FriedClams

Keith, thanks and you're welcome!
 
Rik, I think I might draw up a conceptual diagram of the operating session described above, to help people see in map view how things got moved around. Hopefully o over the weekend. It definitely is a very new way of thinking if you're not in this world and I want to at least convey the intellectual challenge and stimulation it creates.

Extremely fine work, Paul.  Your model is progressing nicely with each new step so thoughtfully executed. 
 
Gary

Eric,
 
Not being a model railway enthusiast this is all new to me but nonetheless fascinating and a bit complex. I'll re-read these posts to let it properly sink in. 
 
The diagrams and pink cards add a whole new dimension to it all. 
 
The last pic of the train passing through the bridge is quite picturesque.
 
A very interesting build log....keep it coming 😉
 
Richard
 
 

That's pretty dang slick, Eric. Thank you for taking the time to explain the operations side of model railroading. 

OK, let's get to work. Our locomotive is going to start by sorting all the inbound cars into the right order for shoving into this siding. In some cases this pre-sorting might have been done in the yard to make the road crew's life easier, but that didn't seem to happen today, so they're all jumbled up (more busy work in the real world, more fun work for us). Below, we're using the near end of the siding as an extra place to stash a car while we sort things out. 

Keeping an eye on our MK&T timetable, we know we have to clear the main line for an express passenger train soon. So everything gets shoved out of the way while this passes through. One change I made from the real Rocheport is to designate the track nearest the depot as the passing siding, and have the main line be the track away from the depot (on the real thing the main line was in front of the depot). The actual reason for this is complicated and has to do with how best to arrange turnouts in this condensed scene, but there is real-world precedent for having a depot on a passing track. In my case, I can argue it makes sense because only slower locals stop at Rocheport so this lets faster expresses barrel right through on the outside track.

Once all the inbound cars were sorted, we pulled all the outbound cars and started spotting inbound cars. Here the locomotive is shoving two empty stock cars toward the stockyards. Cars 74 and 49 in the foreground are going to a different town than Rocheport, so will just be left out of the way with the caboose until we're done.

And another angle on that move, shoving the stock cars into the siding. 

And the final placement.

With those cars shoved into the far end of the siding, we can place the other three cars at the western end. Here the locomotive is shoving in a boxcar of small freight for the depot, an empty boxcar for the grain elevator, and a flatcar with a new wagon for one of the local implement dealers. You may recall from an earlier post that all the businesses listed on my waybills are real ones found in the railroad's business directory, adding to the sense of realism.

With all the inbound cars spotted, it's time to reassemble our train. Five outbound cars and two more to take to another town before returning west to Franklin. Let's grab that caboose and those two cars and stick them back on the end of our newly pulled five cars.

Tacking the caboose and two final cars onto the rest.

Our train is reassembled, but we can't leave yet, as there's a local passenger train due. We were smart enough to reassemble our train on the main this time, so the local can pull into the passing siding in front of the depot.

Another view of this meet, with the short local at the depot and the longer freight ready to depart eastbound.

Our freight heads east along the river bluffs...

and our passenger local heads west toward Franklin.

And that's what a simple one-town operating session looks like. The intellectual puzzle of sorting and spotting cars is quite fun, and it can be kept fresh time after time by simply altering the waybills for each card. Maybe next time there's a boxcar of apples to ship out instead of a wagon-loaded flatcar arriving. Maybe there aren't any livestock shipments. Maybe a boxcar has to stay at the elevator, meaning we have to move it out of the way, do our work, then put it back. So many iterations even in a small town. 
 
As the layout expands, operations get even more complex. As towns are added, trains have more places to actually go, and more work to do in those places. It gets more practical to run passenger and freight trains through, actually going places instead of just moving back and forth on a glorified diorama. Add in the larger yard at Franklin and suddenly you have a whole separate job dealing with all the long-distance freights as they stop to drop off and pick up local-destination cars. And so on.
 
Long-term the full layout I have planned will keep 4-6 people happily busy for several hours. As it is, Mrs. Cathead and I (or any other friend) can run a fun little operating session in half an hour or so, a quick break from life to travel back in time to 1900, when steam whistles still echoed off the bluffs here.
 
I hope you followed along on all that, and that it gave you a sense of what makes model railroading distinct from many other hobbies. Feel free to ask further questions, whether you're a model railroader with specific curiosity about something esoteric, or someone who wonders something more general about all this.
 
Thanks so much for reading! There's still a lot of scenery and building to do, but this project is now at the actively fun stage.
 
 

OK, so things have progressed enough that over the last month or so I've run a few test operating sessions in Rocheport. I put a lot of thought into designing the track plan and the operating scheme for this layout, and the early results are that it's paid off as things are really working as I want them to. I could go really deep into the weeds of all sorts of planning details but that's not of primary interest to most of you right now. What I'm going to do here is an illustrated walk-through of a single local freight coming into Rocheport, doing all the switching necessary, and then heading on. This is the basic concept of an operating session, bringing an actual train into town and doing real railroad work in a way that's reasonably similar to how a real railroad would do it. I can't post video so you'll have to make do with the images below, which I took in sequence while Mrs. Cathead and I ran this session together. You'll have to imagine the sound-equipped locomotives as they huff and puff and whistle their way through the work. Also, keep in mind that scenery is nowhere near done and I have a lot of buildings left to complete, so town looks rather emptier than it should.
 
Leading off, an eastbound seven-car local freight arrives through through the tunnel from the yard at Franklin, where its cars were previously dropped off by through freights that don't bother stopping at dinky little towns like Rocheport:

Already in town are five cars waiting to be picked up: an empty gondola that had delivered coal to a local dealer, a boxcar loaded with grain from the elevator, a boxcar  behind the depot that both dropped off and picked up small shipments (the UPS truck of the 1900s), and two stock cars loaded with livestock from local farms and ready to be sent to processors in St. Louis:

Our locomotive starts to break down its train and sort cars for delivery. It's easy to just pick up all the outbound cars and take them back to the yard, but how do we know where each inbound car goes? 

The answer in this scheme is the car card and waybill system, very common in model railroading. What's presented here is a rough version I mocked up for testing purposes; I'll make better ones later when I'm satisfied.

The pink slips are car cards, each of which represents a physical car on the layout. The waybills are little printed slips of paper that slide into a pocket on the car card, with information on where the car originated, what it's carrying, and where it needs to go. Back in Franklin, the yard engine would have switched all these cars onto the same track based on their final destination printed on these cards, and here in Rocheport, other printed lines tell us which cars are destined for Rocheport (vs other towns down the line) and which exact destination they go to.
 
I also drew up a railroad schematic for Rocheport, which shows operators where each track is, what its official name/number is, where different car destinations are, and other relevant geographic features. Using the waybills and this map, you can figure out where any car is or where it needs to go. The numbers in the corners are the actual railroad mileposts. If you go back a few photos, you'll see this hanging on the fascia where it's easy for operators to consult.

There's a little shelf hung from the fascia right in the center of town, where operators can sort and read the car cards and waybills as they do their work. This "desk" is a key featuring in making operations functional. Here you can see how it's laid out. Right now each track just has a cheap label, in front of which the car cards are stacked based on which track the cars are on. Soon those will be converted into little sorting boxes that will better hold the cards separate.

With that explanation out of the way, we'll follow our freight as it switches this surprisingly complex little town. But I'll do that in the next post.
 
 

OK, this is going to be a long post (or maybe series of posts). It's finally time to talk about what makes this project something other than just a big scenic diorama: active railroad operations. The trick here is to make this interest for the model railroad folks, and intelligible to the non-railroad folks, without boring or overwhelming either population. Here goes.
 
A core idea in model railroading is not just that you're creating a realistic static scene or model, but in addition, setting up a stage on which actual railroad operations can be conducted. In other words, you're not just recreating a look or an object, but recreating a full set of actions and operations that bring the feel of railroading back to life. There are decades of writing, theory, discussion, practice, debate, and experience in this realm and I'm not going to conduct a seminar here. But I do want to try and express how this idea and goal plays out in the design and implementation of this Rocheport module, and by extent to the rest of the planned layout if it expands.
 
First, a reminder that Rocheport was a real place along the 1900-era MK&T. I'm reposting this image from earlier in the log, showing the route of the mainline. Coming from the west, it passes through the line's only tunnel, crosses the Moniteau Creek bridge, runs through town, encounters the depot and grain elevator toward the east end of town, then curves out of town to the east along some major bluffs hard up against the big river. What we're doing is recreating a version of how the MK&T might have operated its trains through and in this town. A reminder that the railroad's primary yard in this region was 10 miles west at Franklin, and a series of smaller towns with minor industries/customers stretched east from here along the river.

And here's a contemporary view from the east side of town, showing the dual-track passing siding in front of the depot, and the single spur track behind the depot that serves all the town's possible freight customers, from the grain elevator to the depot itself to the stockyards to any other customer that might want a carload of something delivered or picked up (such as an apple shipper).

MK&T traffic through town in this era would have consisted of (1) three passengers trains each way (some stopping, others expresses that didn't stop), (2) a certain number of through freights between St. Louis and points west and south (these also wouldn't have stopped), (3) livestock trains hauling local cattle and hogs to slaughterhouses in St. Louis, and (4) a local freight operating out of the yard in Franklin (10 miles west) whose job it is to switch small towns along the line like Rocheport. In a larger layout, I'd be focusing on recreating all this traffic when it really has somewhere to go (and the Franklin yard to interact with). Right now, with just Rocheport, the focus is on the single local freight arriving in town to pick up and drop off cars, then proceed on its way, while staying out of the way of any other passenger trains or through freights that might be scheduled to pass through while it's here.
 
Yeah, that's long enough, this is going to be multiple posts. This one sets the stage, and in the next one I'll try and show what actually operating the town looks like.

Apologies for ghosting this log. Summer has continued to push us hard, with relatively little persona time. I do have two updates to write up, the shorter of which I'll do here, the longer of which I'll need more time for.
 
I've moved forward with a bit more scenery work, mostly laying down base layers in the eastern part of town. Here's the current status:
 

This is trying to replicate the pattern clearly seen in historic photos, of the depot area having a much lighter layer of ground cover (some form of sand/gravel) than the rest of the area. The foreground area will become a rough farm field; much of the area south of the tracks was functionally in the river's floodplain and had small farm plots on it. You can also see that I've filled in the road east of the depot and added a rough version of the stock pens along the spur behind the depot. Here's a photo of this area in the early 1900s.

 
A couple closeups: here are some of the grade crossings, laser-cut wood castings that I weathered.
 

And here's the stockyard part of the spur.
 

Both the road and the spur's ballast are finished with sand from my local stream, sifted to a grain size I want. The stockyard is a cheap plastic modular kit; down the road I'll want to rebuild this from scratch using wood, but I had this sitting around, and adapted it to fill the space for now. At some point I'll use an airbrush to do some weathering on it.
 
This all continues to look like Montana until I get more vegetation on it, but that's down the road yet. But at least I'm slowly moving forward with filling in the blank surfaces with something at least resembling scenery. Thanks for sticking with me on this! Look for a longer post at some point on my first test runs of an operating scheme for this town.
 
 
 
 
 

Most amazing build I have ever seen! Unbelievable quality, design and craftsmanship.

This was one of my favorite ships, and you are doing an excellent job on the model!

Catching up after being away for a few weeks. She looks first class, paul.
 
John

That's some super nice work, Paul. 👍

Hey Everyone, I hope all is good. Thanks to Everyone for the Comments and Likes. This update looks like more of the same only at the stern. I finished planking the forecastle deck. I managed to squeeze in 2 nibbed planks. The drawing shows 3 but because  I'm using 5/64" wide strips instead of 1/16" wide strips everything gets thrown off a bit.
 

 
 
 
 

 
The rough cut subdeck for the cabin deck was pinned to the hull and sanded back to within 1/16" of the bulwark planks using the small sanding block. The subdeck was then cut to accept the cabins and then glued in place. 
 

 
For the waterways a piece of 1/32" plywood was laid on top of the subdeck and the outboard edge of the subdeck was traced on to it. The outboard edge of the waterway was cut almost to the line and pinned on top of the subdeck. Then the inboard edge of the waterway was scribed on to the plywood using a compass stuck in a small block of wood that slid on the face of the bulwark planks. The inboard edge was cut and sanded back to the line and the waterway was pinned to the subdeck.
 

 
Once everything looked okay the waterway was glued to the subdeck and the outboard edge was sanded back to the subdeck using the same sanding block
 

 
The 1/32" x !/8" strip of wood that runs under the waterway was glued in place
 

 
 

 
The coaming is made of two layers of 1/16" x 1/8" strips of AYC that were pre bent on the same mold as the rest of the stern planking. A line was scribed on the waterway to mark the inboard edge of the first plank and pins were inserted along this line.
 

 
This plank was attached to the waterway with CA
 

 

 
The outer plank was glued to the inner plank using white PVA
 

 

 
After a bit of sanding the bulwark planks were painted
 

 

 
Thanks for stopping by. The cabins are up next.

Late arriving to this party. That is lovely work, Paul!

Your last photo shows the outer edge planks with "hooks" that the next plank fits into. But the drawing above it shows only one plank "hooked" where a separate "nibbing strake" fits into. The subsequent planks are nibbed into this nibbing strake. In some plans the nibbing strake is called a "margin plank."

Such lovely and clean work. It is a pleasure to watch.
 
Yves

Hi Steve, thank you for posting the photo of your beautiful Willapa. I hope to see more. I had noticed the metal attached to the corners in Phil’s photos but for some reason I thought that they were added when she became a museum ship. I appreciate the information about the hardwood corners. There may be a few things that I let slide but overall I will try to be accurate. ( something I am not known for 😀) . Thank you so much for your Comment, I appreciate it very much!

Paul, I have been following along with your build and you are doing a super great job. Not knowing the level of detail you plan I am reluctant to point out a detail as I don't want to sound like I am critizing  your build.  The bitts that you show in this lastest post had hardwood corners rabbited in. In some cases were capped as well. The post with all the Wapama photos shows the corners having hardwood inserts. Also looks like metal corners were added to protect bitts from chain damage. Here is a shot of what I did on the Willapa. Keep the great work coming.
Steve

A new post is alway a treat seeing more of your beautiful work, Paul.  

The small pad under the bit to slide under the deck is actually a clever idea 👍🏻

Beautiful craftsmanship, beautiful wood.  Very pleasing to the eye sir.

Hi Everyone, hope you are all doing fine. Thanks to all for the Comments and Likes! This update starts with the making of the waterways for the foc'sle deck. They were cut from a sheet of 1/16" AYC and sanded to shape.
 

 
 

 
The coamings are made by layering three  1/16" x 3/16" strips. The waterways were scribed to show where the center plank is located and pins were placed to support it while it was attached with CA.
 

 
The outer plank was glued to the center plank and the waterway with white PVA
 

 
 

 
 

 
The inner planks were glued to the center planks and the waterways also with PVA. The  thickness of the inner plank was tapered to 1/32" because the coaming gets narrower towards the aft end.
 

 
I made a sanding stick long enough to span the deck and sanded the tops smooth
 

 
The coaming across the aft edge of the deck was installed and after some sanding it went to the paint booth
 

 
The deck planking was laid out to where it stops at the pad for the anchor winch. The 18" x 18" bitt slides into the hole that was left in the bulkhead former
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
The planking from the winch pad aft and the forward planking didn't match in width so the next planks on either side of the pad needed a width adjustment.
 

 
 

 
The  smaller bitts port and starboard were the next obstacles. A small pad was glued to the bottom of these bitts to to help them sit vertically when they are glued to the horizontal bulkhead spacer just below the subdeck
 

 
The last planks go and get all fancy. They will be covered in the next update
 

 
 

 
Hope to see you then 

I agree with Keith.  Your work looks about as flawless as possible.

Tight and tidy, Paul. Closeups don't show a smidge of error. 

Hi Everyone, thank you very much for your Comments and Likes. This update starts with completing the hardwood facing on the guards. When built they were made from Iron Bark. The face plank  that wraps around the stern was shaped on the same mold as the previous planking. They are made from 1/16" x 1/8" AYC and painted with Vallejo Anthracite Grey 71.052 before attaching. The first plank was pinned to the stern, the wood was slid away from the guard, glued and slid back on the pins and clamped. This sat over night.
 

 
The ends are sanded to 45 degrees and the next plank locks in behind the previous plank..
 

 
 

 
Then I worked towards the bow.
 

 
 

 
 

 
The holes for the portlights were enlarged using a step drill bit that goes from 1/8" to 1/2" in 1/32" increments. It was turned in by hand.
 

 
Previously the holes for the hawse pipes were made but I forgot to take a picture before the were covered. Regular 20 pound printer paper was used to suggest metal plates around the hawse pipes. A piece of 1/4" brass tube cut at 60 degrees was used to get the oval shape. A piece of 5/16" x .029 thick wall brass tube will be soldered to the end of the 1/4" tube.
 

 
The deck planking was started under the overhang of the forecastle deck so that the beams could be installed. The 5/64" AYC planks were painted with Vallejo Model Color Old Wood 70.761 that was diluted about 50/50 with Vallejo air brush thinner. They were wiped right away with a cloth and allowed to dry. The next day a coat of WOP tinted with dark grey pigment was applied and wiped off immediately. The camera really picks up the black but it actually looks less crazy in real life.
 

 
 
 

 
The patterns for the knees were made from 1/32" plywood and once shaped 1/16" wood strips were glued to their backs and shaped. They needed a bit more thickness so 1/32" strips were glued to them and sanded to the proper thickness.
 

 
The beam was glued into place after being painted
 

 
The knees were then attached
 

 
The forecastle subdeck could now be installed using 1/32" plywood
 

 
And then the mast was test fitted
 

 
I think the main deck should be completed next. Hope to see you then,