Southern Pacific Railroad in the Cascades (Part 2)

[Cody23Fields]

Well thats sad to hear its not a club. You did a really good job it for a home layout. I live in california and have never been to colorado. When i go out there your club shall be one of my stops. Thank you for responding, cody fields

[Cody23Fields]

I really would like to join your club. Where is it located?

[billr991]

Hi @Cody23Fields, I'm glad you like the video. Thanks. The layout is not a club layout, but is a private layout in the basement of our home. However, if you are ever in Colorado, send me an e-mail. Perhaps we could arrange a layout visit. Bill R

[FVMACHINES]

Its a work of art! Really beautiful layout!

[jefflynnalex]

I hate to criticize such a brilliant and beautiful layout but you have a snow shed directly above an open cut. The Shed is there presumably to deflect an avalanche from blocking the main but on your layout, the snow would be deposited directly onto the track below. So a RR architect would either dig a tunnel through the mountain at the spot below the shed or build another snow shed. Otherwise the way below would certainly be blocked by the same snow that the shed above deflected.

[billr991]

@jefflynnalex True enough. I wanted a longish siding on the lower level, so that meant two tracks. I thought about the problem just as you described it. A snow shed or tunnel on the lower level would be double tracked. There are no double track tunnels or snow sheds on the prototype, so I chose the lesser (to me anyway) of three evils.

A similar situation occurs on the prototype, but the two track levels have a much larger separation covered by a dense douglas fir forest.

[theteejmiester]

train needs to be longer,32 cars for three cabforwards seems a little less than awe inspiring, and where is the weathering? everything looks straight out of the box. but they are beautiful models never the less. and a nice layout.

[billr991]

@theteejmiester Well of course it should be longer. One hundred car freights require an unusual amount of space on a model railroad. If the layout was big enough, there would be 100 car freight trains. The weathering is gradually getting done. Not everything happens instantly when building a layout.

[paulreyn71]

allthough Sp did run triple headers it usually involved one up front one in the middle and one on the very end with only a caboose behind it

[billr991]

@paulreyn71 The last helper was sometimes cut in a few cars ahead of the caboose. And from time to time there were multiple cabooses on these trains. I presume this happened because more cabooses were needed for other trains on other parts of the system.

[k2kkoos]

Great layout, I guess you'll need hundreds, if not thousands of trees in total to get it as dense as you want, it's amazing how many go on a few square feet. Beautiful job!