 I'd like to welcome you to my freelance version of the Great Northern Railway. I actually call mine the Great Northern Railroad, just to dissayers the fact that this is a freelance version of the Great Northern Railway. I modeled the area from Spokane, Washington down to Northern California, which of course was the old S-P&S route, and I believe the S-P&S was a subsidiary of the Great Northern. I don't actually use the same names of the towns, well I have a couple that are named the same, but most of them are changed just to protect the people that are living there, because I don't actually do it the way that town looks. I've been building this layout now since about the early 80s, and it's in a large train room that's 21 foot wide by 35 foot long, so I have a fairly extensive layout. I like to operate it with maybe five, six or seven operators, and it brings the layout to life. Construction was done in the old tried and true methods that I'd read about for years while I was serving in the Navy. I used the older construction method, topped with joist, holding up three-quarter inch sub-roadbed. I used three-quarter inch plywood in lieu of half inch because when I went to the lumber yard, all the half inch plywood was so badly warped that I could never work with it. It's turned out to be a very good idea to use the three-quarter inch, because I have a very solid roadbed that does not give me any trouble over all these many years. I used Code 100 flex track for my track, and I also had Pico turnouts and Sinohara turnouts. I like the Pico's best, they are very smooth and easy to operate, and even though I started building the layout in the old days when we had block control and electrically controlled turnouts, as years went by, I got to the point where I was using hand operated turnouts and walk around DC type controls. Eventually I switched over to command control, and I originally started with digit tracks and now I've switched over to north coast engineering. DCC makes operating the layout much more fun. I like to have six or seven operators up here to operate the layout. It really brings it to life. Construction of the mountains and the hills were done with the tried and true cardboard strips stapled and glued together covered by plaster impregnated cloth. I used mostly hydro-caled plaster. In fact, I can remember bringing at least three 50-pound bags of plaster up here. So the room was named wait over the years. I then recovered with a brown latex paint, the same paint that I used on the fascia. I found by using the same paint on the fascia and on the land, I don't run into that problem with color of the land and the color of the fascia contrasting into it. Also, by using a flat earth type color on the fascia, it doesn't detract from the layout. One of the things that I've enjoyed doing is working on my quarry, and I've got quite a few compliments on it, so I'd like to take a look at the quarry here. I have two branch lines on the layout. One is the Fergus Falls branch. It's a great northern branch line, and it surfaces the Fergus Falls coal tipple and the granite quarry at Klamath. The quarry at Klamath was built with styrofoam, and has turned out to be one of my favorite locations. It makes for a very interesting place to send in flat cars and gondolas to pick up the granite blocks that are then transported down to Rockport. Rockport then ships them out by barge, so we have a good interaction going on here. The quarry was built quite a few years ago, and it's made with styrofoam, not the white styrofoam, but the closed cell or dense gray or pink styrofoam. This just happened to be gray, which worked out better for me. I carved the blocks using a jigsaw, and actually carved grooves into the blocks with using the back edge of the jigsaw blade. I then painted the blocks with a granite-type textured paint I'll show you a bottle of that a little bit later. We tried to make the quarry look like it's well worn at the very top, but new blocks coming out from down below, much as most quarries would. The quarry is quite deep, and because it's up on a high location on the layout, you can't really see all the way to the bottom from the normal perspective. To let people look into the quarry, I mounted a mirror up on the ceiling so people could then stand back and look down into the quarry. We'll have to take a look at that mirror at a later time here. This is an aerial view looking directly down into the quarry. As you can see, we have green, slimy water. We have to keep pumping that out, otherwise you would flood the entire quarry. The Fergus Falls branch line is normally operated with a great northern consolidation and a kombus. Kombus is a kick-bashed car. It's a combine and a kabus made by a good friend of mine. As we look at the quarry area, we can kind of see the front of the planet-ground quarry building, which was also built by another very good friend. We get another view of the quarry itself with the stiff-legged derrick. A stiff-legged derrick is hoisting blocks out of the quarry itself. After the stiff-legged derrick brings the blocks up out of the quarry, it transfers the load over to gondolas or flat cars. And if the gondolas and flat cars are not available at the time, then they're transferred to the overhead gantry crane and stored in the block yard until such time as the cars are available. We're looking at the underside of the quarry. As you can see, it's made up of layers of styrofoam blocks with a styrofoam base underneath. The layout of the quarry was built off the layout and then inserted through a large hole in the layout itself. As I said earlier, the quarry was built with styrofoam. This is a sample of the pink version, one inch thick. I happen to use gray, but you can find either one at the local lumberyard or hardware store. It's a closed cell type. It doesn't break into little beads like that white styrofoam. So make sure you use this closed cell styrofoam. I cut the styrofoam using a handheld jigsaw, but I took the jigsaw and I monitored it upside down in a vice and locked the trigger on. I was able then to cut blocks with the jigsaw, much like the size here. As you can see, this is the gray underside of this particular block. Once I cut the blocks to the shape I wanted, then I wanted to make drill marks in the sides of the blocks to look like they had drilled in the quarry to break the blocks apart. What I did then was take the blocks, put them on the jigsaw base, and bring them up to the backside of the saw blade, not the side of the teeth. That's what I used to cut the blocks, but the backside of the saw blade made these grooves. It was just random, bringing it in, working on all four sides, or three sides, as the case may be. Parts of the styrofoam broke out as I was working with it, which is good. Gave a nail regular shape on the top of the block. So basically what we have here is a piece of styrofoam, very lightweight, and looks like a pretty good block. Now, the secret to making it look like a piece of granite was this granite stone paint that I purchased at Michaels some years ago. I'm not sure if it's still on the market, I hope it is, because I've got a few more things I'd like to do with it. It comes in a variety of different colors. This particular one I've added some black to it, and it gave me a black granite surface. But I use it for making my asphalt roads. It has a bit of texture to it and looks very nice. It doesn't reflect light back shining. So you can add acrylic paints to the granite stone and get any color that you want. Granite stone comes in this size and also much larger bottles. My latest project is to construct the Keystone Sawmill Kit. It is a very nice kit. I think it's out of production now, but it is fully detailed with all the machinery inside. And that's this winter's project. Well, this is Jim Ferguson thanking you for visiting my layout. I hope that you've enjoyed the tour. We will have a few other pictures and videos available for you. So come back again sometime. Thank you.