The summer can be a bit patchy for club nights, with different members away on different weeks and the warm evenings attracting some to more scenic places other than a village hall. But thanks to some regulars plugging away and a few sessions at home, work continues.
'Inspired by Friedrichstrasse' continues to develop, and with the new fiddleyard all but complete, work has turned to scenicing the revised end boards. The four tracks to the left of this board used to reduce down to two via a pair of points, but now all 4 continue to the new fiddleyards allowing for more frequent, bigger locomotives and stock to roll through the platforms. The two tracks on the far right are for smaller suburban stock which can cope with the tighter curves, and the stub siding is for display or for use as a DCC programming track. Or just to provide interest when nothing is running.
The mighty girder bridge was constructed from a Kibri kit, and is very imposing in person. Originally it was going to be a road bridge, but the plan now is for some non-working/abandoned rails to cross the span. The bridge wasn't quite wide enough for the baseboard so the team are taking the opportunity to model a mixed media bridge, continuing on to a more 60s/70s concrete span. The base of the bridge is made out of balsa, with the rest made from a combination of balsa and plasticard, as well as using the leftover pillars from the Kibri kit.
There's even more new track hidden on this revamped board, with an industrial siding buried in 'concrete' (actually polyfilla). The red brick building is a factory, and will allow for a little shunting back and forth amongst all the through passenger and freight on the main lines. The resin kit is now off for light-fitting and still needs attaching to the baseboard and a little bedding in, but overall this end board is shaping up very nicely.
But it wasn't wall to wall East Germany - another member was test running a new acquisition, an Atlas Master line GP38-2, sometimes known as a Dash 2. The Bay Line (reporting mark BAYL) is a very rare livery for model railroad products (only one run of locomotive 509 was ever made in N scale), and after 15 years of patience a mint condition locomotive finally came up on a certain popular online auction site. And strangely this was only 6 months after a loco shell of 509 was purchased. So another chassis will be needed! Note also the 3 BAYL box cars in tow.
The Bay Line (formerly the Atlanta and St Andrews Bay Railroad) was founded in 1906, but never reached Atlanta and only served St Andrews Bay for six years. For many years it was owned by various lumber and papermaking parent companies, and served the many forests, sawmills and woodchip mills of south Alabama and north Florida. Today it's owned by Genesee and Wyoming Inc, a shortline railroad holding company with the unfortunate habit of repainting all their stock in a garish orange and yellow scheme, but the very 70s green and yellow colour scheme lasted until 2005.
Now he finally has a locomotive in the correct livery, one club member is planning a layout based around a town in the middle of the route, Cottondale, which interchanges with the class 1 railroad CSX. Another member has kindly 3D printed 12 of the railroads iconic woodchip hoppers, so inertia is building and hopefully it won't be too long before baseboard building begins.
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