Neat house. Glad to see you have a plan going forward. Will be fun to watch the layout develop. Doc Tom
Last edited:
Hi Bill.
with most of my railroading activities pretty much on old, and not being able to share pictures off my phone, on this forum, I have been absent a lot here. but here is a locomotive project from last year. it is a United V&T Original Reno. Identical in looks with my old #2, which was an AHM Genoa, excepting it has much finer detail, and does not have the oversized flanges that caused problems on much of my layout where code 83, 70, and 55 are in use.
am trying to do layout planning for the garage our lake house in Stewart TN, and a workshop next to the garage behind the the bungalow in Houston Texas that will be our winter home.
neither location has enough space for most of my current RR, although I can fit Crooked Creek, my sawmill town into the space currently allotted for RR in the garage, but I have not yet figured out how to build a good plan around it. My wife would like to get a laundry room that was on the main level , and thinks a detached garage might be a good idea. If I could get the laundry room, the car, and the kayaks and canoe out of the garage that would free up a lot of space, and my RR would only have to share space with tool boxes, work benches, the mower, a seating area, and an interior stairs, which we do not have at this time.
using Crooked Creek would let me establish a fully sceniced 3x18 switching area very quickly, but the grade at the 21 inch radius curve at Tom's bend is 3.3% and is severely limiting for some of my tiny rod Locomotives. Also Crooked Creek somehow is well set up to deal with sizable trains, and I don't have enough space to make other areas similarly proportioned. So my dilemma is do I start with Crooked Creek. or do I start over, building for 4-8 car trains, with a 2% ruling grade on the main, to let tiny rod engines do their thing, sand perhaps some steeper grades on mining or logging branches.
I'm even considering making provision for continuous running. with less usable space in Houston: I'm thinking of doing mainly doing HOn3 narrow gauge there as most of my Hon3 equipment will do a 16 inch radius, and what won't could be used in TN to feed logs and Iron ore to my RR, saving space for more scenery between locations. just have a lot of variables to juggle, and I don't like a lot of the only options I have. I'm aware that years ago, when I started my thy attic RR, the biggest error was starting with what I had, and that small area, with steep curves and short sidings became the standard that everything but Crooked Creek was built to.
using a lot of graph paper, and not getting anywhere quick; but hopefully I can make most of my mistakes on paper
Best of luck to you. I hope you get into that house quick and get all settled in without a hitch. Glad to hear you got a job with OshKosh, I hear they are a great outfit to work for.Bill,
I'll be relocating here again. I know I dropped off the radar for a while, and I'll make a post on my Whiskey River Ry thread, but in 2019 I lost my job at the railroad. I did gain employment with a hotel as their maintenance guy but pay wise was lacking, so I packed up everything and headed back home to Wisconsin. I was able to get a job with Oshkosh Defense building the JLTV's and have been there since October '19. Now with a little more of the storm calmed, I'm closing on a house here at the end of the month. I can't wait to get out of this apartment and back into a house again.
Tyler