Smalltown USA - the second coming

[Mr_Tilt]

Smalltown USA

A new old layout

 

 

 Back in 198something the Gloucester Model Railway Club N gauge layout was the infamous Somerset & Dorset based 'Fircoombe', but even after a rebuild and with an added computer display to inform the public what was going on it was becoming a bit hackneyed and we looked about for a suitable replacement in 1/148 scale. After some months of thinking and with the date for the club show rapidly approaching, in a moment of madness we decided to build a new layout....

 

 Thus it came about that 'Smalltown USA' made its debut at the club show after going from a bare NTRaK baseboard frame to a complete running layout with scenery, rolling stock and a complex sector table based fiddle yard, in a WEEK!

 

 Yes, that's not a misprint, it really did take two of us only seven days to do the first half of the layout. OK, so we didn't get MUCH sleep during the week but we did manage it. Subsequently we showed 'Smalltown' at the Swindon Show and won 'Best in Show' which was pretty amazing, and we later won 'Best N Gauge Layout' at the Derby Show, but that was after we'd spent another week, well 9 days actually, in doubling the size of the layout with a big mine loader and adapting the old 'Fircoombe' computer display to run 'Smalltown', and with added horn sounds too!

 

 'Smalltown' was retired in the early 1990s but was carefully stored and is in the process of being fettled and refurbished for the 2015 GMRC show, over 20 years after its last public appearance. We'll be making a few small changes and adapting the computer displays to the 21s^t century as using an 8 bit computer in this day and age is hardly par for the course.

 

 'Smalltown' represents an imaginary section of track in the mid-West USA sometime in the 70s and 80s. The left hand end of the layout is based on Elk River in Minnesota, with its 5 track diagonal grade crossing leading from the depot into the town itself. To make it fit the baseboard shape the angle of the crossing has been changed a bit but all five tracks are still there, unlike the real Elk River today. Almost nothing else of the surrounding layout bears the slightest resemblance to Minneota however. Immediately to the west of the depot is the curved, single track trestle over Whitmore's Canyon which leads into the tunnel at the bottom of the steep westbound grades, and to assist the heavy trains up the grade there's a small shed behind the depot which houses a quartet of GP30 helper locos. A short spur track leads off the main line up the road to the town feeding O'Keeffe's Widget Manufacturing Corp., the local heavy industry, and there's also a terminal road in front of the depot which is where the 'Pineliner' RDC cars end their run from Jefferson, the big city to the east.

 

 On the right hand side of the layout is the 'Smalltown Mining & Ore Company' plant, a major employer in the area, and which has its own sidings where the hoppers are marshalled, both inbound and outbound. SM&OC have their own switcher loco to move the hoppers under the loader and there are also sidings for cabooses to rest over between shifts. The double track eastbound main curves away around Mary's Mountain to Jefferson and points east.

 

 The track itself is owned by the Pinetree and Western Railroad Corporation, one of the smaller but nevertheless important railroads in the mid-West but the PineWest, as it is known to both customers, staff and railfans, extend running rights to many of the major US roads and also to Amtrak, as viewers will see when the daily double-headed Amtrak passenger train stops over at Smalltown.

 

 Steam is long gone during the period of the layout and the diesel reigns supreme with a wide variety of motive power from many roads hauling long freight consists through the town. Westbound freights usually have to stop to enable the PineWest helpers to attach themselves to the rear of the train to help them across the Smalltown trestle, through the tunnel and up the steep grade to the west. Eastbound freights just tend to run straight through, but the attraction of the excellent burgers available from Angie's Diner just north of the depot sometimes require a short stop-over.

 

 To the east the action is all centered on the SO&MC loader and long trains of empty hoppers can be seen arriving, often with dual Union Pacific power, and the hoppers are cut into shorter 4 or 5 car consists and are switched through the inbound road by the SO&MC switcher. Usually the UP power then moves up to the Smalltown refuelling rack while the hoppers are filled and then return to haul the loaded train either back to Jefferson or further west, as customers demand.

 

 From the modelling point of view the layout consists of two NTRaK modules with turn-around end sections and a couple of largish fiddle yards behind the backscene. 'Fiddle Yard' is probably a misnomer as the one behind Smalltown I, the original half of the layout, is actually a monster seven road sector table which holds six complete trains minus their motive power. The locos are held on short spur roads leading off the sector table enabling us to display a wide selection of motive power. Both Smalltown l's sector table and Smalltown ll's fiddle yard connect through the backscene via hidden holes, and in Smalltown ll's case enable us to work the 'empties in-loads out' trick for the mine.

 

 What may not be too apparent is that we can run the layout with only Smalltown I on show, as the scenery break in the middle of Mary's Mountain fits on the end of either module and the layout can operate in both a 14 ft length or a 8.5 ft length, but with obvious operating limitations in the case of the short version.

 

 Motive power and rolling stock is available in abundance from many manufacturers, as well as some modified and kit and scratchbuilt items. Not only the PineWest's own locos and stock but also that of many other US railroads are used, as is normal with the US railroad scene. The primary PineWest passenger train is powered by an A-B EMD E-8 unit, and has passenger cars typical of the pre-Amtrak era, including a dome car and an observation car bringing up the rear. There are also four Budd RDC cars, called Pineliners on the PineWest, which operate the local services from Jefferson out to Smalltown and points west. Our Amtrak passenger train is powered by twin F4OPHs and is a full length train of the 80s, modelled on the 'Empire Builder' consist of mostly double decked Superliners, but with normal height baggage cars at the head end.

 

 Freight operation is in the hands of many of the US road's locos, EMD SD45s and U boats are common, as are SP Tunnel Motors, the models coming from major manufacturers such as Kato and Hallmark, but also some converted locos are used to depict the rarer types. Freight stock covers the full range of cars typical of the period, from normal box cars, usually Kaydee models, to road trailers mounted on TOFC flats, some tankers, covered hoppers and of course the many hopper cars serving the mine. Being a traditionalist type of road, the PineWest still uses cabooses, nowadays long gone from the US railroad scene.

 

 Operation is via an old style cab control system, DCC has yet to reach the PineWest, and we can connect either controller to any part of the layout. For exhibition work a remote hand set can be connected to the front of the Mary's Mountain end module enabling more precise switching movement and giving a closer contact with the viewing public. We can also use a radio control transmitter for one cab which enables even closer contact with the public. All of the track is standard Peco N gauge, using live frog powered points on the front half of the layout and hand operated dead frog points behind the backscene. The point motors are all SEEP originals and we have Kaydee magnets mounted strategically to make uncoupling possible without the intervention of too many fingers.

 

 To ensure that operation runs smoothly Smalltown uses a computer operated display to not only remind the operators what to do next but also to inform the public what's about to happen via a second screen, bearing in mind that UK viewers may not be all that familiar with US operating practices or terminology. As a side effect of using the PC we've also been able to incorporate authentic American railroad horn sounds for the various locos, but rest assured that the volume of the horns is variable to suit the size of the hall...

 

 

Smalltown I end - general view

 

 

Smalltown I end - Whitmore's Canyon trestle and tunnel mouth

 

 

Mary's Mountain end with the old computer monitor

 

 

Smalltown I sector table and control panel

 

 

 

Smalltown II - Mine and loader

 

 

 

Smalltown II from a different angle

 

 

 

The 'Pines Limited' curves its way into town.

[DanielB]

Lovely! Truly lovely. The town scene is great!

[F-UnitMad]

That old PC monitor is a blast from the past, isn't it..??!!

 

... and as Regulars in this RMweb Section & at the Trent Valley N.A.M. Show will know, these days some layouts are built & exhibited in far less than a week.....

Nice layout although a little too 'generic' for my tastes.

[Mr_Tilt]

That old PC monitor is a blast from the past, isn't it..??!!

 

 

It's from an Amstrad 664, for goodness sake. Now gone to a computer museum in Yorkshire, so I'm having to re-write the software using a PC, a vertical leaning curve at my age. 

[CourthsVeil]

I… a vertical leaning curve at my age. 

 

That's nice wording, me thinks…

 

But seriously: a really nice layout - like it !

More pics, please, if possible…

 

Regards

   Armin

[Mr_Tilt]

That's nice wording, me thinks…

 

But seriously: a really nice layout - like it !

More pics, please, if possible…

 

Regards

   Armin

 

Hehehe, a Freudian slip methinks! 

 

I'm glad you like it, thanks. I have quite a few more pics but they are still 35 mm prints and not scanned. I'll have some more in digital form after May 5th when we're moving the main parts down to the GMRC clubhouse to continue the restoration.

[Mr_Tilt]

We've made lots of progress on Smalltown over the last few months. The entire layout, all six sections of it, have been transported down to the GMRC club house, as it's too long to fit in any of the rooms at home, and we've been working on the refurbishing the scenery and re-wiring the electrics.

 

One of our controllers blew up as soon as we applied power to it  so that had to be replaced, and a few of the panel switches didn't work too well, but they haven't done anything for 25 yrs so it's no real surprise I guess. I've been going through the VAST amount  of locos and rolling stock to see what works and what doesn't and I was agreeably surprised to see that over 50% of the locos ran just fine. A few need some work on replacing bits of couplers, those N scale KayDees are a tad fragile at times. And no, I just CAN'T think of them as 'Micro-Trains Couplers', they'll always be KayDees for me!

 

As the layout divides itself naturally in two halves, the town bit called STI by us, and the mine bit, called STII, we're working on the halves separately and by pure fluke we managed to run a couple of 'First Trains' over the two halves on the same day. 

 

 

Here's the 3026, the first ever loco I painted up in Pine West livery, crossing the trestle.

Note the signs of the scenery work at the foot of the gulch and the rudimentary track

connector to the main board on the right.

 

 

And this is the first train round Mary's Mountain since the re-build. It's powered by one of the Pine West's GP38-2s and hauls

a '4-cut' of the umpteen UP coal hoppers we have. Note the even MORE rudimentary track connector, the track gang have still 

to lay the other two connectors laying there in front. The controller is plugged into our 'Chatting to the public' position on the

front of the Mary's Mountain section.

 

We have an open day at the community centre where the club meets in a couple of weeks and we're working on showing trains running on one half of the layout while we do work on the other half. Still lots to do after that of course.

[Mr_Tilt]

Yesterday we had a sort of shake-down event for Smalltown. The local Community Centre where the Gloucester Model Railway Club meet had an Open Day and asked us to participate so we put four operating layouts on show, one of which was Smalltown.

 

As we're still in the middle of the refurbishment programme I ran a few trains while the scenery guys showed the public how we did things and described what we we planned to do. I was trying out all possible paths through the track network and testing out train consists for our show in November. While the scenery making demos went very well it would be wrong to say that the running side did as well.....

 

One pair of cross-over points/switches shorted out the entire layout whenever we tried them, so they'll need some intensive checks, and as a result we had to run 'wrong line' for the eastbound services for a short distance. We need to replace one point/switch at the throat of the STI sector table entirely, it's developed a kink on one exit rail and we're going to re-lay it with a curved point/switch and re-align that whole area as well. At least one area of the fiddle yard to the rear of STII seems totally dead and no amount of thumping managed to enliven it, I suspect that one of our ribbon cable sockets has an internal fault so that'll need checking too.

 

Of the umpteen locos and rolling stock items an amazing number just DIDN'T want to run properly, wheelsets kept falling out of the trucks, couplings, both KayDee and Rapido, just didn't want to stay connected and lots of items needed more weight added to ensure they stayed on the track. I'd got five packs of Blu-Tack in hand for doing just that and I used maybe half of it yesterday!

 

Yesterday did 'what it said on the tin' for us, and we now know the true size of the work load we have before November. In some ways it wasn't too bad, the layout looked really good, and we had a number of compliments, especially after we told people how old it was. On the other hand there's a number of niggling faults that will need attention, but that's model railroading of course.

 

 

An overall view of Smalltown. Note the 1980s vintage sign on the wall behind, back when printers were all dot matrix and used 

fan fold paper! The white area in the centre is where we're re-doing the scenery and the Mod-Roc isn't painted yet. On the left

is the PC screen running the descriptive screens for the public.

 

 

 

We seem to be majoring on passenger trains in these pics but that's just the way it panned out when I took them. The

new road tunnel mouth and the modified rock face behind can be seen more easily and our Sperry Track Fault Detection

Car (a repainted and decalled ConCor RDC of course) is just checking the street tracks.

 

 

The trestle survived the two moves from my house to the club and then across to the other building. Usually

we slide it out from under the track before any moves but we just forgot these two times!

[Mr_Tilt]

I forgot something.........

 

During the refurbishment we updated the connections between the six modules that form the layout. Our original system used wooden dowels and holes drilled in the side frames of the modules and over the years the holes had worn and the locations became very much hit and miss. Luckily two of the GMRC members are the 'movers and shakers' at Elite Baseboards http://www.elitebaseboards.net/ (If such links aren't allowed here could some passing moderator please remove it?) and they replaced all our wooden dowels with steel pattern maker's dowels. Now we can position and clamp the modules in place in maybe 15 secs. where it previously took more like 15 mins! 

 

Sadly we also found that one of the sector table frames has warped while it's been in my loft and now we can't get both ends of the sector table to align at the same time. That makes running continuous trains impossible and the trains can't be longer than the sector table either, both of which tend to limit us. Even our Amtrak Superliner has to be hand switched into position before running as it's longer than the sector table with the two F40PHs on the point. 

 

As the tracks at each end are soldered to a monster chunk of paxolin faced PC board we can't adjust their positioning so we've come up with an alternate plan....

 

We're going to build Smalltown III (STIII) which will be a short section, maybe 2 feet long, that fits between the existing STI and STII modules. At the rear the fiddle yard tracks will bend to accommodate the errors in connecting the two current yards and at the front there'll just be three tracks and a largish mountain thing connection the two other modules. We may even make it a large radius curve as well so the layout may become kidney shaped rather than a straight run.

 

Way back when we built STI we didn't sleep all that much over the week's total madness and my wife Mary kept us going with a continuously cooking pot stew, wonderful stuff. One of the constituents of the stew were some wonderful dumplings, just the job for topping up your stomach lining after building zillions of small sub-boards to carry point motors! At one stage she made too many dumplings for the size of the pot so we put the remainder in the freezer until later in the week. NOT a good idea, as when they were recovered and re-loaded into the pot they sank like a torpedoed U-Boat and never surfaced! 

 

Not wanting to waste them we used them as the core for Mary's Mountain, thus its name of course, and they're still in there! 

 

I mentioned our plans for STIII to her when I got home y'day and she said 'Hm, perhaps I better look out the dumpling recipe again.....' 

[Mr_Tilt]

In 1976 many of the US railroads went WELL over the top with their special colour schemes for the Bicentennial Year celebrations. For reasons best known to themselves Amtrak didn't get into the Bicentennial thing, maybe because they'd only been in existence a few years by the time it was upon them. I decided to change that policy, at least as far as the Amtrak train on Smalltown was concerned.  ;D

 

I run a 9 coach Amtrak Superliner train on the layout, well short of the real world train lengths but then UK houses aren't large enough to contain an N gauge layout for 14-16 car train! The Superliners were first built in 1978, so I time-warped them a year or two earlier into 1976 and sorted out my own scheme for a Bicentennial Superliner.

 

One of my Superliner cars had the paint on one end wrecked when the superglue zapper I was using oversprayed onto the top of the model so I designed up a scheme that covered over the wreckage of the paint job and made up some decals for the rest as well. I can't remember what make these cars are, I got them in the late 80s sometime, well before Kato bought theirs out, and there's no maker's name on them anywhere.

 

The standard car is the top pic and the Bicentennial version is below.

 

 

[Adrian Wintle]

 

I can't remember what make these cars are, I got them in the late 80s sometime, well before Kato bought theirs out, and there's no maker's name on them anywhere.

 

Those would be ConCor cars.

 

Adrian

[Mr_Tilt]

Those would be ConCor cars.

 

Adrian

 

Thanks Adrian, I had my suspicions they were as two of them have the diabolical 'split pin' type truck pivot pins.

 

Guaranteed to make your cars wobble like jellies, even on straight track! I've converted the Bicentennial one by chopping up a plastic chassis box car and grafting it's ends under the Superliner to take sensibly sized truck pivot pins.

[Adrian Wintle]

Thanks Adrian, I had my suspicions they were as two of them have the diabolical 'split pin' type truck pivot pins.

 

Guaranteed to make your cars wobble like jellies, even on straight track! I've converted the Bicentennial one by chopping up a plastic chassis box car and grafting it's ends under the Superliner to take sensibly sized truck pivot pins.

 

I dealt with mine by replacing them with Kato ones  That means that not only do they run well, but they also have interiors and finer detailing. I think I did find a way to use MT pins and one of their adaptors to get a better connection. (I still have some ConCor cars, they are just out of service).

 

BTW. I got Palace Car Co. Superliner seats that I thought would work in the ConCor cars, but they are obviously intended for something else (brass?). No real hope of fitting in the ConCor cars.

 

Adrian

[Mr_Tilt]

I can't even get the roof off my ConCor Superliners, they seem to be welded in place!

 

As they badly need more weight low down I've packed the underside between the trucks with BluTak, which seems to work quite well. You can see it in the pics above.

[Adrian Wintle]

I can't even get the roof off my ConCor Superliners, they seem to be welded in place!

 

As they badly need more weight low down I've packed the underside between the trucks with BluTak, which seems to work quite well. You can see it in the pics above.

 

If I remember correctly, they are a combined roof/glazing, latched by the end (gangway) windows. They are a very tight fit and damage is a possibility.

 

Adrian

[Scottish Modeller]

Hi Kit, Adrian,

 

Adrian is correct - windows and roof all one piece held by the end windows in the gangway.

 

I have 3 and managed to crack the glazing on each of them when I tried to take them apart for adding interior and lights.

 

I used to think Lima Mk3's were awkward until i tried these!

 

Thanks

[Mr_Tilt]

Thanks for that gentlemen, I think I'll leave well alone and carry on with the Blu-Tak. 

[Adrian Wintle]

Thanks for that gentlemen, I think I'll leave well alone and carry on with the Blu-Tak. 

 

I checked what I did with mine:

 

1. The things that lock the glazing in are actually the marker lights on the end. Once I had freed the glazing I remove the nubs so the glazing now slides in and out with a decent friction fit.

2. The fluted bosses that come with Microtrains trucks fit into the truck holes in the body from the inside. This allows the trucks to be retained with Microtrains bolster pins, removing the wobble.

3. The truck-mounted couplers were replaced with body-mounted Microtrains ones (I used coupler boxes cut from Microtrains freight trucks that I had lying around)

 

Adrian

[Mr_Tilt]

LOTS of good ideas there Adrian, thanks very much. 

 

We tried the whole train out on the layout today, and while it was an improvement on its previous woeful performance it wasn't all that good. 

 

I'll try out some of the stuff that's been suggested here and see how thing go. At one stage we used Unimate couplers on the standard ConCor trucks, which look great on the straight and give really close coupling, but a] they're a real bitch to couple up, especially with the height of the Superliners, and b] they couple SO closely that they severely restricts the minimum curve radius we can use, and that's crucial when getting in and out of the sector table yard.

[Mr_Tilt]

A very successful  work Tuesday yesterday! 

 

When we first put all six parts of the layout together they didn't quite fit exactly, hardly surprising after lying for 23 years in my loft! While much of it connected OK, we had to re-build the old NTRAK connector pieces and decided to make them permanent as the layout won't ever exist in its previous NTRAK form again. What we couldn't do was to the  get both ends of the sector table to line up at the same time, which meant our train lengths were limited to that of the various sector table tracks. 

 

Yesterday we experimented with an idea I'd had last week to insert a spacer between the front and rear halves of STI to re-align the tracks, and with just over 4mm of thickness it worked! 

 

We connected up both the control panels and all the ribbon cables and for the first time in over 20 years we ran a train all the way round the layout! We took the opportunity to test every track and switch on the whole system and they ALL worked!!!

 

So here's the First Train on its second lap of the layout, naturally it's the Sperry Rail Test Car.

 

 

There's no structures on the layout at the moment as we're upgrading the scenery and planting lots more pine trees, to go with

the railroad operators name of course.

 

Only nine weeks to go before the show, aaaaaggghhhhh! 

[Mr_Tilt]

While I've been sorting out the consists for the various trains we're planning to run on Smalltown at the show, the 'Scenery Team' have been fettling the front side of the layout. 

 

We were always a bit unsure about the perspective of the road heading off behind the gas station on the original build, see pic below, so Harvey Whitmore, the #1 Scenery Team artist (it's him who painted the amazing backscenes on the layout and who did most of the original scenery) decided to put in a road tunnel there and build up the mountain behind it. While he did the original groundwork for it much of the actual shaping, painting and texture placement was done by John Boxall, a man of considerable talent in this area, despite what he says himself.

 

 

As it was originally with the road vanishing into the distance.

 

 

 

As it is after yesterday's work with the tunnel and extended mountain scenery behind it. Some more paintwork on the

backscene will increase the height of the mountain in due time. 

 

What you can't read on this print is the name of the tunnel. Harve cast some letters into the tunnel mouth that read 'MELLENCAMP TUNNEL 1938'. 

 

This is an 'in joke' on our part as John Mellencamp's 'Small Town' track is our layout's theme tune and we often play it in the background during running sessions, much to the chagrin of the died-in-the-wool GWR enthusiasts at the club. 

 

Listen to the words and you'll see why we like it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CVLVaBECuc

[Mr_Tilt]

While working out the consists for the ever nearing show (6 weeks away now, aaaaghhhhh!) I figured I wasn't going to have loads of empty bulkhead flats, centrebeams or gons running on Smalltown so I've started on a 'loads generation' scheme.

 

Bulkhead flats seem to be used a lot to carry wrapped lumber in the US and I found an excellent on-line article on how to do this by printing out your own wraps on paper and covering wood blocks of the correct size to place aboard your freight cars. http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/magazine/mrh-2011-07-Jul/home-made_lumber_loads and hit the 'Download this issue' link.

 

All the templates in the article are of Canadian lumber companies but I thought it was unlikely such loads would reach as far south as Smalltown so the Pinewest Railroad suddenly expanded itself into the sawn lumber business.....

 

[Mr_Tilt]

Working up the consists for the November Show, I tried out our TOFC set on Tuesday. It's an 8-car set of articulated spine cars matched with some 50 ft TOFC trailers and one very badly running Kaydee 89 footer. To add length I usually run them with two 89 ft container flats too, which takes up one entire road of the sector table on STI. I ran one lap of the layout with only a few derailments of the articulated trucks (3 actually...)   and tried a second lap to see if things had improved.

 

No such luck, one of the artic trucks derailed coming out of the tunnel and put the following two cars in the dirt and right off the bridge!!!

 

The 'coupling arrangement' on the  artic trucks leaves a lot to be desired and I've already modified one to improve this. It looks like I'll have to do the rest of them too.

 

The accusing fingers in the pics are those of my fellow Smalltown-USA conspirator, Harvey Whitemore. He didn't want me to forget our first disaster of the Second Coming.....

 

 

 

[Adrian Wintle]

Those are the ConCor 4-car sets, aren't they? At one time there was a modification set (by N-scale of Nevada, I think) that included a new method of connecting the spines + weights sized to go in the hollows in the spine frame. I found a couple of these sets a few years ago with a view to modifying the ConCor spines I have. Ultimately I intend to extend mine to prototypical 5-unit cars. Why ConCor made 4-unit cars has always been a mystery.

 

Adrian

[Mr_Tilt]

Yes, I think you're right Adrian, they are ConCor sets. Maybe the 4 car sets fitted the boxes, it's been known before?

 

On the one I modified I cut off the little plastic conical nub that's meant to restrain the end of the car, drilled out the artic truck chassis where the nub used to be, and superglued in a length of fuse wire, 10 A wire I think. Then I drilled out the hole in the car end to suit the fuse wire before cutting off the wire so it was just long enough to go right through the hole. That way the car is located a bit more firmly and both it and the trailer don't roll as if they're drunk!

 

I'll report back next week, if I get enough time to mod all the trucks that is.

 

The Kaydee 89 ft TOFC car is apparently notorious for not curving properly, and there's an article in a old MR magazine about how to convert them to a body mounted coupler configuration. I've tried that on mine already and I'll continue the mod when I've found a drill that's harder than the Kaydee chassis!