 I didn't hear you come in. Horace told me you'd be stopping by and want to see a train run. So I figured we'd run the reefer Express train 100. Call it the polar bear. Anyway, train 100 here is sitting in Salem staging, Salem's a temporary staging yard. It got moved to this location in January. Before that it was over on the other side of the aisle. When we put the next mile of main line in it had to move. When we moved it we added a track too. It used to be five tracks and that wasn't enough but six tracks seems to be a lot better. The reefer express is headed for Bear Creek and that's just the beginnings of Bear Creek there. Eventually Bear Creek is going to come down here and take over all this space. Bear Creek is going to be a big honkin yard. The reefer express is entering Bear Creek right now. Bear Creek is still very early in construction. There's a lot more track that's going to go in here. The reefer express is going to take the main line, go past the diner which is waiting for the passenger express train 14 to pick it up. All this area in here is going to become a sea of track. I have an empty car yard here, drill track, clean out track. Over here we're going to have some industries. The reefers are headed for the east end of the yard. Our engines are going through Winston Junction. Winston Junction is where the Siske branch line ties into the main. Sometimes I call this area of the layup plywood hinge. Once the backdrop goes in you won't be able to see the sky in the background or the buildings that are over in Mill Bend. The backdrop will be just beyond where the reefers are going. So this curve will have a creek on the inside of it. The track in the foreground is the Siske branch line. This part of the layout is the newest construction. It went into service in January. The main line here is crossing over the Siske branch line. The Siske line drops down and go into the staging area that's up here and it's underneath the main line. The main line winds its way up the hill and it'll come out an oak hill. The scenery here, I'm going to have a hill up here. The reason that hill is coming up here is I got the yard throat for the Siske staging area underneath and I wanted to be able to get at these turnouts. So I figured if I put a hill up here then there's more room underneath to see what the turnouts are doing. Well we're coming up on the part of the layout that's got scenery. This scenery went in several years ago and it's been there waiting for me to do more but I kind of got distracted with building more layout. There's an awful lot of construction that went into this peninsula. This area is Upper Bear Creek. The grade here is about oh 2.2 percent I think coming up, coming up the hill. We're about to cross the Upper Bear Creek bridge here which is a scenic highlight on the layout. Now the reefer express is the hottest train on the railroad when we're running an op session so everything else is supposed to get out of its way. So after crossing this bridge the train's going to be pulling into oak hill. That's the gravel quarry there. Someday I've actually got to put a crusher in that quarry but for now just some piles of gravel are standing in. The oak hill turn switches the industries up here which is a little tricky because it's not supposed to use the main line when they're doing run-arounds instead there's a y-track. The oak hill turn has to use the y-track for doing run-around moves which makes switching a little more difficult. We're passing the log loading area. The logs here get picked up and taken down the mill band where they're given to the sawmill there and we're just about just about out of oak hill now. We're heading into the 2.8 percent downgrade leading to mill band. Reefer express is in Roberts Creek now. You look at the trains in Roberts Creek through a series of dewport. No scenery to speak of here is just roughed in but someday this ought to look really nice. Although I've been having second thoughts about these landforms here these just seem maybe too aggressive for me so I think I'm probably going to tear those out and put in a different set of cliffs that aren't quite so steep. There's quite a view here of the train coming down through these S curves. After coming through tunnel 2 the train heads out on the last canyon bridge. Eventually there'll be a micro-engineering deck girder bridge here. Tunnel 3 is one of the first places where I did major rock carving. They came out fairly well I thought. After coming through tunnel 3 the train crosses Canyon Creek another area where the scenery isn't quite finished and heads for Baines Valley. There's a nice wood trestle across Baines Valley. After crossing the Baines Valley bridge the polar bear heads for Deschutes Junction. Deschutes Junction is where the Deschutes branch joins with the main. Just beyond Deschutes Junction is the town of Mill Bend. Looks like Gaston and Mannets are playing checkers again. Those guys are always at some place on the layout. The polar bear crosses 6th Street and enters Mill Bend. Goes past the warehouse and past the cold storage just beyond the warehouse. As soon as we cross Highway 97 here we're going to be entering South Jackson. South Jackson and Mill Bend are sort of like oh well right next to each other. We're bringing the reefer express into South Jackson yard on the main track. South Jackson is the only real operating yard on the layout but when Bear Creek is finished South Jackson will become a secondary yard. They'll serve the junction traffic at Deschutes Junction. All the traffic coming up down the Chutes branch will get merged onto the main line here. This is the second version of this yard. The first version I built out of a bunch of stuff from my scrap box left overs from my previous layout and it was at the wrong elevation for here. It went the wrong way coming off here but it let me get operating right away. So when I built the helix and put the peninsula in the old South Jackson had to go and so this new one showed up here. Well our reefer express is almost a tow junction. This is tow junction here. Tow junction is spelled T-O-H which stands for top of helix. There's two tracks that come up the helix and three ways to get out of it and the junction connects them all so we can go any which way we want to. Looks like there's going to be a meet on the helix. The helix is two laps of double track. The inner track is 40 inches and the outer track is 43 inches. We always run the uphill trains on the outer track because the grade there is gentler. The inner track gets the downhill trains because the grade is steeper. Up hill grade is about oh 1.4 and a half percent and the outer grade is 1.4 percent and the inner grade is about 1.6 percent. All of this is going to be hidden underneath scenery so you're not going to be able to see these ugly tortoises sticking up here. It's going to be a hill here. The hill will be a view block to hide the access hole. They'll be in the middle of the helix. It'll be a creek that runs out and around and comes back over here. After negotiating both laps on the helix, our train comes out at the bottom onto the staging lead. There's two tracks here. One splits over to the B side which is for the trains who are going to be going up the hill. The other one that we're on is going to the A side staging which is the entry side of staging. We're going to pull into track two on the A side staging. The longest track in the A side can hold a train that's about 60 cars long but most of the tracks aren't that long. The A side staging has got nine tracks to it. Over on the other side of the peninsula is the B side staging. That has ten tracks in it. Trains always go through staging this way on the A side and that way on the B side. That lets us fleet trains up and down the helix for efficiency. Well we're just about ready to tie up here and I think we're done. The train's in Pocatello and well thank you for coming. Hope you enjoyed the trip.