Wilmington and New York Railway (c)2009 George J. Irwin

The Wilmington and New York Railway
Constructing Au Sable Part 3: The Do-Over
©2009 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting Prohibited.

We last left the Wilmington in a rather wet state, thanks to a burst water filter under the kitchen sink. As I mentioned at the end of Part 2, I decided to walk away from the layout for a while and I didn't return to model railroading until after the family vacation in early July 2009. Instead of getting back to the extension, though, I occupied myself with other N Scale projects including decoder installs and rolling stock painting and weathering, and some minor repairs to the main layout made necessary when the "rains" came.

I also had Sam and Glen, a couple of N Scale friends, over to see the Wilmington, and I explained the situation. No problem, they said, we'll fix you up straight away. And so they did, and the "do over" began...

And so without much fuss, another of the sections of the previous layout was attached to the existing part of the Wilmington, again, right where the two branches of the wye diverge off the "main line." However, my two friends did not stop there!

And before I knew it (I was working on some rewiring), there was a three by eight foot "box" constructed and attached to the extension! There was also OSB board waiting in the garage to be cut and put into place on top of that "box". So instead of just the town of Au Sable, the framework was in place to build the entire Upper Jay Branch. Glenn and Sam offered to keep going from there, but I told them that this much real estate would easily get me through the winter, and then some...

Here's a view from the other side of the basement that shows more clearly how much more layout there would be-- once I got to it, that is. It adds up to close to 30 more square feet, which is more than the total footprint of many entire N Scale layouts. By the way, for those of you who have never seen UMTRR HQ, there it is in the background.

So the only part remaining of the first attempt at the extension was the sharply curved spur track coming out of my heavily modified Atlas wye turnout. Right? Well... we will come back to that in the next installment...

I am not so incompetent that I can't cut OSB board, so the next weekend I set out to handle that. The 4x8 piece went quickly into two pieces, one 38 inches wide and the other 44 inches wide. Once proper crossbeams were added to the "box" and the pieces of OSB set down, I couldn't resist playing with some track, and here is the preliminary result.

Sweeping out of the connecting wye towards the other end of the extension will be a 19 inch radius curve, or perhaps some flex track instead of the Atlas sectional pieces. The Woodland Scenics risers and ramps are there to give me some sense of how the scenes will divide. I doubt that the boundaries will be that regular.

In a concession to limited space (and don't we all make these?) the branch line will unprototypically reverse direction before ending at Upper Jay, on the right hand side of the picture. You can see why I pulled out the Woodland Scenics foam pieces. The "boundary" defining Upper Jay will be a rather critical item here. The real Upper Jay is higher in elevation than the real Au Sable Forks, as it is "upstream" on the East Branch of the Au Sable River, so I'm thinking that the trackage will rise as it comes around the corner.

And in between Au Sable and Upper Jay will be something I've wanted on my layout for a long time: "Pretend Land." Based on what are known as "The Kiddie Parks of the Adirondacks", most notably the "Land of Make Believe" which was actually located in Upper Jay, "Pretend Land" will feature kid-sized buildings and rides. The feature attraction will be a kid-sized train ride. How convenient that Z Scale is just about the right size for this! That's a loop of Micro-Trains "Micro-Track" that will surround the park. The structures were picked up on that Internet Auction Site. The castle and the church hiding behind it are Z Scale while the ornate building on the left is N Scale and will probably be the gift shop and restaurant (which does need to be full size in order to accomodate N Scale grownups!). It's all very preliminary at this point but I'm excited about finally having the opportunity to build this scene.

Next time: Re-Foam and Re-Wye...