Small Industrial Yard

Builder:

Steve Blanding

Dimensions:

4' x 2'

Date Started:

Feb 10, 1996

Period Modeled:

Modern

Location Modeled:

Somewhere in Western Washington

Status:

Nearly Finished

There are photos at the bottom.

This was my third fully compliant NTRAK module. By this time I'd managed to get most things right.

The frame is built of 1 x 3 pine, the legs are 2 x 2's. The top of the module is a single slab of 2" thick pink extruded foam, the kind used for insulation in many modern buildings. The mountain division sits on 1/8" cork and another 3" of foam. Since the tracks below are mounted directly on the foam, this puts the mountain division exactly 3 1/8" above the main lines.

The foam is glued to the frame with Liquid Nails (original formula) and the track is in turn glued to the foam with the same stuff. At first I was afraid that the Liquid Nails might react with the foam but a quick test showed that it works great. (Always use the original formula Liquid Nails if you can, the other formulas don't set as fast and some of them are water soluable which means that they can soften if they get damp.)

The advantages to using foam instead of wood are many. First of all it's very light. This entire module can be easily lifted with one hand. Also, the foam is very easy to carve into virtually any shape you can imagine. Furthermore, it holds paint well provided you use acrylic paint; solvent based paint will attack the foam.

The skyboard is removeable which makes it really easy to reach every part of the module for painting, repairing and adding details.

The long trestle that crosses the back of the module was scratch built from styrene before the module was started. The module was essentially built around this trestle. The concrete footings at each side of the trestle are made from sandwiched sheets of styrene, sanded smooth and painted.

The interchange track between the two main lines and the yard tracks can be electrically isolated from the rest of the module, allowing you to park a locomotive there. The interchange can draw power from either the first or second mains. The yard can be powered with a private throttle and the branch line can be switched over to also recieve power from the private throttle, allowing yard operations to spill onto the branch line without disrupting other trains which might be using the branch line on other modules.

The bulldozer clearing the mud slide is a GHQ model, as is the Burlington Northern service truck parked beside the small freight depot.

An interesting note: this module was framed, the track was laid and the wiring was put in place all in one saturday: February 10, 1996.

Photos: