The Lower Staging Yard
June 7,2023
After several months of only working on the upper level (Sn3) I got back to working on the Madisonville Sub. First up was cleaning up the dispatchers office and ballasting the staging yard. The white curtains cover the window and protect the room from the afternoon sun. I still need to paint and install the phone system.
I don"t normally ballast my staging yards but this one is very visible in the dispatchers office. Nothing fancy here, just basic paving sound from Home Depot. The small shack and tie stacks were added at the same time. The track in the foreground represents the L&N connection at Memphis Junction, TN. The four tracks in the rear represent IC at Madisonville, KY and the PC at Evansville, IN.
Siloan
June 8, 2023
Now that the line over the mountains to Chattanooga has been abandoned, the Madisonville Sub is more of a branch line. The "end of the line" is now the small village of Siloan. Siloan, just south of Westmoreland occupies the space that used to contain a helix. There is currently only one active shipper, Jenkins Feed.
The day started with sanding and painting the new back drop.
By early afternoon it was time to install the background mural. Two background murals were used from Trackside Scenery. The sky was cut off both backgrounds and the one with the feed mill was hung first. The second mural was cut to match both ends of the feed mill background and a adjoining background. They are held in place with 3M Supper 77 spray adhesive.
Here
is the new backdrop for Siloan. I took the picture before the LED
lighting was installed which really confused the camera.
The instructions call for butting adjoining backdrop scenes. I have found over time, for reasons I'm not sure, I end up with tiny but noticeable gaps. For Siloan, I overlapped slightly with the butt of the seam facing away from the primary light source. Right now, the new sections with the overlapping seams look better than the butt joined sections that were put up several year ago.
Here is a section with a overlapping joint, to the left of center but is nearly invisible.
Finally, if you are thinking about the commercial background from Trackside Scenery or any other vendor for that matter, I suggest you buy them all at one time. When my new backdrops arrived, contrary to what I was told to expect, the colors were slightly different. I solved this problem by using a leftover section of the new backdrop, trimmed it to follow a tree line and applied it over a portion of the existing backdrop.
In this picture you can see where the two backdrops come together. To the right is the new backdrop and to the left is the old. The old one was lighter with less contrast. The overlay is to the left of the seam. It starts at the seam, near the top of the backdrop, and tapers down to the ground on the left.
By around 9:00 pm the track and most of the wiring was done.
Jenkins Feed
Work has also started on Jenkins Feed by building 4 Walthers storage silos. Here is the first one that included several miss steps in the construction process. Luckily this one will be sitting behind several others and the backside won't be seen!
I also ordered this Farmers Fertilizer Supply kit from Blair Line. I've never built a Blair Line kit so we'll see how it goes. Several other kits are also in the pipeline to fill out what I hope will be a cluttered "backside" of town kind of scene.
Lighting
June 8, 2023
While
working on the upper level (Sn3) all the LED lighting on the lower
level was removed. This morning it all got reinstalled including
replacing some of the original LED with newer versions with more natural
light. I also fixed some wiring on the original part of the layout. When I went to knock a few cars around on the new track, I found that all the tracks in and around Westmoreland were dead. It took about an hour to track down and fix the problem but after it was fixed I spent some time switching the future Jenkins Feed.
The locomotive layover spur was a last minute addition. Considerable thought was given to operations and it was concluded that the South Local should originate here at Siloan in order to spread out the crews at the beginning of an operating session and relieve some of the congestion that occurred around Preston Miller Yard during a couple of informal operating sessions (No dispatcher). At one point, all the operators were clustered around the yard and nothing was moving anywhere else on the layout.
Lower Level Repairs
June 9 , 2023
Unfortunately some damage was done to the lower level when I was rebuilding the upper level. Most of is minor but it looks like I may have to replace a couple things. I started with the ground cover and ballast where the rural grade crossing south of Westmoreland got destroyed during the rebuild. Originally the track entered a tunnel leading to the helix about where the chunk of pink foam is filling a hole in the bench work.
Here is the scene following the repairs. The matte mediun is still wet so the repaired areas show up darker.
GM Assembly becomes Chrysler Airtemp
June 11, 2023
The Airtemp brand is
the result of the air conditioning system designed by Chrysler engineers for Walter P. Chrysler's Art Deco
style Chrysler building in New York City. When completed in 1930, the skyscraper was the world's tallest building. Four years later, with their acquired climate conditioning expertise, Airtemp Corporation was born. About forty years later, the Bowling Green factory was built around 1970. In 1976 Chrysler Corporation sold Airtemp and in 1982 the Bowling Green plant was sold to General Motors and converted into the Bowling Green Chevrolet Corvette Assembly Plant.
So... For me, that meant a General Motors plant on the Madisonville Sub circa 1980 wasn't correct. While I've known this for several years, I never quite got around to changing the name until today. Why today? I'm not really sure. I just walked by that portion of the layout, while actually working on something else, and pulled out the GM sign and made a new one. While I was at it, I added a few trees around the sign and some hedges in front of the office building portion of the plant. The spur in the foreground leads into the plant.
As always, you comments, suggestions and questions are welcome
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