River Road
Last night I was playing around with some stained strip wood leftover from one of my other projects making grade crossings over some of the tracks on the back side of Harlow. I'm going to start calling this area Southside, to differentiate it from Downtown Harlow.
On my railroad the Georgia/ Tennessee state line is on the 4th level, so for the standard Gauge at least South is up, and North is down. . The main line here, as it ducks under the backdrop. lead to the long upgrade to Crooked Creek, so in the convoluted logic of this railroad , this are is to the south of downtown Harlow, so I'm going to start Calling it Southside, which sounds a lot better than the back side of Harlow.
The roads in Harlow are a mess. I had wanted to put in a little street car line originally, but abandoned the plan as my design got worked out, as it would have force my roads into a more block oriented design, and would have caused a lot of limitations in the way I set this town up. I'm adding a little bit of road that runs off of Depot st. toward the aisle. The whole thing is less than four inches long, but I'm going to call it River road. It is made out of foamcore, with some chunks of "rock" (pink foam) stuffed up under it to fill holes between it and the existing scenery. This is a lot faster, easier, and cleaner than trying to build it up with plaster.
Here is a picture of river road from a low angle, that shows the foamcore and the pink foam rocks. in a few, when these are painted grey, it won't be easily recognizable for what it is. I also have a photo of River rd, from up above that shows the grade crossing, where the road crosses over the tracks over the pitifully small passing siding near the yard throat in Harlow. That passing siding is too small, and the one downtown has thre way stub switches, which are tricky, so you do as little switching as possible in Harlow, If you are going there from Crooked Creek, you want to block your train in Crooked Creek, where there are great big passing sidings.
And speaking of switching Harlow, #9 is in the photo's. #9 is a Westside models import of Westside Lumber C. #3. It is a nice little Heisler (way oversze for #3 though ; lots of early brass was built oversize, when smaller motors were not available). #9 runs pretty well, and is a hoss. It used to have a regular job on the mountain division, but has found semi retirement as the Harlow switcher, where it can be relatively happy with the light rail, and seriously compromised track plan down in Harlow.
#9 came from the factory with a straight stack, which I removed to keep it from setting the woods on fire. It has had several stacks, including a cabbage stack, which looked plain weird. It is currently wearing a 1870's style stack, which is just wrong, maybe some day I'll find the correct stack for this beast. I need to be patient, after all it has only been in service for 35 years.
Bill Nelson