Freight cars

 2 weathered hoppers for my fleet 

Paper mill update

Here is an update of my paper mill. As you can see by the piece of wood on the track where the pieces of lumber come together are not very level I will have to fix this soon. But when the boxcars are filled with paper rolls they don't move to much 

Farm added

 Cnw f3a  pulls a sting of boxcars into town 

More updates

so in honor of all the dairy products in Wisconsin I have added O'leary's Dairy. and a diesel fueling station on the second track of the inglenook. The third track will serve as an interchange and be connected to a staging track.

Layout Update

So the layout has come along to the point of operations or for now switching out a couple industries. A few people were able to run a few trains a round town A, and yes we had some minor track issues, luckily Ken was able to figure the issues out with his great soldering. Here are some layout picture updates

Paper mill and 2 track yard

The inglenook Interchange 

Town A ( to be named)

Another shot of town A

More to come later.

Hoover Dam and More

 Snow scene on the prairie and the hoover damn

Slightly off topic was our layout tour for the St. Charles Model Railroad Club. Every six months or so we visit a few of our members railroads. One member build a hoover Damn. Pretty cool

Beginnings of a paper mill

The major industry on my Railroad is the Paper Mill. The back building will ship the finished products and the house next to it is the chemical house that accepts chlorine and other chemicals used in the paper making process.

Plastic Hoppers

You know sometimes something simple like this i think would look great on my layout even though it is modern.  Today I drove past this and a pellet hopper was being loaded.

How simple a spur, some hosing, a small scratch built building and a few hoppers. If you zoom out from street view trucks can pull up right on the grass and load their trucks.

This is in wentzville, MO

Inspiration

The inspiration for this layout really comes from a few places. I have been reading through the blogs of lance mindheim. I really like his approach to switching layouts, don't get me wrong I like watching trains run, but as life moves on and priorities change I don't mind watching a train running back and forth over the same line versus watching a train run around in circles.  I really like the puzzle work of switching operations.

I also have found blogs  like http://cnwmodeling.blogspot.com to contain a lot of information that allows for a better understanding of how real railroads operate. So incorporating some of these things with the ideas of Lance's shelf layouts I think there are infinite possibilities for making small switching layouts or a medium size layout that allows for larger industries paper mill and soybean processing plant.

Starting over

Well I have learned a few things in purchasing someone elses layout.

1. It is a great way to get into the hobby. A lot of things are done for you so you can get up and running in a few weekends.
2. However some of the issues I came across was having to but in a DCC bus, It didn't fit my space, as great as it looks in pictures, once you tear it down, it is hard to get it to look like the previous layout.  The legs were not as strong and when I went to remake them I just decided to just start over and reuse what I could.
3. I was able to reuse the industries, tracks, trees, turnouts, L girder benchwork.
4. What I needed to remake were the legs, this time around I decided to mount leg adjusters on all legs to account for the slope in my basement. 
5. I also decided to run the wiring bus before installing the benchwork. I put two holes in so if I ever put in an accessory bus it would be easy to run. 

Any way here is to second chances to old layouts.

In this new layout I plan to focus on the CNW operations in the midwest. Initially I was planning on using a Model Railroad Shelf layout track plan to the T. But realized it would fit my interest more if I aged the layout from the 80-90's back to the late 50's- late 60's so I could have more 40 foot boxcars.  So I could run older F units and have a commuter service to get in the way of the operators.