Time For a Change

I decided it’s time for a change. Time for a new layout.

There have been a few issues with my layout that just aren’t fixable. The two major ones are:

  1. Duck-under at the entrance to the layout room / my office
  2. Grades to second level staging yard were too steep

I was really starting to hate that duck-under. My train room is also my office, and I work from home, so I was ducking under the layout more than a dozen times a day. That gets OLD.

The grade to the second level was causing operational problems too. Some trains would stall on the grade, which is not the end of the world.

The remainder of the long, long climb to the CP staging yard
The remainder of the long, long climb to the CP staging yard

The bigger problem was that there was a bit of a “hump” where the grade transitioned to flat at the top of the hill. This sometimes caused couplers to separate vertically, leading to a runaway down the hill. Also, I couldn’t run long metal cars on CP because they would “bottom out” and cause shorts.

I know I could have fixed that by redoing the whole grade, but I felt it was time to start over.

The duckunder was easy to remove – some quick work with a saw and I could walk in and out of my room without ducking.

"Where'd the duckunder go?" "I don't care (glug)"
“Where’d the duckunder go?” “I don’t care (glug)”

After a while, I started removing the track in Georgetown. Most of the photos in this post are from that effort.

The rail removal crew, hard at work
The rail removal crew, hard at work

Once all the track was gone, I removed the benchwork that was under Georgetown. The room seems a lot larger…. although I still have a lot of clutter.

Over the past month or so, I’ve been slowly removing track in the staging yard and around the walls. The CP staging yard is gone and the only part of the CN staging yard remaining is the shelf that the yard was on.

Rail removal in the CP staging yard
Rail removal in the CP staging yard

I think I’ll keep the peninsula with the Cargill grain elevator.

I honestly feel really, really good about this. The demolition feels GOOD. This is the right decision.

More to come!