Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railroad along the Missouri River by Cathead - 1/87 (HO) scale - model railroad with steamboat

[Cathead]

No further modeling progress has been made due to an overload of family visits, work deadlines, the onset of spring garden/orchard season, and more. So here's a little more background context to keep you all interested.

 

Below is a rough track plan that will continue to evolve but is guiding my work. I've spent two years researching and adjusting this and it's pretty close to my final "ideal" design. The arrangements at Rocheport and McBaine are quite accurate representations of those settings with some necessary tweaks and compression. The depiction of Franklin Jct and New Franklin follow the general pattern of the railroad there but the literal track arrangements have been adjusted more heavily to match the requirements of space and operational interest. The  bridge over the Missouri River at Boonville is nearly 8 feet long, but is only about a third the length of the real thing. I plan to go through all of these scenes in more detail to discuss how I designed the track plan for each and how they match up with reality but this at least gives a loose sense of the plan. This also shows the modular design I'm following.

 

Below the track plan is a rough map of the real railroad's route through the modeled area, laid over a lidar elevation map of the terrain. This helps illustrate how the Missouri River valley dominates the setting, flowing through a valley over 2 miles wide at Boonville and lined on either side with tall bluffs rising 200' above the floodplain. The railroad's main line comes up across southwest Missouri from Oklahoma and Texas, through the city of Sedalia (off-layout), then crosses the Missouri River at Boonville. At Franklin Junction, the railroad splits, with the original main line continuing north toward connections with Chicago, while the newly built (mid-1890s) Missouri River extension headed east along the river valley to connect with St. Louis. You can see how the line hugs the northern side of the valley, pinched between the bluffs and the meandering river.

 

And here's a full MK&T route map from the same era, originally from the Katy Railroad Historical Society. I've highlighted the modeled area in red:

 

 

The layout's basic design is intended to provide two different but equally important (to me) operating goals: a connected loop allowing for continuous "railfan" running, but also a point-to-point design that lets trains be operated in a realistic manner from one staging yard, through the modeled portion, and back into staging again. For example, in the design above, trains leaving the staging yard to the right are heading north from Sedalia, while trains leaving to the left are heading west (railroad south) from St. Louis. When they re-enter the staging yard after transiting the modeled layout, they can simply be re-staged as a new train later in the operating sequence. Franklin yard is where freights are broken down and remade for various destinations down the line in all three directions, though I'm not really modeling the northern branch toward Chicago because I don't have space. Local freights also originate here to work the route through Rocheport and McBaine. The Katy ran three passenger trains a day each way on this line during this era, along with regular freights and livestock trains.

 

That will make sense to the model railroaders reading this; if it doesn't to others, please say so and I can explain in more detail. Or ask any other questions; it'll still be a while before I can get back to real modeling work so this is as good a time as any to engage in the intellectual side of this project.

[Canute]

Looks like a fun layout for operations, Eric.

[Keith Black]

 The historical aspect of this project is fascinating, Eric. Thank you for taking the time to be our guide into the past. 

[Cathead]

Here's another way of looking at layout design. There's a tension between pure operational interest (lots of active switching and industries) and pure scenic interest (lots of pretty places to run trains through). This region has both, but I don't have the space to do all the possibilities justice. So there were a number of different ways to organize the layout plan depending on what my priorities were.

 

Here's a schematic view of the area in question. Every town sits in a small valley where some tributary to the Missouri River cuts through the bluffs, and these towns are separated by long stretches of scenic riverfront running with tall bluffs immediately behind the tracks. At the west end, the line makes a literal 90º turn to join the north-south mainline (great for a model railroader, we never get corners that neat!). At both ends of the north-south mainline, the line climbs through the bluffs to reach the high ground beyond. At McBaine, a ~9 mile branch climbed through the river hills to the larger town of Columbia.

 

 

A pure operations layout could focus almost solely on a big version of Franklin Yard, where the railroad's two main lines met and where lots of switching happened along with a busy engine terminal and passenger depot. The next-best operational locations are Boonville (which had a lot of industries for a fairly small town) and the branch to Columbia from McBaine (Columbia had more industry than anything in the river valley beyond Boonville).

 

A pure scenic-running layout would ignore these settings to focus on the Missouri River bridge, lots of river- and bluff-front running, and the Rocheport tunnel area. This would let the builder do the dramatic scenery justice with long stretches of track gently curving along the river, really bringing the scale and beauty of the setting into focus.

 

My track plan is a compromise, because I want both. I think a pure scenic-running layout would be fun to build but eventually become boring because there's not much to do long-term once you've railfanned a few times. To me, realistic operations are one of the key attractions of model railroading (in contrast to, say, static ship modeling), and I was determined to allow for this. But as a geologist and naturalist, it was unacceptable to leave out the scenic setting; at that point why not just design a free-lanced operations layout rather than a version of the Katy that stripped out all the best parts?

 

So through a long iterative process, I developed a way to include:

• a Franklin yard that was big enough to allow some basic operational switching while still being small enough to not dominate the room
• a Missouri River bridge that was big enough to convey the massive original span while still being small enough to fit
• three more mainline towns with minor switching, enough to allow diverse operations
• barely sufficient scenic runs along bluffs and the tunnel

Reluctantly leaving out:

• Boonville and its many industries (if I were more purely operations oriented I could swap the big bridge for this town)
• longer runs along the river (again, I could swap Rocheport or McBaine for a nice long river/bluff run)
• meaningful operations along the northern line from Franklin Jct and the Columbia branch. In both cases, I'm allowing for cars to be switched into blocks as if they were headed for those destinations, and that has to be enough.

What this lets me achieve (hopefully) is operating sessions that can host 3-4 operators, allowing for the fun social time that is such a key part of model railroading, with a diversity of jobs from through passenger trains to yard switching to local freights. While still giving fair play to the scenic setting and something of the geographic scope of this line. And including this many towns balances the operator jobs, so a local freight has enough to do to be worthwhile as an assignment, and through trains feel like they're passing through many different locations rather than just one stretch of the line.

 

If I had just a bit more room the first thing I'd change is to add Boonville, it's such a fascinating town, but it just doesn't make the cut. Leaving it out also simplifies operations because I don't have locals going both directions from Franklin yard.

 

Anyway, that's another brain dump but maybe it helps you see more of how and why I've been thinking through this project. 

 

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 02:26 PM by Cathead

[Paul Le Wol]

Eric,this is very interesting. In the track plan above, there is a duckunder that leads to the staging area. Do you need to access that area for operation or is the switching automated / controlled from a central location?

[Cathead]

Paul, great question. This layout will run up to three passenger trains and four freights each way during a single "day" operating session. If the staging was fully automated I'd need 14 separate staging tracks and at least that many locomotives, an expensive proposition in both space and purchases.

 

Instead, this is designed as a "fiddle" yard, meaning that one operator is tasked with actively remaking trains by hand as they depart and arrive. This lets me reuse fewer locomotives and cars far more efficiently and creates an interesting job. So that duckunder is how the staging operator (essentially a dispatcher) accesses that area. It's hidden behind the backdrop and big enough to allow a standard desk chair. The out of sight setting helps create the illusion of distance, that trains are entering the main layout from locations far away.

 

This lets me get away with five staging tracks instead of fourteen, which would be impossible in the space I have.

[Paul Le Wol]

Thank you for the explanation Eric. 👍

[Canute]

Eric, excellent job balancing the operations versus railfanning of your railroad. I'd come and operate there.

[Cathead]

Hopefully in a few years you can!

[pennytimeline]

You're doing a stellar job!  Can't wait to see more!