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 Posted - April 05 2025 : 6:07:53 PM
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I have in the past alluded to my CUmberland Terminal neing a subsidiary of a much larger railroad, the Alleghany Railway.
Here are some teasers of what is to come......
Edited by - jward on April 05 2025 6:08:37 PM
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 Posted - April 05 2025 : 9:09:44 PM
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Very nice design.
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Posted - April 07 2025 : 11:56:07 AM
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quote:
Very nice design.
Originally posted by wks - April 05 2025 : 9:09:44 PM
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Thanks. There are probably 30 already painted this way, but they've been where I can't access them for many years. I hope to retrieve them soon and will opost photos of them when I do.
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Posted - April 07 2025 : 3:51:49 PM
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Now for the good stuff. The Alleghany Railway will be under construction as soon as I can get the space cleared out. The plan I have come up with is a combination of two 5x10 railroads I once built many years ago. They both featured 18" radius curves but the plans have been redrawn for 22" and 24" to give my 6 axle diesels and passenger cars room to run.
The first railroad was a mountain line my Dad and I built around 1975-1976 when i was about 12 years old. I had alot of fun running trains on that layout in spite of the 6% grade on the back track. It was a single track main with 3 passing sidings, and the centerpiece was a huge bridge that towered 10 inches above the yard. This layout survived a move but fell victim to an expansion of my dad's railroad. We worked out a trade wher I gave up this line for our old christmas railroad, an N scale 4x6. Unfortunately, running N scale in a damp Pennsylvania cellar is a bad idea, and I've regretted giving up the HO layout ever since. The benchwork we built remained in place and still exists under my dad's railroad right where we set it when we moved in 1977.
The other part is a classic Atlas plan, the Granite Gorge & Northern, which I built with my kids in the 1990s. Unfortunately, I had to move and had no room to take it with me.
At first I tried to incorporate my existing railroad into an expanded design, but came to realize that I couldn't do what I wanted and work around it as well. The Cumberland Terminal with go into storage, where it will reside until I decide what to do with it.
Starting with a clean sheet let me utilize the available space. I realized I could get a 5x10 into the room and had two plans I had built and really liked but couldn't decide which to build. So I decided to take my own advice to "think vertically" to the extreme and build both of them as a double deck layout. The old N&O from my childhood will serve as the bottom level, with its steep grades and towering mountains bringing me over halfway up to the top level. The GG&N on top will be a more open plan with much lower hills. Its double track line will be a great place for the grandkids to let the trains run. All that was missing was the connection between the two levels, which will be an oval helix coming off the end of the bridge on the lower level, and circling the outside perimeter to the upper level on a 4% grade.
Some modifications were made to the original plans. In addition to the wider curves than the original layouts had, I flipped to old N&O into a mirror image of the original, which worked much better. It also allowed me to arrange the layouts so that the yards on the two levels were on opposite sides of the layout. Basically, you'd run the bottom level from one side, and the top level from the other. And somehow in all of this I even managed to keep all grades to 4% or less.
Here is the lower level, the mirror image of the old Narrows & Osceola from the 1970s. The top of the grade is at Spruce Bridge, and you can see the stub of the connection to the upper level. The yard itself is at table height, with Spruce Bridge being 10" above that. For clarity I have broken this down into two regions, Valley and Mountain to unstack the railroad so others can better understand it. Valley is all elevations below 4", and Mountain is everything above that.
The Valley section, which includes the main yard at Wolf Creek.
The Mountain section, which includes the Spruce Bridge and the Bess Mine siding.
The GG&N section sits atop the bottom level, and the yard is 19" above the yard on the lower leve
Note the benchwork is identical between the two layers, allowing me to easily add support to the upper level, Plans are to build the simpler, upper level first to get the trains running for the kids. I can pop up through the benchwork to access whatever I need to during construction, and there will be less debris falling on the lower level if the nupper is completed first. Also, the track is being laid on TruScale wooden roadbed, and I do not yet have enough 22" radius curves to build the whole thing. As I acquire the missing roadbed, I will build the lower level, with priority given to connecting the two levels into a coherent railroad.
The light tan track is the connection to the lower level, and most of it will be underneath the GG&N trackage.
Edited by - jward on April 07 2025 3:53:44 PM
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Posted - April 08 2025 : 4:03:39 PM
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| Very cool! Looks like quite the ambitious design. Am I reading correctly that there is 19" of vertical space between the two layouts?
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Posted - April 09 2025 : 01:41:33 AM
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| Yes. 19" of vertical space between the two yards. Given the thickness of the bench work on the upper level that works out to about 15" between the lower yard and the bottom of the upper joists. I am make the inner joists thinner to compensate since they'll be well supported
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Posted - April 09 2025 : 10:07:34 PM
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| Sounds like a nifty layout. Can't wait to see how it turns out!
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