The rocks and colors are all hand-pained with artists paints and washes with a rust-colored latex base.  I made culverts using foil and an extra 3/8" bolt I had, they came out pretty good but my camera (or the photographer) seem incapable of taking a good picture of that feature.  I have been experimenting with roads, but so far I like the way thick plaster on cardboard comes out.  I made a little batch in a pie pan, kept stirring it until it got about the consistency of peanut butter, and then applied it with an artist's knife.  Sanded it down with coarse paper the next day and painted it either in washes of thin white and grey for pavement or used pastels for the dirt roads.  I had to fiddle with the pastels quite a bit, but once I figured out that the white one blends the other ones it it worked pretty good.

While I was playing with the pastels, I decided to try my hand at weathering again.  I beat the hell out of that Gp40-2, like it should be.  There is no such thing as a clean switcher on the real UP nor will there be one on mine.  I liked the way the pastels work, just dust that stuff on there and hit it with dullcote and you are good.  I took the shell of the engine first, but the cars get the works as soon as they come out of the case now.  I have been using a combo of the lighter colors on the darker cars and the darker colors on the lighter cars and they call come out equally dingy...I like em.

And that is where we stand for right now!  Comments and questions all welcome.  Hope you have enjoyed my little tour here, and I will leave you all with a pic I srpung from my camera a couple of days ago.  Here we go...