New Town Design, Thoughts?

Here is a preliminary layout of my new town.
Please make suggestions.
First photo shows my plan.  LH and RH are types of turnouts.  Read rectangle is a station, the rest are industries.

Here is an aerial view of the town with approximate locations of the industries, turnouts and flex track.  You will notice that I did not add the RH turnout at the very top of the schematic.  

Here is a view as seen by the operator.  The problem I see so far is how am I going to reach the turnout and industry (brown building with grey roof) above the two buildings (gray building with dark grey roof and red brick 2 story building) on the right side of the photo?  Did you know that there are two correct spellings for the word gray (grey)?

And here is a view from the left side of the town.

Removing Hidden Staging

Well, I bit the bullet and got rid of both my hidden staging areas.

Yes, it was a mess, but I have OCD so it didn't stay that way for too long.

And here are the hidden staging segments removed.

Now I have 10 more turnouts to put online!  In the top photo you can see I am already starting to remove and salvage the flextrack.  Putting it down with caulk made it pretty easy to remove from the roadbed.  Next posting I will show you what I did for offline staging.

Privately Owned Cars Waybills

Some cars are privately owned meaning that the industry that uses the car also owns the car and pays the railroad to deliver the car to the consignee and return it back to the car owner.  Here is an example of privately own car's waybill, the shipper is sending a boxcar to Toes-Up Funeral in Mars, PA.

Nothing extraordinary about this waybill, it is written just like any other waybill.  Below is the boxcar and you will notice the wording in the top center of the car side which states that it is a private car.  Most of the cars I have seen don't have this wording that pronounced.

Here is the return waybill from Toes-Up Funeral sending the car back to Transylvania Casket.  At first glance it looks like a normal waybill but the note in the INSTRUCTIONS box says REVERSE ROUTE.  This is different from a typical empty waybill because it sends back the privately owned boxcar back to the shipper where it originated.

Assigned Service Waybills

Sometimes the railroad will use home road cars for "assigned service", meaning they will use their own cars for special purposes.  Below is a waybill for a CP hopper car used in assigned service by the Keystone Coal Company. This waybill is unique because the coal company uses hoppers so often that they have their own waybill forms printed. This car is originating from the Keystone mine #14 in located in the town of Millcreek and will go offline to a colliery in Hazelton, PA.

Below is a photo of the CP hopper, car number 12, in the CP's early paint scheme listed in the waybill above.  A fine example of an Atlas 2 bay offset hopper along with truck mounted Micro-Trains couplers.

And in order to use the car again a special assigned service empty waybill is shown below sending the same car, this time empty back to the Keystone mine #14.  The yardmaster or agent is the person who writes up the waybill, in this case a Mr. Casey Jones.

Empty Waybills

What happens when your industry want to ship an item but you do not have an empty car to?  You would most likely fill out an empty car request form which would then go to a yard agent and he would look in his yard to see if there was an empty car he could send your way. Once a car is found he will add the car to the next local train which services your industry along with an empty car bill.

This would be the form that would accompany the car to your industry.

The top of the bill shows the type of car, this time a boxcar, the reporting marks, NH for New Haven railroad, and the car number 45007.

This type of bill can be used for 2 purposes.  In this example we are requesting an empty for loading, so the bill will be filled out under the "FOR LOADING" section when tells the conductor that the car needs to be dropped off at Lincoln Fuse in Millcreek for loading by that industry.

If you had emptied a foreign car and you wanted to send it to its home railroad you would fill out the "FOR HOME" section of the bill.

This bill shows that the yard agent in Berwick is sending the car to Scranton, PA which is in the direction of an interchange point with the NYC railroad.

Waybills

Ah, yes, waybills.  When I first started out with operations on my layout I tried the card card and waybill system.  It was a very easy system to implement and to use.  I believe if I would have had a much larger layout I probably would have continued using this system.  I then started using a switchlist system.  This was even an easier system to implement and use.  

After a while I got bored with this system and decided to use a waybill only system.  I found many references to this system from Tony Thompson; he has written a great many good articles on waybills on his blog.

Below is a typical freight waybill that I use on my layout.

So, what does it all mean?  Well first off, the waybill is used to deliver 40 boxes of steel to my online industry of Lincoln Fuses located in the town of Millcreek.  The car is a foreign car owned by the Grand Trunk Western shown here in the CAR INITIALS box as GTW with a car number of 516771.  You can also see that it is 40' boxcar.  The waybill was originated on the B&M who decided to send the empty car back to its home road with a load for Lincoln Fuses.  And here is the GTW boxcar at Lincoln Fuses.

Why doesn't the waybill show the industry and town of where shipment was originated?  Back in the day when waybills were commonplace the conductor would fold the waybill in half because he only needed to know where the car need to go; since he had the car in his train and the waybill in hand he didn't need to know where the car came from, even though that information would be on the other side of the waybill.  And one last note of interest is the routing instructions; this car originated on the B&M was then interchanged with the NYC and then interchanged with the CP.  Routing will become important in my later posts about waybill.

In my next posting I will discuss in greater detail how this waybill is used on my railroad.

Operations - Train Orders

Now the fun stuff, operations.

Here is a typical Train Order I use.  The train is called the Scranton Morning train which originates at Harrisburg staging track 4 then pulls and spots cars at Berwick yard and then terminates at Scranton staging yard on track 4.  This is a typed example.  (A form 19 is a typical train order which can be passed on to the train with out stopping, as a opposed to a form 31 train order where the train has to stop and the train order has to be signed by the conductor.)

Here is the same train order but it is hand written.  I like the hand written train order but I think it might be difficult for my guests to read.  Both train orders are made using Excel spreadsheets and the fonts are digital fonts found on the internet.

And More Construction

Now comes the town of Pocono and again you can see a train on the track just to make sure all of the 

track joints are good.

 And finally the town of Sunbury is added on top.

And back to the hidden staging turnouts.  I figured out how to arrange a few diodes in order to enable the use of one button to select the staging track of choice.  But before I solder it together, I tried the circuit on a breadboard.

 And here is the final circuit board with the wires and diodes solder together.  The tape with the number are used to keep track of the wiring.

And Reconstruction

But before I can put the top (visible) plywood down for the towns, I have to build the hidden staging for the west end (a.k.a. Harrisburg)

So here are my methods on laying N scale track.  After I draw on the board the approximate center lines of the track I then bend the flex track to about the final shape, then I connect the next piece of track and cut the joints of each track to where they are offset about an 1".  Then I solder the joints together.  In order to offset the joints I have found that I have to remove 3 or 4 ties on each piece of track in order to make the joints.  This is not a big deal with the track I am using since it seems pretty stiff to begin with and I have never had a problem with the track gauge, heck I have never had to check the gauge of any of my rolling stock wheels or any of my track!  Shown below are where the turnouts are installed; I don't solder the turnouts anywhere on my layout.  I am not a soldering expert and I have melted ties before to the point where the turnout was non-usable.  Not shown are the Peco switch machines.

And the Demolition Continues

Here is a picture of the west side with the helix removed.  You can see where the hidden staging used to be along with the pillars for the plywood.

Next I draw on my new plywood where the track should go.

 And then place some turnouts and buildings just to see how it all fits together.

Layout Construction - part 2

And the construction continues.  In this photo you can see the tools of the trade along with my hidden staging yard on the lower level.  Making sausage sometimes is not a pretty sight!

The add some ground foam, buildings, electrical panel, rolling stock and a loco, and wah-lah!

But what happens when you don't like how it turned out?  Well you start over!

Layout Overview

The Central Pennsylvania Railroad (CPR) is a point-to-point N scale layout.  Most trains originate and terminate in the hidden staging yards of Harrisburg (west) or Scranton (east).  Below is a schematic of the layout.

Also shown on this diagram are the 4 towns that the locals service; originating and terminating at the Berwick Yard.

Here is another diagram which shows each town and its industries; these diagrams are also posted on the fascia of the layout.  

Here is the east side of the layout.

And here is the west side of the layout.

Construction Steps - part 1

More Construction Photos;

Now add some helixes;

Always a good idea to test run trains before gluing it all down.  You never know what sort of grade your locos can go up given a set number of cars.  Transformer is hooked up for the test in the background.

Once the helixes are in place I added the plywood for the towns.

Then came the roadbed and track!

In the beginning.......

Here is where it all began back in 2009.  This is a hand drawing of my proposed layout that would fit into my family room.  I would like to thank some friends from the Trainboard Forum who help me with the design.  Yes, I know it is only a hand sketch, but it was pretty easy for me make and to make modifications to the design.  For 8 years I designed aircraft parts on a CAD machine, but the pencil and paper just seem so much easier.  As you can see it is roughly an 8'x8' "L" shaped layout.

And here is the first part of construction; this is the level where the hidden staging will reside along with the two helixes at each end.