Klik hier om hierdie blaaie in Afrikaans te sien
EMD SW9 B&O 5081, a Life-Like model.
One of the things that is part and parcel of any military career is frequent transfers. During my 32 years in the South African Air Force I was transferred on average every three years. All these postings did not necessarily involve relocation, since a number of these moves were from unit to unit in the Pretoria area. But during those 32 years I was also stationed at bases located all over the country. Therefore, when I constructed a layout the first requirement was that it should be portable.
My present layout was built while I was still living in military quarters in Voortrekkerhoogte, outside Pretoria. When I moved to Cape Town upon my retirement in 1999, the layout went into the removal truck first, after which a floor was constructed over it so that the rest of my furniture could be stacked on top. It consists of a steel chassis that's roughly the size of a caravan's (4 by 1.6 metres, or 13 x 5 feet), with a railing made of square tubing to have something to lean on rather than on the layout itself, as well as something to hang the layout from. The deck is made up of ten 20 mm plywood squares that started out as pallets for Rank Xerox copiers. The whole thing hangs on four steel cables and can be hoisted up to the garage ceiling with an small boat winch, so that the car need not be banished from its own sleeping quarters to accommodate my trains. The beauty of this is that the trains on it need not be removed before stowing the layout.
Here the layout is in its raised position. I'm 5' 8½" tall and I can almost walk upright underneath it, except under the box visible below the layout to the left, which is actually a small shelf to hold the DCC command station and the transformer. The pairs of 20 litre oil cans serve as legs for the layout to rest on when it is lowered. Since it's a walk-around layout, there's no real need for scenery backdrops, but I painted the trainroom part of the garage sky blue all over. I also painted the railings the same blue to make them less obvious on pictures.
Here is a picture of the winch with the layout raised. Part of the bus bars that run right around the layout and from which power is fed to all tracks approximately every 60 cm, is visible in the picture. The fact that I painted everything the same colour blue does seem to help to make things like the winch support less visible on pictures.
And here it is lowered on to the oil drum legs. I've painted rings around the drums on the floor to make it easier to place them in their proper positions before lowering the layout.
This picture shows the complete layout. I ripped up a large part of it in April 2000, and relaid all the tracks except the yards and those on the left of the picture to get rid of some sharp curves. All my switches are forefinger-operated and all of them can easily be reached from one side of the layout (at left on the picture). The track plan is totally freelance and does not attempt to represent any real place, and it is basically a single line that goes around the layout four times, and twice across the hill and around the loop, before getting back to its starting point. This gives me almost seven scale miles of main line, and with DCC it is easy to run four long trains at once all by myself. There are altogether six passing sidings of varying length, two of which have three lines, and two yards. I also plan to attach N-Trak or BeNd-Trak style modules to the layout eventually - the lines to connect to the modules are just out of the picture at bottom right. I probably have way too much track put down - as you can see I used every bit of available space to put down as much track as possible, which does not leave a lot of room for structures and scenery. Which suits me just fine, since I prefer running trains to building scenery!
It's no Tehachapi, but a loop nevertheless. The central part of the layout is a hill, and the main line passes over and around the hill twice. On one of these lines there is also a passing siding that can easily accommodate long trains of about thirty 50' cars. I tried to keep the track radius as wide as possible. The minimum radius on the hill, at left on the picture, is about 13", while the rest of the curves are mostly 18" or larger.
The turntable is a high-tech forefinger operated affair. The ancient coaling tower is a relic left over from long gone days, not needed with a fleet of diesel only locomotives. (The diesel refuelling facility must still be installed next to the turntable's approach track.)
Even though the diesel refuelling setup is still absent, I did find some great looking fuel tanks and a water purifying plant.
This was bought at a swapmeet of the N Gauge Guild in Krugersdorp, where Neville Ewing had it listed as "dirty old station". I cleaned and fixed it up some, and it is now no longer a station, but a hostel for train crews who have to make a nightstop before taking a train back home. The turntable tracks are visible in front.
The tower was recently acquired, while the tracks at the spot where I wanted to place it was laid years ago. After building the model, I found that the space between the tracks was just not enough to allow trains to pass the tower without striking the slightly wider first floor. So I raised the platform to get the required clearance. I still need to add some railings, since the platform under the tower is now about ten feet off ground level. Whether a prototype exists for this, I don't know, but - it's my railway and here I can do what I like!
To the other Chessie pages:
To the rest of my website:
The following pages contain decoder installation guides for a few N scale diesel locomotives:
And the following pages contain guides to servicing or performance enhancement of some N Scale diesel locomotives:
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
According to the WebCounter you are
visitor number to these pages since 23 May 2002. Drop by
again, since I will be updating the site from time to time and
will add new pictures as work on the layout progresses. If you
have any comments or suggestions or just want to say hello, feel
free to drop us a line.
Created on 29 August 2003. Last updated on 2 October 2003.
