Some Thoughts Regarding Design and Bench Work

This railroad will be based loosely on the Dolly Varden Railroad in upper Canada.  Some of the features it shares are the time period in the early 20th Century, its isolation, its use of narrow gauge equipment and its service of mining and later logging.  It will be very remote with no connection to the rest of the world except by water.  There will be an ore tipple on the wharf and logs will simply be dumped into the bay to be formed into rafts and towed to the sawmill.  There will be no town and very few buildings.  There will be a small yard with an engine house/machine shop and some storage for a few railroad cars.

There will be a loop for continuous running when desired but the railroad will be operated as a point-to-point with a pair of switchbacks on a 5% grade that leads to the mine and the log-loading site. After a lot of indecision, I have decided to use HO flex track as most of it will be out of site or buried in the dirt.  There will be no ballast.  Main line curves will be a 22" minimum radius and the upper line will be 18" minimum radius.  I think this will be fine with the engines I am using.

Motive power will consist of a pair of double headed Shays to climb to the logging site and a Climax to pull a few ore cars to the mine. There will be very little rolling stock and all will be no longer than 30' in length.  There will be a couple of Porters and perhaps a rail truck for maintenance.  I will have a hidden staging track for some other equipment that I may want to bring out and run around the loop when the mood strikes.

The railroad will be power by DCC and I will have sound in as many engines as I can manage.  This is not a large railroad so I plan on it only being operated by two people.  If a third person shows up they could switch the wharf  and/or shuttle cars around the small yard.  More about the design in a later post.

The bench work is going to be an around-the-room design.  It will be 30" deep in all but one section. The height of the bench work is 48" but the track will be 50" to 68" above the floor.  The high point will be at about my eye level.  I am trying to create the illusion that this railroad is high in the mountains.

I am making the bench work, including the legs, out of 1/2" plywood.  I have ripped it down to 3" wide strips and then screwed and glued it into sections that are mostly 4' long.  These are connected with bolts and wing nuts and then they are screwed to the wall.  Additionally, some of the legs have braces for more stability and all legs have levelers in the bottom. This makes for a very stable platform but still keeps it light in weight and easier to breakdown and move if necessary.

I have put the bench work in temporarily to make sure that it fits but will have to remove it to sheet rock the new wall and paint a backdrop.  The backdrop will be fairly simple as I expect to have trees along the back.

That's it for this post.  Check in again next week.