Great Northwestern Railway

Roads - they connect the model railroad to a piece of the world we are all familiar with. As such, having roads on a model RR is an important scenic element. That said, I find roads to be tedious. Too often I see them dropped in without context, looking like they are anything but pavement, or flat out cheesy looking. So I have been holding off making roads... until now.  Turay sits on top of the helix. I wanted to use the space to tie in Armstrong and give the feel of a local center of population, without making it look like a big city. Think Las Vegas, New Mexico. So the city would have several key structures (more on that later), tied in with, you guessed it, roads. The basis for the roads are sheet styrene. My daughter works retail, so she was able to score for me some relatively heavy signs they were throwing away. Yay! Unfortunately the backs had some kind of adhesive on them that made the 'clean' side unusable. The printed side had pricing info on it... oh well. Next step...

 Mesa City has always been a favorite place for crews to work.  Off the main and plenty of switching, it attracts those who enjoy just working a local with some quality throttle time.  Since the expansion of the GNW, on-line industries have been lower priority as the focus was to get the layout running.  Well, now it is running, and I could turn my attention back to creating some industrial spaces. The geometry of Mesa City changed enough that the main did not really run through it anymore.  But... the main TOOK the real estate to go over it, thereby killing the former switching area.  However, the area where the former dispatcher's office was located is now reallocated for a new switching area: Mesa City East. Connecting to it was a bit of a challenge.  There is a set of shelves along the back wall that is more or less permanent.  I integrated the paint booth exhaust duct into the framework, so besides removing all that, I would have to a lot of ...

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 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!...