Great Northwestern Railway

Excited to report that a LOT of work has been done on Mesa City.  The area around the wye has been scenerized.  Got Orchard Supply yard finished up, added the buildings, and put up some fence.  The fence was a bit tedious, but sure makes it look better. Pavement is 0.100 styrene spray painted a dark gray.  The styrene was cut up to the ties.  The pavement between the styrene and track is unsanded grout.  Came out pretty nice! Test driving some of the rail cars. Once the pavement was down, started adding scenery.  The 'dirt' is sifted play sand.  The ballast is sifted "gray breeze" from the landscape materials lot. With that in progress, I blended in the new work with the old. Use a LOT of different textures and materials to get the siding tracks to look like they have not seen much maintenance over the years.  Added fencing as well. To break up the massive pavement area, I put a strip of "dirt" with styrene curbs delineating the space between the lumber yard

 The layout really needs to get back into operation.  Really.  A lot of rolling stock is just sitting there, begging for a wheel to turn.  Sure, we run a few trains every so often, but nothing like a month op session does. Before COVID hit, we operated a few times to get the bugs worked out.  All in all, it went well.  But there was a lack of work for the road crews to do.  So it ended up that a lot of work was put on the yard masters (YMs), with road crews doing short hops.  Not much industry is on line yet.... more on that later.  So what to do? Commutes!  We had run them in the Phase 2 incarnation of the GNW.  We had not owing to (1) lack of experience with the layout and not wanting to overload the operators, and (2) no means of turning the locomotives at Warm Springs.  Recall Phase 2 had a wye at Mesa City.  But now... with the Mesa City wye back in place (see the last blog post), commutes could run again!  (yay!)  A couple of test trains were set up and some tweaks had to be made

 Mesa City used to connect the layout across the western wall of the room.  The western wall was, as you may recall, removed to make room for the expansion.  It was ruthlessly demolished... and much sadness ensued.  ( https://greatnorthwesternrailway.blogspot.com/2017/12/and-just-like-that-mesa-city-is-gone.html )  It was one of the nicest areas of scenery, as well as a wonderful switching opportunity.  So I kind of put Mesa City out of my mind as a pleasant and yet sad story.   Fast forward about two and a half years and I realized a fatal flaw in my track plan.  Mesa City was not only a great place to watch and switch trains, it was also the place for handling coal cars for the generating station as well as turning commute engines.  Something had to be done!  Surveying the area, it turns out there WAS enough space for a wye and maybe a lead for switching.  Grabbing a couple pieces of plywood which, ironically, were from the staging yard under the old Mesa City, turned out to be about

It's been a temporary setup from the start.  A couple short metal filing cabinets and a scrap piece of plywood.  Add to that an old laptop and that was it - the dispatcher's office!  But a few op sessions quickly showed it was uncomfortable, limited in working space, and looked sloppy.  What to do? The good news is that using the temporary setup showed what was needed for the functionality of the office.  It's a small space - a repurposed hallway that used to go to the kids bedrooms... the same ones that were removed for the layout.  I did not want to remove the hallway as at some point, this will have to be converted back to living space.  So the idea was to cut a single piece of 3/4" plywood into the proper shape, finish it, and set it on stringers attached to the walls.  The desk itself then would have plenty of legroom under.  Experience showed the desk needed a side-table to store the car-card/train packs.   I elected to use birch veneer topped 3/4" plywood. 

Yes, it's been quiet on the blog, but work certainly has been happening!  Of note, the C-19 bug allowed for more evenings and weekends at home to tackle a massive project.  Let me explain... The layout is double decked, without a helix to get between the decks.  Well, actually, it is TRIPLE decked at the staging yard, so there IS a helix to get to that from one end.  But there are no helixes between the visible decks.  This was done to allow the operators to really follow their trains from point to point.  But even with a "no-lix" connection, it also means there has to be a transition from where the connection between the lower deck and the upper deck... which means the scenery for some of that run will have to be associated with the lower deck, and then later with the upper deck.  That makes for an interesting scenic transition. The way this is being handled on the GNW is having the lower deck include the first portion of the ramp up in the scenery with the lower deck, t