It's been a long time since I've posted but thought I'd share a little progress. My son and I made a video as if our layout were the real BN Ottumwa Subdivision in 1995. There's still so much work to do but we now have 95% of the track done (ok, not counting the West Burlington Shops) and 30% ballasted with some basic scenery. Clearly there are more engines to super detail and paint along with endless brick buildings for downtown. I seem to have an inexplicable need to bash or scratch build everything. I got sick of crossing the Mississippi on plywood and 3D printed a "temporary" bridge but actually it looks pretty good. At least it will work until downtown is done. Here's the video: And some other pictures: BN 491 with GP39E 2913, GP39M 2813, and MPI SD40M-2 (ex PRR SD45) crossing the Mississippi River. Burlington yard looking North. The Hawk Eye building is cardboard to see how it will fit. Rutherford potato is scratch built. We're going to keep the turn table and round house even though they were removed in the 70s. Main Street (blue foam) conceals the K-Line (Hannibal sub) staging. Burlington yard looking South. The platforms are scratch built but still need the gravel top and weathered. Clearly the station needs built too. The yard is all code 40 with hand laid turnouts driven by Blue Points. I still have 8 turnouts to build for the north end. The K-Line peals off at the far end under the bluff and has staging under main street. Downtown Burlington clearly needs a lot of work. The track for C&E, Borax, and Murry Boiler are complete with the Lucas crossover. The Burlington Junction in the foreground needs completed once the yard ladder is done. Looking back at Burlington from the West Burlington Hill. This is the ruling grade on the real BN at 1.6% and is on the layout as well. Mine is just a lot shorter. In the distance you can see the yard and the Mississippi bridge. I couldn't have asked for a better shaped basement to model Burlington, IA other than for it to be bigger. Or maybe it was too big? Here is where the West Burlington shops will be. I need to at least get a cardboard version up sometime. The helix down to staging is in the background. If anyone is thinking of building a layout with hidden staging below I have one word - don't. It makes things so much harder than they need to be. Of course I said that on my last layout too. Here's one of my CTC control panels. This one is at Dayman. The switch knobs are rotary switches that drive tortoise switch machines. The signals right now are just "play" but I have designed and built some optical IR detectors that will eventually tie into operating signals. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask and I'll try to check in more often. John.
Wow John, your layout is really nice. I enjoyed the video as well. Your "temporary" MS river bridge really does look good as well. Thank you for sharing the video and pics.
Love those prototypical CTC turnout and signal controllers. I recall these were produced some years ago and remain impressed.
I agree. I'm pretty pleased with them. My parts come from Alan and Mike at CTCparts.com. While I'd like to have a whole CTC board sitting somewhere it's just about as good to walk around as the dispatcher and throw switches and signal knobs during an operating session. It's also been pretty fun trying to match signal locations and manual (Blue Point) vs. powered (Tortoise) on the layout. I took a few liberties but for the most part numbers and locations match. The real CTC board used to sit in the Burlington depot. Now it is at Midwest Central in Mount Pleasant. I'm glad it still exists. Here's a picture of it at Midwest Central and one I found from the Burlington Depot with Phil who used to be the operator of the CTC board at one time.
Yes, absolutely great that it's been saved. Thanks for the pictures! Some years ago the NC Transportation Museum activated a pair of their former SAL CTC machines and had veteran Dispatchers "working" their divisions and answering visitor's questions. It was quite a treat. In this era of microchips, it's easy to forget that the pulse-code and relay technology used by these vintage machines was cutting edge and faultless too, returning a code to the machine to affirm that track components were indeed in position. As a kid, I remember standing aside signal bungalows and hearing the rhythmic clicking of the relays inside. In a more modern adaptation, I shot this in 01/1980 at SOU's John Sevier Yard in Knoxville, TN.
Really nice looking work, thanks for sharing! I've always liked BN, in fact it was the book Building the Burlington Northern RR in N Scale that got me really started with n scale. I don't model the BN now, but still have some BN locos and rolling stock tucked away.
I've done some more work on the "temporary" Mississippi bridge. I now have the swing span mostly done and I scratch built the phone pole support on the east approach. I 3D printed the center pivot pier as a bunch of bents, sides, and concrete parts. Once panted and superglued together I'm very pleased. As much as I would love to have an operating swing span to throw a wrench in operating sessions that will have to wait until someday when I build the "real" bridge. The phone line support was quite a bit more work than I wanted but I'm pleased with how it turned out. Now guard rails, edge boards, swing span control shack, and then everything is off to the paint shop. I would like to put operating lights on the bridge but that can wait a little longer. Oh, and I need to do the rest of the phone poles too. Maybe I can move on to Connet and Gladstone in a couple of weeks (or months).
Thanks! I love watching a 40 car coal train rumble across the bridge and snake its way through the yard, station, and downtown.
Nice work on that swing bridge! I started as a BN fan, and moved on to D&RGW, but have lots of BN equipment as well.
Thanks for the comments. And @HemiAdda2d I certainly have plans for a D&RGW engine or two as run through power. So I got the bridge painted a couple of weeks ago and decided I'm done for now. I still need to build the control house and center walkway. I would also like some lights on it too for night time operation but that can wait. But for a temporary bridge it sure beats plywood river crossings. Now I'm playing with signals.
And here's a preview of my signals. I'm pretty sure I'm crazy for wanting scale operating signals complete with logic. I built a number of C/MRI nodes with Teensy Arduinos and wrote some software to interface them to JRMI. I now have half the panels installed and wire to Teensy nodes and talking to JMRI. Here is the Wood Tower Panel. I'm waiting on more CTC levers and need to design the track schematic. Someday I would like to light it to show signal and switch feed back and train blocks. Here's the first CB&Q signal bridge working. I had thought about putting an i2c IO expander on the signal bridge but I would have needed to layout a circuit board and that felt too much like work. It would have meant just 4 wires (power, ground, clock, and data) between the bridge and relay house but after looking at number of signal pictures there are some fat wires on the prototype. I ran one 3.3V to the bridge and then 40 AWG magnet wire from each LED. The Q-station signal shack hides the hole in the layout for the wires to go to the IO expander below the layout. The detectors are IR ones I built and illuminated from the bottom of the signal bridge. All of this talks to the Teensy node and then over C/MRI to JMRI. I still need to figure out how to get JMRI to route the switch but I do have it working with the crossover normal and following the bridge signal and Gladstone permissive signal.
in the event anyone wants to print their own bridge, I posted my stl files for the bridge in the resource section (https://www.trainboard.com/highball...ngton-iowa-double-track-swingspan-bridge.179/). I also wrote up a brief assembly narration but I'm sure it won't add to anyone's understanding. The fixed span is 9" long and can be lifted on and off to access the track. If anyone is interested I can provide the Inventor Fusion or step files as well so you can make your own changes.
I created a quick video of 9615 going past some signals and over the bridge. Sorry for the shaky hand held shots. And forgive the misspelling of Connett on my panel.
The Weed Weasels are always watching... you could add a trainmaster hiding in the brush with a radar gun and rulebook... All kidding aside, great work!