The Madisonville Sub: August 2022

Entrance to Lower Level Staging

There are only two ways to effectively disguise the entrance to a staging yard; a tunnel portal or a view block like a building or a cut. Anything else, in my mind is a compromise. Unfortunately, neither will work on the lower level of the Madisonville Sub. A tunnel is geographically inappropriate and there isn't room in the foreground for a view block.

So, the compromise. At this point, it should be noted that I am not entirely satisfied with the results, but unless somebody else has a better idea, it's the best I could come up with.

There is about 6" of clearance between the backdrop and the garage door so I decided to use that space to add some depth and extend the scenery through the backdrop and use two photo background building fronts as view blocks.

One of the buildings, needed a partial side wall due to the viewing angle. I took a picture of the front, matched the scale, adjusted the color, and printed the resulting image on matte photo paper.

Then the photo was trimmed, glued to a piece of styrene with spray adhesive and glued to the back of the original building front.

Another building flat was used on the left hand side and a cut down Rix overpass was used to disguise the top of the opening. The bridge is about a 1/2 wide on the left side and about 2" wide on the right. That's the southbound EVCH-1 passing through the backdrop and arriving at Memphis Jct.

The pass through was finished off with another photograph. This time, a photo was taken of the existing Trackside Scenery backdrop behind Preston Miller yard. The resulting photo was spray glued to a piece of cardboard and stapled in place.

And here is what it looks like from the back side.

Here's a current view of the area just north of Memphis Jct. There's still a lot to be done to include figuring out what to do with the relatively large area between the fascia and the tracks on the left.

The Pig Ramp

There isn't a lot of TOFC traffic on the Madisonville Sub but there is some. During the 1970's TOFC ramps were pretty common on most railroads so I thought one would be appropriate adjacent to the yard at Preston Miller. The only thing I needed was a little more real estate to park a few trailers. I found the space by pulling out the fascia about 6 inches.

The new real estate was filled in with pink foam and the cracks were filled with Polyseamseal. Now there is plenty of room for trailers.

Memphis Jct. - More details

Adding detail is an ongoing process. New to the scene are the cabs, bus, flagpole, VW convertible and some freight on the far end of the platform.

As always, your comments, suggestions and questions are welcome

sdepolo@outlook.com

Mockups

Mock-ups are useful tools when developing a scene. Some modelers use cardboard, foam core or some other inexpensive material to build them. My local hobby shop has 12" square styrenepieces left over from a sign making company for $1 a piece. I built the mock-up shown below to represent Berry Global in Bowling Green. Berry Global makes plastic packaging and receives plastic pellets in covered hoppers. The Berry Global mock-up will serve as a stand in until the actual model is built by my friend Kurt Boyd.

Kurt's a busy guy who is also building a HO-Scale layout so it may be some time before he gets around to building the actual model. In the meantime, I decided to make the mock-up a little more presentable. Years ago, I used photographs to build both a HO and N-Scale model of Greenbaum's Home Furnishings here in Woodinville. Out of expediency, I used the same photos, slightly altered with Photoshop, for Berry Global.

The original photograph.

Photograph modified with Photo Shop

The original N-Scale Model

For those of you who are interested in this tecknique, I can email you a PDF for the Power Point presentation I did for the 4th Division of the NMRA or you can find it on YouTube by searching "Madisonville Sub" and scrolling down to "Building Model Railroad Structures with Photographs".

My New Helper

My ten year old grandson, Adam, has been running trains on my layouts since he was about five. Over the summer, when he's not storming up some hill on his dirt bike or doing some other outside activity, he's built a couple of models entirely on his own.

First, he painted and assembled this little office for Southern Recycling. I made the sign and Woodland Scenics provided the vehicle.

Then he found this Accurail kit on the shelf and asked if he could build it without my help. Here is the end result. He built the kit per the insturctions, added some metal wheel sets, and installed Kadee scale couplers. I did help him change the number since there was already a factory lettered car on the layout. Next, he wants to weather it so I will probably have to give him and hand with that.

Adam also got his first "real" locomotive. He used $40 of his own money and $100 loan from grandpa to acquire this Union Pacific GP-50. It's an Athearn RTR model with added details and a Tsunami2 sound system. All I did was add a TCS keep alive and programing to bring it up to Madisonville Sub standards. It looks and runs great!

Recent additions to the roster

ICG GP-38-2 is a Athearn Genesis model with factory equipped Tsunami2 sound. This model showed up on ebay and seller accepted an offer of $190.00. ICG pools power with the MBG&C between Paducah and Preston Miller.

While I have had these Athearn RTR models for some time, they are next up for a motor upgrade and the addition of Tsunami2 and a current keeper. I suspect they will spend a lot of time shuffling coal hoppers around at Palmer and Coalmont.