Benchwork 3

There have been numerous articles in the modeling press about layout height, and Tony Koester's article in the 2007 Model Railroad Planning magazine discusses the compromises between optimal layout elevation for realistic viewing and ideal height for construction, maintenance or operating crews.

Koester offers an optimal layout elevation formula for consideration: H-28" to H-17" where H = viewer's height in inches. His example of a 6' 0" person (72") is H = 44" to 55". For single deck layouts he recommends a few inches either way of 50" and for multi-deck layouts, a range from 40 inches to 60 inches, depending on the layout and people parameters determined by the owner.

In my analysis i considered several factors: 1) operational visibility while standing both upper and lower decks, 2) reach in capability, and 3) operational visibility while sitting for the lower deck. Assisting me in my consideration was my workbench height - 34 inches based on: 1) chair height, 2) comfort and wrist position while working (carpal tunnel considerations). My modules are approximately 4 inches in height which then places the lower level subroadbed at 38 inches.

The upper level is based on the optimal layout elevation formula modified by the needs of the helix. As sketched, the right of way enters the helix at the rear of the circle and exits the helix at the front. Using Helix Calculator 2.0 I determined that a 21 inch radius, with a 3 inch clearance would be 7 levels (21 inches) and a 2.275% grade (good for my 4 axle locomotives).

That placed the upper level at 59 inches. I'd forgotten about vertical curves coming off the helix but raising the upper level another inch and rotating the heliz 0" elevation start 90 degrees gave me 2 inches in height to achieve the 60 inch upper level height, and an easier vertical curve entering and leaving the helix.

This places the lower L-girder height at 34 inches (zero elevation line) and the compression - studs were level lined. The upper L-girder height was set at 56 inches (22 inches from the lower L-girder).

Prototype Interest 1 - Choosing a locale

The first area of consideration in  Prototype Interests is Choosing a locale. Tony Koester in the January 1977 Railroad Model Craftsman postulated that the successful layouts of the day were 'miniature railroads'. Those layouts were designed to be:

• A transportation system linking two or more geographical areas.
• It provided a means to ship things - people, products or raw materials. 

Tony's article further discussed that selecting a prototype, a locale and an era provided the modeler with the layout design parameters that would support the vision of the the builder. Geography would govern scenery, identify prototype railroad connections; point to industries that provide revenue for the railroad, and dictate operational practices. Having these parameters already identified, layout design and track planning chores would be simplified for the builder. In order to model the scenery and topography on your layout with realism you need to select a specific geographic location.

My interest in railroads started at a pre-teen in Dayton Ohio. Just across the highway was an occasionally used railroad yard owned by the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) railroad. It was here that I walked the tracks, found my first rusty track spikes, explored the cars, watched the switcher come and go with its short consists and where I occasionally found a cast off switch list or routing card lying along the track. I'd hurry home to the basement and recreate the experience on my own rail yard.

 I got older I persuaded my Dad to drive me to other yards owned by the  Baltimore and Ohio or one of the other 3 other major railroads (Chesapeake and Ohio, Pennsylvania Railroad, New York Central) that crisscrossed Dayton. My college days took me to Philadelphia and the Main Line - GG1's and other electrics moving passengers between Washington DC and Philadelphia. I also found the Chicago South Shore and South Bend, a freight and passenger interurban.

My military career took me back and forth to Georgia and North Carolina (Norfolk and Western and Southern), Finding the electrified Piedmont and Northern was great! Washington State brought me the Burlington Northern, Great Northern, Milwaukee Road, Northern Pacific, Spokane Portland and Seattle, and Union Pacific. I spent time reading the histories of the railroads during the week and then driving to and walking along the routes I read about on the weekends.

So when it came time to coming up with a location it made sense to me to focus on the Pacific Northwest, where the bulk of my favorite Class I railroads were located. A 1948 Rand McNally showed lots of potential opportunities.

With the Pacific Northwest established as the region, it was back to the file drawers and books. Having been stationed at Fort Lewis I knew the Seattle - Tacoma  - Olympia Washington area fairly well - and I had enjoyed the majestic scenery in the area. The GN and NP were the big players in the Cascades - MILW to a lesser degree, but there were few branch lines in that region.

The Rand McNally map showed that the Olympic Peninsula however had TWO branch lines that three of the 4 Class I's (NP, MILW, and UP) serviced - Centralia to Hoquiam and Chehelas to South Bend.

Further research turned up a history of the railroads in the Gray Harbors County by Mike Davison and J.A Phillips III. When I looked at topographic maps of the area I saw numerous logging railroads tied in to the branch lines serving Gray's Harbor County - Rayonier Logging Company at Aberdeen, Clemons Logging Company at Melborne, Polson Logging Company at Montesano, Schaefer Bros Logging Company at Brady, and Simpson Logging Company at Sheldon. Plenty of prototype to use for my freelanced railroad!

I was surprised to learn through research that coal mining was found north and east of Seattle. Coal reserves were found south of Tacoma, so with some deft non-scientific maneuvering I added coal mining operations onto the layout. Western Washington - the Olympic Peninsula - Grays Harbor County - I found my locale.

If you are interested in the process, see:

Author: John A. Phillips, III. Title: Tempest in the Timber. URL: www.employees.org/~davison/nprha/harbor.html.


Tony Koester's article in the January 1977, Railroad Model Craftsman, p. 99.

Larry Smith's article in the February 1991, Model Railroading. p.26.




With that experience you would think that I'd be modeling

Benchwork 2

There is an old carpenter axiom "measure twice, cut once". There's also an idiom "one step forward, two steps back". So it was in my initial wall construction.

I got the first two walls up using the compression-stud benchwork in my last post (http://modelingthewwsl.blogspot.com/2019/02/benchwork-1.html). I then went out and rented a laser leveler to locate the zero elevation line and mark the studs so I could then install the lrear lower level L-girder and the luan backdrops. I was able to quickly do two wall, the leftmost 30 foot wall and one 12 foot wall.

When i installed the 4x8 foot luan backdrops i noticed they didn't line up vertically as well as I expected. I pulled the 4 foot level out and ran it along the top of the backdrops and was surprised to see that they weren't level - the bubble wasn't close to center in the tube.

I went to the rental company and re-rented the laser leveler. This time I went to the web site and downloaded the instruction manual and read it. Imagine my surprise when I read on the last pages, that the laser was accurate to 5/8 inch at 50 feet. Review of other brands of laser levelers of varying prices revealed accuracies of 1/8 to 1/4 inch per 30 feet.

I discussed this with a contractor friend of mine who confirmed that level varies by price, and by the care of the leveler by the owner. His leveler was accurate to 1/16th inch in 100 feet, and he said it was well worth the cost for his construction needs. He expressed surprise that I had gone to the expense of a laser leveler for such a small area. He reminded me that a low tech high accuracy tool in my garage would do just as well - a chalk line and a torpedo level!

Being the friend he is, he brought his expensive laser leveler over and shot the new zero elevation line. Sure enough my 30 foot wall was 1/2 inch off - my chalk line and torpedo level 1/16th off.

I can accept a deviation of 1/16th inch. So back to deconstruction and reconstruction.

Layout Concept Overview

In Layout Design Process 4 - Railroad Modeling I identified that the layout design process can be broken down into three primary functional areas: Concept, Structure, and Layout Detail.

Concept identifies the: Who, What, Where, and When aspects of the layout development process. It is broken down into two main element:

1. Your prototype railroad interests that you wish to model.
2. Your specific modeling interests.

At the end of the concept phase you should have a 5 second ‘overview' of your layout and a larger 'theme‘ document to refer to in the track planning process.

Prototype Railroad Interests

This element consists of four parts:

1. The Location (or locale) to be modeled.
2. The Era to be modeled.
3. The Class (or size) of railroad to be modeled.
4. The Type of railroad to be modeled.

Specific Modeling Interests.

This element consists of six parts:

1. The extent of railroad operations that the modeler wishes to replicate, Railroad operations consists of: passenger, freight, yard, interchange and maintenance of way operations.
2. The industries the modeler wishes to replicate. This includes heavy industry, light industry and miscelaneous . 
3. The traffic the modeler wishes to replicate. This includes train frequency (the numbers of trains to be run, diversity of train consists (the mix of business that determines the equipment and motive power requirements.
   
4. The locomotives of interest to the modeler.
5. The rolling stock of interest to the modeler.
6. The type of railroad personnel positions the modeler wants to simulate during layout operations.

In the next several blogs I will discuss the thought process I used to determine my specific prototype and modeling interests.

Benchwork 1

The WWSL v1.0 was conceived and constructed in 1987 while I was still in the military. Knowing that moving every couple of years was a reality, I decided that the railroad would be a sectional layout; each module would be no larger than two foot by eight foot. Since then I have successfully moved v1.0 and v2.0 four times.

Version 1.0 was a free standing (tabletop) layout. Version 2 was a two level shelf layout anchored to a dry walled stud wall. Version 3.0 is located in a basement with poured concrete walls. A traditional basement interior wall framing with drywall was possible but local building would have classified the work as a finished basement and significantly increase the taxes for the building. I chose instead to use an ingenious system developed by Malcolm Furlow and published in the January 1988 issue of Model Railroader. It's called compression-stud benchwork. Malcolm used 2x2 lumber with a T-nut and carriage bolt on one end and a small piece of thin plywood on the other. The entire assembly was cut to the height of the wall less a 1/2 inch or so, then tensioned between the floor and ceiling using the T-nut to provide a sturdy foundation for brackets, girders, and other shelves. 

I adapted the concept using 2x2 lumber attached to the wood sill as the ceiling point, and 2x4 and 2x6 studs. I used 3/8 x 3 inch zinc screws in lieu of the T nut and carriage bolt, and used a 4 inch mending plate to attach to the 2x2 top plate. 

Corners were created with one 2x4 and one 2x6. The 2x4 was screwed on end to the face of the 2x6 allowing 3 inches of usable facing on either side for attaching the backdrop (I use 4 foot by eight foot luan plywood). A 2x4 studs is placed at the four foot mark, a 2x6 at the 8 foot mark, then repeated along the entire wall. The compression stud is leveled vertically and horizontally.

I use L-girders as the horizontal elements for my benchwork. As I am building a two level layout, my lower L-girder is built with a 1x3 and a 1x4. The upper level L-girder is built with two 1x3's. I got excited about getting to this level of construction and before i knew it I had a 30 foot wall constructed and the luan backdrop installed.

Layout height considerations, backdrop painting etc will be discussed in later posts.

References:

Model Railroader, January 1988, Carbondale Central, Malcolm Furlow.

Great Model Railroads, 2015, Less is More, James McNab.

Layout Design Process 6 - Defining and Redefining

One additional planning tool I used during the process came from an article written by Dave Clemens in the LDN in November 1988. It was a flow chart identifying a problem solving process of defining and redefining the objective at hand, in this case moving from a broad idea to fine tuning the process (in this case layout design) to those final elements that can be reasonably represented on the layout. Dave's process is visually depicted below.

This process uses the myriad of The next blog will discuss the development of the WWSL's basic concept using the LDSIG layout design process.

Room Preparation 3

The left half of the concrete foundation walls were painted with waterproofing paint.

An electrician came in and installed 8 Can lights with LED lamps for general illumination. Two can lights in each zone with its own switch (4 switched circuits). Each came with its own 9w LED (65w equivalent). Lots of light and very low current draw. Better than it was before though i may replace them with 100w equivalents. Either way - best of both worlds.

Began to install dry wall onto the ceiling. I ran 2x2 lumber along the edge of the sill to have a place to anchor wall framing (to be discussed later). Then I ran 1x3 lumber along the edges of the wall, a 1x3 two feet inside (for a screw point for the drywall AND a screw point for the valence (to be discussed later), and 1x4's (for screw points) where two dry wall boards meet.

 I also decided to create removable plates for areas where plumbing ran through the ceiling (I hate tearing out drywall to find water leaks). This changes some locations of 1x3's.

I've only managed to get 7 drywall panels installed, taped and mudded so far. Time for a labor saving device (a dry wall lift) to install the remaining 20 panels.

Layout Design Process 5 - Research

Researching a prototype can be a daunting task.Fortunately for researchers today there are a number of resources. My research encompassed a multitude of sources:

Model Railroad Magazines.

Model Railroader All-Time Digital Archive THE COMPLETE COLLECTION 1934—PRESENT

Railroad Model Craftsman - have not found a CD or DVD but a web site is available with indexes for all years at Trains.com

Mainline Modeler has been released on DVD through the C&OHistorical Society.

Prototype Modeler is available online at the TrainLife.com Magazine Archive

Model Railroading magazine is available online at the TrainLife.com MagazineArchive

Railmodel Journal magazine is available online at the TrainLife.com MagazineArchive

Books and Periodicals. 

I was particularly fortunate in that during my military career I was stationed at Fort Bragg North Carolina, A few miles north of Fayetteville, home of the 82nd Airborne and the Army Special Operations Command, is North Carolina State University – and their library had an excellent periodicals section that included a full set of Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman magazines, as well as trade magazines for interurban railways and logging operations.

Railroad Historical Society web sites and publications

The Great Northern Railroad Historical Society

The Northern Pacific Railway Historical Society

The Milwaukee Road Railroad Historical Society The Union Pacific Railroad Historical Society

Layout design blogs

Lance Mindheim's Model Railroad Design blog

LDSIG's Layout Design Primer.

 The Process.

I began to research prototype railroading and identified specific items of interest in each of  13 functional areas I have identified in the Reference Page section on the right side of this blog. Those items were cataloged in file folders. I’ve 20 file drawers of Xeroxed copies of articles in addition to nearly 15 years of other model magazines published in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.

Those 20 file drawers and numerous books and magazines produced too many ideas for my railroad modeling. To aid in the refinement process I used Dave Clemons' development problem solving process. The next blog will discuss that problem solving process of defining and redefining the objective at hand, in this case moving from a broad idea to fine tuning the process (in this case layout design) to those final elements that can be reasonably represented on the layout.