No-Name Construction

This post collects some progress photos of the No-Name Industrial construction.  Of course it wasn't always the No-Name Industrial (see the evolution post), and there were several changes to not only the plan but already constructed stuff as well.  Photos of the current state of the railroad are in a following post.

Construction started in the corner now occupied by Northeast Container.

1. 4/7/99 First section of backdrop.

2. 12/31/01 First benchwork, shelf brackets

The removable section in the corner between Midstate Recovery Systems and Cains is based on a piece of 3/4 inch plywood which slides into wood channels on each side.  There are hard stops at the back, and toggle clamps underneath to hold it so the rails are precisely aligned.

4. 2/26/02 The removable section.

In this overview of freshly glued down ties, you can see the ties for the second siding next to what is now the Midstate Recovery siding - that second siding never got as far as rail.

5. 5/24/02 A lot of ties glued down.

I use insulation displacement connectors, which are very reliable if you use them only on the type and size of wire they're rated for. The heavy red and black wires are my #10 track bus. The smaller red and black are #18 track feeders. The orange and brown pair were going to be the #12 accessory bus, current plan is they will be a separate power bus heading from my command station (which is on a shelf under Cains) to the N scale layout.  At the time I choose the wire, it still wasn't clear that I wouldn't end up running older O scale equipment that drew a lot of current, which is why I choose the heavier wire.

6. 3/8/03 Wiring.

Building the second leg of the layout.  This view looks from Cains down toward the corner with Tighe and the transload track.

7. 9/16/04 More bench work.

I got impatient and reused a bit of old plywood with homasote glued to it for sub roadbed for the main track behind Cains.  That made it harder to tie into the preferred 3/4 ply sub roadbed.  The second problem is the sub roadbed was positioned for the Elmira Industrial plan, and the Corning Industrial plan needed it in a slightly different place, so I had to remove about 4 feet of it.  The plastic tube coming out of the plywood and curving into the wall is for feeding the cab bus through into the ceiling and on to the radio base station.

8. 9/16/04 Adjusting roadbed to the new plan.

When I did both the Elmira and Corning Industrial plans, I had access to a large format printer with the caveat that I bring my own paper.  So I could print the plan out on 3'x4' paper sheets full size.  Taping in place and running over the lines with a pounce wheel made it easy to transfer the plan to the plywood.  The track closest to the aisle is the Cain's siding, which will be cookie cuttered to allow lowering it an inch.

9. 10/17/04 Transferring plan to plywood.

Here's the Cains siding cookie cuttered out and lowered 7/8 inch. If you look really closely at the sub roadbed just where it separates from the main plywood, and again two risers closer to the foreground, you'll see I had to route the thickness of the plywood down to 1/2 inch for a foot or so to make the two vertical curves fall where I wanted them to. In the background you can see the sub roadbed for what was the Wegman's siding on the Corning Industrial plan (now the Tighe siding), elevated 1/2 inch with a strip of 1/2 inch plywood. I used a belt sander to get a nice long taper on the end, and the curve around the back corner is a series of short pieces with shallow angles on the ends which make the curve when put together.

10. 11/19/04 Cains siding cookie cuttered.

The homabed at the yard throat. Lots of cutting and fitting. The little dots are all the brads sticking up that I used to hold it in place while the glue dried - they'll be pulled out later.

11. 11/20/04 The homabed at the Corning Industrial yard throat.

Sanding the homabed can be tedious.  I got impatient this time and did it with the belt sander. Works quite well with relatively fine sand paper, a vacuum attached to control the dust, a bubble level stuck to the top (that round white thing), and some restraint. The odd thing in the upper left is a belt cleaning tool - it unclogs the sandpaper, and unclogged sandpaper makes everything go faster. You do need to be careful, and not press at all but just let the weight of the sander to the work while you worry about keeping it level and moving so you don't make dips and wobbles. It's way faster than the long piece of sandpaper on a 2x4 approach I used before.

12. 12/4/04 Sanding the homabed.

The original part of the layout is handlaid code 125 rail on wooden ties. The new part is Atlas code 148 flextrack. Needless to say, they're not the same overall height. It took some time and a lot of trial and error to get the homabed tapered down just enough to line up the rail head. The damage to the paint on the old rail is from the rail bender. It's not really noticeable from a normal viewing angle, but I'll touch it up one of these days. The speckly paint on the flex track is from a painting experiment that didn't go quite so well.

13. 12/4/04 Tricky alignment job.

I primed the homabed (and everything nearby) to seal it. I had white primer on hand, so that's what I used.  Gray would have been a better choice.  Pretty much every switch in this picture had to have a bit trimmed off at least one leg.

14. 12/13/04 Laying Atlas flex track and switches

That second siding I pointed out the ties for in photo 5 above meets it's demise.  The remaining siding was Cornell Brothers Agway on the Corning Industrial plan, and is now Northeast Container on the No-Name plan.  The jog visible in the distance was originally justified by the second track, I'm figuring out how to place buildings so as to make it visually "obvious" why the track jogs.

15. 2/13/05 Tearing out the ties for the second siding.

In the Elmira Industrial plan, the access hole in the corner was inside a building. In the Corning Industrial plan, it had the Cornell Brothers Agway track extending over it.  So I made a removable hatch to cover the hole.  The hatch registers against the near side of the hole, and in the back in the corner there's a cleat with a couple springs pushing against the hatch to keep it from wiggling around.  The screw eye near the front edge will be hidden by bushes. It's a handle to make it easy to lift the front edge, get a hand under it, and lift the whole thing out.  Since the end of the spur is going to be completely weed covered I didn't bother with homabed, ties, or ballast. That's just 1/2 inch homosote with rail spiked directly to it. The whole mess is sealed with gray paint. The track on the hatch is unpowered, since only a little over a car length of track is on the hatch there's no reason for a loco to ever get down there.

16. 8/5/05 Access hatch.

17. Screen wire for scenery at Cains.

The plans at one point called for a curved switch leading out onto a second peninsula covered with industry.  It seemed like a good idea to see if I could actually build a curved switch that worked before proceeding, so I did.  I drew up the centerlines in cad, printed out a full sized plan and glued it to a piece of 1/8" plywood.  I glued PC board ties to that, and after a lot of rail bending, filing, fitting, and soldering I had a turnout that worked pretty well.  And then I changed the plan to not need it.

18. 1/10/06 Curved switch done and works.

Not shown in this series of photos is the benchwork and track for the portion of the Corning Industrial's yard along the back wall - around the curve to the right in the photo below.  The only part remaining to be constructed was the second peninsula.  This is what the yard throat area looked like at the point at which doubts set in and eventually the plan changed.

19. 3/19/06 Corning Industrial yard

Even though I was very exciting about the new plan, it was a horrible feeling to rip up track and remove benchwork.  Especially given my glacial construction pace.  But it had to be done.  This photo shows the same corner as the above photo, with a lot of track removed and the benchwork around the corner removed.  The following photo shows the homabed being scrapped up.

20. 7/4/07 Demise of the Corning Industrial, converting to a shortline.

21. 7/6/07 Scrapping up lots of homabed.

Old stuff removed, ready to make progress on the shortline.  The horrible feeling went away at this point, replaced by enthusiasm for the new plan.  You can see the remnants of the curved yard homabed.  The heavy pencil lines are the new track alignment.

22. 7/6/07 Starting on new track.

The new switch for Cains is in in this photo.  I like the new Cains alignment much better than the old one.  Also note that the team track siding had the homabed tapered down to plywood level, to make it a bit lower than the main track.

23. 12/2/07 Main track in.

24. 4/5/11 Feeders ready to solder to new track.

Rather than show the current state of the No-Name at the tail end of this already too long post, I'll follow up with another post with current photos.