The Southern Railway Memphis division circa 1975

[Specter3]

Playing around with the Ford casting plant on the Reynolds spur. Pink foam and toothpicks. Craft paint to help imagine.

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[Specter3]

Found a couple more views of the Ford plant.

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[Specter3]

Also did some more work on the roundhouse foundations in Sheffield. No actual info on the roundhouse, but I looked up the steam locomotives in service in 1903 when they built the roundhouse. 4-6-0s and 2-8-0s were the norm. 2-8-2s came around in the 1910-20 time period. 4-6-2s came in in 1906 with the venerable PS4 coming in 1923. The turntable in Spencer NC, built in 1923 was 100ft. So I figure a 1903 turntable would probably be 80-90ft with roundhouse stalls of similar length. Drew these on paper and cut inspection pits in them.

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Maybe put the remains of a concrete coaling tower up?
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[Specter3]

Kept going with track replacement. Putting down permanently new Atlas c55 which replaces a mish mash of 10-15 yr old Atlas and ME flex. Sanded the cork, ran a straightedge along the row and got rid of some high spots.

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Put in some evidence of older rails having been removed. This is the L&N line to Tuscumbia. Abandoned at the end of steam. Southern finally pulled out the diamonds and just threw them to the side. They kept the trackage on the other side as it was the wye they used to turn steam specials coming from Birmingham or Decatur. Somewhere down the road I will probably do a steam consist, but it will turn itself in Memphis on my railroad.

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[Specter3]

Lots of track replacement going on as I transition the layout from temporary trackage to permanent track. Alignments have been settled and positioning of scenic elements is decided. Progress is definitely being made. Or at least some progress. See my post about Atlas flex track not being anywhere close to in gauge. But with progress comes the opportunity to see what you can do with your space. One element I have always dreamed of including on a layout is Southern’s Pride transload facility.

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Now you look at that and go how can anything short of a wharehouse layout incorporate that? Well I have thought about it and modeled it on an Ntrak set of modules(2 4 footers with behind the backdrop trackage, empties in Loads out to boot) so I had hopes of being able to include it. Over the helix is just enough space to get it in a n a format that works on a home layout. I threw up some supports temporarily this morning and put some of that older ME track pre curved on a large piece of foam and my designed length coal train just fits.

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I drug out the scratch built structures from the NTrak module and I think it is something I will pursue. Operations wise there will be a loaded train on the loader loop at the start of the session. It will be brought back to staging. The empty train will either be in staging or in the storage siding in Sheffield and will be then taken to the loader. [ Guests cannot view attachments ]

Am I crazy? It is where it belongs as far as geographically and layout wise. It will take some engineering and there will have to be a hatch built into it. But I think it can work.

[Specter3]

Video update on the transloader.

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[Specter3]

I have a space I am putting a chemical plant on the lower level of my layout. Since I am modeling a specific area I wanted to actually put something together that was not generic. All I originally had were some blurry old aerial photos.

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Started googling using address. Found it was an Occidental plant. It made chlorine among other things. Kept digging. It had changed hands a couple times. It was shut down in 2008 and demolished in 2011. It was referred to as a chloralkil plant. Kept Googling. It used a process that used mercury in baths that were open to the atmosphere. By its mechanics this process got mercury airborne. We all know that mercury is bad so in the 90s environmental groups really started laying on the companies to change to a newer technology that did not use mercury. Oxy Chem did and shut the plant down. No pictures exist that I can find of the actual facility. Did more Googling. Found out that there n my time frame the plant was owned by Diamond Shamrock. That was nice to find. But still did not lead to pics. Had another idea. I know the basic layout from the aerial photo. I just need to know what a mercury process building looks like. Well turns out there are photos of those.

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So using this photograph to help I made a paper template of my space and started drawing. Came up with this:

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Got it on the layout and threw some foam on it to get a feel.

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What do you think?

[chessie system fan]

I like the look of the plant.  Do you know the radii of those curves?

[samusi01]

Did some poking around and found a 1971 image of your plant... not sure if helpful or not. Looks to have been a busy place.

[Specter3]

Yeah, that curve in is extremely tight. But the only thing that might traverse it would be a switcher engine or RS3. May not make the final cut either. But I figured I would draw it on and see.

Samusi that is a great shot that I had not found. Thanks!!

[samusi01]

@Specter3

It's an excerpt of a 153MB tif found over at USGS EarthExplorer (https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/). Free login required, select the area you are interested in, select the data set (I only bother with Aerial Photo Single Frames) and browse through the results.



The red quad shows the area I selected to use for searching images.

The specific image ID is AR6187004800791 - you can try searching it, I've not ever tried that.

When looking at images, click the icon highlighted with a red arrow to preview on the map. Note that sometimes images are rotated and one must account for that. The blue arrow points to the download icon.

[Specter3]

That is massivly helpful. I sure do appreciate it!!!