Considering a Concept

Well, with all the other items discussed, I have been doodling in the background. Having the train space in CAD is nice, as it allows a number of quick visualizations. One of the first drawings that I looked at is below.

Usable Space

Each of these lines represents the remaining space given aisles of various widths. Clearly, as long as the closets and sink (top of the picture) are in place, I am fairly limited. Access along the right side is a necessity, and the left side must deal with the door to the garage. About the only useable wall space at the moment is in the upper left hand corner - if the door to the garage does not have to open all the way - which it does not.

So, this is part of the fun. It is a challenge. Well, I have been following the Canadian Canyons Series on MR Video Plus. This is the most excited I have been about a project layout in Model Railroader in decades. I really like how the layout uses a helix to connect to a staging yard to form the loop. And so a concept may be born.

Looking at my space, and sketching out where the benchwork could go, I arrived at the following conceptual benchwork configuration.

Conceptual Benchwork

There is room for a helix on the left, and the trains could run around the layout and be followed by a crew all the way around the room. In only a few spots, do we have some sub-24" pinch points, and often we are wider. As a test layout, this concept has potential. It has the shelf style I am anticipating, yet could easily support full length trains. A cleaner benchwork drawing without the aisle potentials is shown below.

Dimensioned Benchwork

The layout is broken into 7 sections - each of which will fit out of the sliding door in the basement. Six sections are sceniced - and the seventh would be the helix. The layout may even be somewhat portable in case I need to move, or want to take it to a show.

So, this benchwork was not created solely by the space, but with a concept in mind. That concept is drawn from the Canadian Canyons Layout. I've drawn up a rough plan of the Canadian Canyons Layout on my own.

So, the tracks run through staging, climb the helix on the upper left hand side and then run through the sceniced layout, before descending the helix and returning to staging. It is a giant loop, but it sparked an idea. What if, my layout did much the same thing, climbed out of staging, ran around the perimeter of the layout and the returned to staging by descending the helix. A little quick math suggested that my visible run could be about 52 feet. In N-scale, that is about 1.6 miles. Since many of the places I am interested in modeling are centered around a grade, so, what I used that stretch to model the grade. Running a few quick calculations led to the following:

...a 1% grade would climb about 6.3 inches.
...a 2% grade would climb about 12.6 inches (think Moffat Line/Craig Branch).
...a 2.2% grade would climb about 13.9 inches (think Soldier Summit).
...a 3% grade would climb about 18.9 inches (think Tennessee Pass).

These are very interesting numbers. Playing with a bookshelf, I am convinced that in N scale, you need to have about 10 inches between the scenery base on the lower deck, and the underside of the upper deck. If you can get 12 inches, all the better, and then you need 2-4 inches for the deck structure. In other words, 12-16 inches of deck separation works for me - particularly if you are talking about 10-16 inch deep scenes. With this in mind, you could almost circle the available benchwork and climb to the next deck in the process.

So, what if the layout climbed out of the helix from staging, climbed around deck 1 to deck 2, circled around while still climbing on deck 2, and then descended the helix. Heck, you might be able to do it 3 or even 4 times. Interesting!

So, I have a concept for a layout that would start in staging, climb out of staging to a first deck, and then tackle a grade to the summit, before descending the helix back to staging. I've had similar ideas in the past and so I adopted a term for it - the double helix layout. This could be a chance to try it out.

Following some quick math, the footprint of the layout is 78.36 square feet, and I think I can more or less have staging + 3 decks, so a total of 313.5 square feet of layout, with a visible main line run of about 156 feet or almost 5 scale miles. Granted, the helix connecting the visible top with the staging level would be massive - but that too could be used for elephant staging (trains nose to tail) so you would not "see" the delay climbing the helix, and going down the helix could be automated or managed by the staging hostler. But a 5 scale mile helper grade, that could be a site to be seen.

Okay, so back to the concepts - Focusing on standard gauge for a minute - the Moffat would be the toughest, the grade is at the low end, which would lead to minimal clearances throughout, and if you had some flatter spots at towns, the climb distance it not there. Furthermore, some of the signature features, such as the Big 10 curves, don't work well at all. The Craig Branch has similar issues with some of the scenes (Crater loops), but perhaps a piece of it could be achieved. Soldier Summit does a bit better, it is worth considering, and given that there are few real towns on the eastern side - maybe. The western side has Gilluly Loops - that won't fit well at all. That leads us to Tennessee Pass, with a western side with 3% grades, virtually all a helper district, only a few sidings, and even where it levels out, we are often still talking about 1-2% grades. Promising.

So, it sounds like I have some concepts to draw up, and let us see how they look. Then there are some other options if I look at the Narrow Gauge options too. But I'm going to start with the standard gauge ideas and see how they look.

A town called...Helper

I was lucky enough in the early 2000's to have the time and money to spend time visiting the last stand of D&RGW SD40T-2 locomotives working out of Helper, Utah. For several years, I made the trip every 3 months, right before the upcoming 91 day inspection for the D&RGW units. I've probably railfanned this line more than any other, and over time it grew on me.

Let's start our discussion of the line in Helper. Helper is a small town at east end of the line that marks the transition from desert to mountain railroading. Its name of course is due to the helper engines that were added here for the climb to Soldier Summit. To the east of Helper, are several small towns with switching opportunities: Spring Glen, Carbonville, Price and Wellington. Just west of Wellington is a major coal loadout, the Castle Valley (CV) Spur. To the east of Wellington, is Mounds, where the Sunnyside Branch departs to several old coal mines. More recently, this branch is the destination for the "trash train" which was often powered by the SD40T-2s in their final years.

Helper is a stop for Amtrak, and boasts a small yard. In many ways, the yard is perfect to model. I count 14 tracks, plus the double track main. Helper originates trains to the local towns mentioned above, and as far east as Green River. In addition, trains to the Sunnyside Branch, CV Spur, and the Pleasant Valley Branch. There is not a lot of industry along this part of the line, but there is also a coal loadout along the main at Royal. Also of interest is the neighboring railroad, the Utah Railway.

The Utah Railway operates out of Martin Yard and serves a number of mines along its route. The Utah Railway joins the Soldier Summit line at Utah Junction, just west of Helper, and sometimes its helper sets ply the rails of Helper Yard, and trains also can serve industries along the line trough Wellington.

To the west, the double track main climbs Price River Canyon, past the fabled Castle Gate bluff (see the photo above), up through the canyon to the Nolan and Kyune Tunnels, before breaking out of the canyon at Kyune siding. The grade on this stretch is a pretty constant 2.2%, and the line closely follows US Highway 6, making railfanning a joy. Kyune itself is a siding between the mains along a sweeping curve making it an outstanding spot for train watching. One of my favorites in fact. Continuing up the hill, the line arrives in Colton, where there is a junction to the Pleasant Valley Branch. This branch is fairly isolated for much of the run, but ends up at several coal mines. Helpers are often cut off at Colton, but may run as far as Soldier Summit.

The last part of the line to Soldier Summit is very uneventful, and the summit itself is almost easy to miss. But a few miles to the west of the summit, things get very interesting again, as the trains descend the 2.2% grade of the Gilluly loops. Again, a perfect model railroading scenario, where the train descends down the valley to the west, loops around 180 degrees, and descends back up the valley, before looping again to descend down the far side of the valley, passing through the scene three times. Plus, there is a passing siding between the mains.

From Gilluly, the line passes through several short scenic canyons (again great modeling opportunities), before reaching the the former site of Thistle. Thistle was the junction to the D&RGW's Marysville Branch until April 1983, when a landslide wiped out the town. The railroad was relocated, and a pair of tunnels were constructed. The Thistle tunnels are the longest tunnels on the line, at 3009' and 3180' respectively. During the closure, the D&RGW had to route trains over the UP through Wyoming, and this closure helped end the Rio Grande Zephyr.

After Thistle, te line runs out of Spanish Fork Canyon, and into Springville and Provo. In Provo, both the D&RGW and Utah have yard facilities, and there is an interchange with the Union Pacific. A little north of Provo is the Geneva Steel Mill, which added some major industry to this end of the line. The Provo Industrial Lead and Tintic Industrial Leads branch off the line at Geneva and Springville respectively, and a few more miles up the line at Midvale is the Bingham and Garfield industrial leads. Ultimately, the line runs into Salt Lake City.

So, what are the operational LDEs I see on the line:

• Helper
• Spring Glen/Carbonville/Price/Wellington
• CV Spur
• Mounds/Sunnyside Branch
• Utah Junction/Utah Railway
• Castle Gate Loadout
• Colton/Pleasant Valley Branch
• Soldier Summit
• Thistle (if revived and perhaps as a junction to the resurrected Marysville Branch)
• Springville/Provo
• Tintic Branch/Provo Branch
• Geneva Steel

The scenic LDEs include:

• Willow Creek Power Station (not served by rail - but maybe could be)
• Castle Gate
• Lynn Crossover
• Nolan Tunnels
• Kyune Tunnels
• Kyune Siding
• Gilluly Siding
• Canyons between Gilluly and Thistle (siding of Detour, crossovers of Narrows and Rio)
• Thistle Tunnels
• Spanish Fork Canyon

Perhaps the best way of looking at this line is that at each end are a number of branches, of which you would like to at least model the junctions to each, as well as industrial concentrations. The branches themselves may simply be staging. On the east end the branches include Castle Valley Spur, Sunnyside Branch and the Utah Railway is at least schematically a branch. On the west end is the Tintic and Provo Branches, and possibly the Garfield and Bingham Branches, with the possibility of recreating the Marysville Branch. Between the two ends is a double track main climbing a summit both ways. Near the top is yet another branch, the Pleasant Valley Branch. Coal loads and empties may move both directions on this stretch, depending on the customer. Plus, the Utah Railway adds a lot of interest as a secondary line. It isn't even inconceivable that the Carbon County Railway (which served mines up the Sunnyside Branch) could even still be running with a little modelers license.

Again, there have been plans to model some or all of this line. Bernie Kempenski proposed some of them, ironically, just as I was in my early years railfanning the route. Also given the all the D&RGW through traffic from both the Mofffat Line, and the Tennessee Pass Line came through here, the traffic density is high. Add to that the locally mined coal, and the Utah Railway traffic, and this appears to be a very busy stretch of line to model. Hence, the double track. Interestingly enough, even with the double track reducing the need for planning meets at limited sidings, I have observed many fascinating hours of operations on this line, including uphill and downhill passes by east and westbound trains.