Building the Frisco System 1980 - Construction Project Documentation - HO-Scale Layout

Discussion in 'General' started by Iantha_Branch, Nov 18, 2023.

  1. geep07

    geep07 Member

    Like your NEW revised track plan.
    The TOFC angled track alignment breaks up the parallel monotonous from the rest of the yard.
     
  2. Iantha_Branch

    Iantha_Branch Member

    I tend to agree. I did come up with a couple other alternate ideas that reshape the yard. I'm just not sure how practical they are.

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  3. klrwhizkid

    klrwhizkid Administrator Staff Member Administrator Frisco.org Supporter

    I don't believe the last two designs on post 122 will not work as well for the switcher classifying trains into transfer cuts.
     
  4. Iantha_Branch

    Iantha_Branch Member

    I worked on wrapping up the more urgent wiring projects on the layout over the weekend. I think I finally have the staging yard working properly with turnout machines and power routing, and I've added enough feeder wires to carry power around to the far side of the layout. With that out of the way, I started putting up the benchwork for 19th St yard today.

    While I work on putting up benchwork this week, I've kept looking at potential redesigns for the yard. A general idea I've stuck with for a while is limiting the yard tracks to 12' each so that the cuts of cars would never be too long to fit in the receiving yard over in Rosedale. As I've looked at different designs I've also looked at breaking away from that concept. It does give the yard a more natural look this way.

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  5. Iantha_Branch

    Iantha_Branch Member

    Update time.

    I rolled on a base coat of green for the south end of Ft. Scott and Iantha.

    Jan 11.jpg

    With the green down I now had space to add temporary staging tracks to that end of the railroad. While taking some time to unpack more equipment, I also slowly worked on putting up the benchwork for 19th st yard. I took to the time to build it last summer while I had all of the wood working equipment in the building and that decision is paying off. It was way too cold to cut lumber in an unheated barn this month.

    Jan 17.jpg

    It's nice to see the layout slowly start to fill up as I get equipment unpacked. Unfortunately, I ran out of car cards and the post office seems to have lost my package that has more in it. Since I ran out of cards to fill out, I finished up 19th st today with a coat of paint.

    Jan 26 3.jpg

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    Ft. Scott staging is starting fill up. Everything has been unboxed in groups, so everything kind of looks like a unit train at the moment. That'll be fixed soon.

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  6. Iantha_Branch

    Iantha_Branch Member

    I'm still working through the process of unpacking cars, creating car cards and creating waybills. I'm making enough progress in that department that by the time I have 19th St ready to receive traffic, I should have enough paperwork ready for operations to begin.

    While we wait for all of that to happen, I've been kicking around some ideas for operations and I think I've come up with one I'm going to implement. Call it rule #1, or call it proto-lancing, but I'm putting together waybills to implement a train 132 and 133 for the Memphis line. In the future, I look forward to recreating the high priority trains 32 and 33, but the trackage for that pair is a long way off. In the mean time, I would really like to get a quartet of GP40-2s out to race a pig train along the railroad, so I'm creating a copy cat version of the 32/33 service. Conveniently, 132 and 133 were dropped from the Northern Division time table a long time before 1980, so these priority pig trains will look right at home in the schedule.

    The idea for this service is to combine traffic from the western parts of the CNW, and MILW (sorry, the Rock is out of business by this time), bridge traffic from the DRGW via the MP, UP traffic that doesn't come in on the FSE (ie: from Denver), BN traffic not from the Pacific NW, and ATSF traffic from Kansas and Colorado. All of that soup gets thrown in with trailer traffic originated by the Frisco at Kansas City, and is expedited southeast to Memphis. The railroad aims to kill two birds with one stone: priority trailer traffic can make better time between KC and the southeast, and there's now extra room for more routine traffic to move on the 134/135.

    I'm not very good at graphic design, but I had thought about making a mock advertisement for this service that included a map to better illustrate the gibberish I wrote above.

    TL,DR: I'm excited that I found a way to realistically run a version of the 32/33 on the part of the layout I have built.
     
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  7. Iantha_Branch

    Iantha_Branch Member

    Additional note since I'm putting words on paper tonight.

    If you look at the photos from last weekend, you might noticed a mixed set of Frisco-UP power and a string of covered hoppers. I'm throwing in a unit grain train on the layout. The back story here is the UP loads it at the Cargill Elevator in Topeka, and the Frisco delivers it to the Cargill Elevator at the Port of Memphis (President's Island). No idea if this happened in real life, but I can make it sound realistic enough to make it work. Or call it rule #1. Or proto-lancing. I love 4750 and 4427 covered hoppers, I want as many on the layout as I can justify.
     
  8. Iantha_Branch

    Iantha_Branch Member

    If you read my ramblings from last night, you're a trooper and I appreciate your patronage.

    If you skipped ahead in the story, I understand. Back to the main action.

    I admittedly have been playing with fire the past couple weeks. Originally, I borrowed a piece of bracing to use as an end stop for the staging yard. As the benchwork for 19th St went up, I had to steal that chunk of 2x4 back for its intended purpose. So for a few weeks, the staging yard had nothing to stop runaways from falling off the end. Luckily nothing bad happened, but with the paint on the benchwork dry my first priority became installing the permanent end stop.

    Feb 1 1.jpg

    With this stop installed, I could finally move on to track work for 19th st yard.
     
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  9. Iantha_Branch

    Iantha_Branch Member

    Moving on to our progress with 19th st yard

    I hadn't posted it yet, but I made a further revision to the track plan for the yard. I ended up liking the last plan that I posted, but it needed an extra tweak. I moved the main yard ladder up one track and added in a cross over at the end of it. That created a short run around should the switching crew need it. As of now, I have the caboose track double ended. This new setup allows for the switching crew to easily run around the caboose of an incoming train and shove it into the north (left) end of the caboose track. Departing power can grab its caboose off the south (right) end of the caboose track. All of this adds up to the caboose track being able to be operated by both the yard switcher and road crews without being in each others way.

    The other great feature of this arrangement is the yard switcher now has an additional long track to work with. If incoming traffic starts to pile up, a full length train can be pulled from receiving and quickly shoved into that bottom full length track and left there without interfering with the yard ladder.

    19th ST Alt 4..JPG

    The first step to building this yard is placing all of the turnouts. I spent a few hours on that today, and I'm about halfway done. If I can get the other half of the turnouts placed tomorrow, I can rough in some track and get a sense for how much I like this arrangement.

    Feb 1 2.jpg

    Feb 1 3.jpg
     
  10. Iantha_Branch

    Iantha_Branch Member

    Slight update. More pictures of 19th st yard with some roughed in flex track

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  11. klrwhizkid

    klrwhizkid Administrator Staff Member Administrator Frisco.org Supporter

    Ethan, I am glad that you took the ball that Rick and I passed off to you and you have been running hard! Rick and I are going to try to coordinate another work day with you in the relatively near future.
     
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  12. Iantha_Branch

    Iantha_Branch Member

    I really appreciate you guys getting this layout started on the right foot.

    My plan for the time being is to get all of these turnouts aligned and pinned down, then when things work out for a work session, everything is ready to go for track laying.

    Beyond track work, I'm gonna try and enlist a couple more guys to help with wiring and turnout motors. With my health issues right now, I can't really work on under the layout stuff.
     
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  13. BR Austin

    BR Austin Member

    I’m seeing a lot of progress since I was up there! Looking really really good.
     
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