Weekend Update 11/30/14

[tehachapifan]

I was having the same problem, but found the Kato Park - I put lamps where they had trees, and removed all of their "plants" and replaced.

Wow! Love this shopping district look! Way cool! Would never have thought to do that but towns everywhere have something similar.

[C855B]

Wow! Love this shopping district look! Way cool! Would never have thought to do that but towns everywhere have something similar.

HAD something similar, at least in our region. The model is eerily similar to the so-called "pedestrian mall" conversion of our downtown a couple of decades ago. I had to look closely to see if it wasn't depicting our mall! Anyway, it was a total bust, as the retailers discovered it drove business away by forcing too far of a walk to parking, especially for quick errands in less-than-ideal weather (which we have a lot of here). Attractive, yes, and made for wonderful architects' sketches, but what John Q. Public said they wanted and where they actually spent their money were two different things.

IOW, good representation of small-city downtowns 1980-2000, but outside of that era, not so much.

[M.C. Fujiwara]

Add some palm trees and call it Third Street Promenade, L.A. 

[craigolio1]

Some beautiful work in here this week, folks!  Jason... love the glowing firebox.   Aren't you going to tell us how you are doing it???   

I took a ride on the Christmas train here in Portland, behind old friend SP&S 4-8-4 #700.   I then finally bit the bullet and back-dated my model.  When I originally made this a few years ago, I used gold heralds and numbers because that's how #700 is painted today.  But in fact, it never wore that herald in real life.  It wore the white herald and then later the simplified thin-line gold.  There was never a wide-band gold emblem.

Since I had the decals made, I had no excuse... so here it is in its 1938 - 1950 scheme:

That looks absolutely real.  I had to double check with the first photo. 

A couple of questions.  Back in the day could a pile trestle have taken the weight of a large loco like that?  I have a smaller line that I'm modelling and I will be running larger locos that never ran on the line mostly due to tighter curves.  I'm wondering if I should make up a reason to show some bridges being upgraded or could those pile trestles really take that weight?

Second, I really like that pin connected truss bridge.  Is that a kit or did you scratch build/kitbash it?  I'd like to hear more about that.

Thanks, Craig

[Angus Shops]

Yes, SP&S 700 is worthy of a double take; perfect. But I agree on the trestle comments in that the structure looks a little light for such a big engine. Perhaps the bents are a bit far apart, and the sill on top of the bents could be a little heavier. These would be hard to fix without a complete rebuild. However, the addition of some cross bracing between the bents would be reasonably easy and increase the mass of the structure. Cross bracing is a critical part of the structure.

Geoff

[Mike Madonna]

Max & Phillip,
Impressive locos with equally impressive scenes! The Steam Locomotive IS a "living, breathing" beast. Each one has it's own inherent traits and "personality". While it is more efficient, the "Diesel" will NEVER capture the imagination of the rail fan, young or old. While I have a fondness for the old F-7 "Black Widows", give me a 2, 3 or 4 cylinder SP steam loco ANYDAY! 

[wazzou]

The spans between bents are typically 15' thus the general use of 30' Stringers.

[mmagliaro]

To address the questions:

1. My bents are not 15' apart.  They are 20'  I cheated a little bit just because I like the aesthetic look of it.
2. A wooden trestle could have carried a big northern, but it would have never had bents spaced as far
apart as mine. 
3. This is not a very high trestle, and I found many photos of trestles that low that had neither cross braces
nor handrails.  I deliberately left the cross braces out because I wanted to be able to see through the trestle to
the scenery behind it.  It was more common to have the cross braces, but again, this was a conscious decision
I made to sacrifice a little prototype realism in exchange for seeing the scenery behind the trestle
from certain angles and when taking photos.

One more thing...  part of how I have gotten some of these bridge shots to look more real was quite by dumb luck.
There is a window to my train room in the background behind this bridge.  If I take the photos
at the right time of day from a low angle, I get a good illumination of natural sunlight on the scene
and that works wonders for making a photo look better.

Oh... and one more more thing...
THANK YOU....  (I'll be addressing the dome and some details on this engine in the weeks to come )

[nkalanaga]

An addition to the trestle comments:  If it was a FRAME trestle, built of sguared posts on sills, it would almost have to have some diagonal bracing between the bents.  A pile trestle, such as this one, relies on the strength of the pilings to resist bending, at least on low bridges.   With several feet of the pile in the hard ground, the rest is fairly rigid, where a frame bent can simply fall over.  Many Northwest logging roads had considerably taller pile trestles with minimal bracing.

As for deck stength, there are usually at least six stringers, three on each side, so it can hold more than it looks like.  Even in the 70s there were a lot of pile trestles on Northwest branch lines, and a few low ones like this on the mainlines.  As he said, his bents are farther apart than normal, but other than that, it isn't an unusual bridge for the area.

By the 70s most of the short, low trestles on the mainlines had ballasted decks, which further strengthened them, and trains crossed them at track speed.  This one would almost certainly have had a speed restriction on it.

[Angus Shops]

OK, I can appreciate your methods for the trestle structure. We all make decisions about how we want to present our models and our layouts. Your reasoning is sound. Number 700 is magnificent.

Geoff

[mmagliaro]

An addition to the trestle comments:  If it was a FRAME trestle, built of sguared posts on sills, it would almost have to have some diagonal bracing between the bents.  A pile trestle, such as this one, relies on the strength of the pilings to resist bending, at least on low bridges.   With several feet of the pile in the hard ground, the rest is fairly rigid, where a frame bent can simply fall over.  Many Northwest logging roads had considerably taller pile trestles with minimal bracing.

As for deck stength, there are usually at least six stringers, three on each side, so it can hold more than it looks like.  Even in the 70s there were a lot of pile trestles on Northwest branch lines, and a few low ones like this on the mainlines.  As he said, his bents are farther apart than normal, but other than that, it isn't an unusual bridge for the area.

By the 70s most of the short, low trestles on the mainlines had ballasted decks, which further strengthened them, and trains crossed them at track speed.  This one would almost certainly have had a speed restriction on it.

Great info!  Thank you!

By the way, my trestle does indeed have stringers running under the track on each side for support.
Each stringer consists of 3 2x12's (I think) with spacer blocks between them like the real thing, although
they don't show in these pictures.

[havingfuntoo]

For those of you working on the #700 check this out http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pre-restoration-view-SP-S-Baldwin-4-8-4-700-Oaks-Park-Portland-OR-1974-/381075522469?pt=Art_Photo_Images&hash=item58b9df03a5

[davefoxx]

I had a few days extra off this past holiday weekend and was able to make a little progress on my layout.  I finished (almost) the next section of road in Aberdeen, North Carolina.  It's not yet permanently glued down, because I need to stain that wood railroad crossing to the right in the picture below.



More over on the Seaboard Central 2.0 thread in the Layout Engineering Forum.

DFF

[carlso]

Dave,

nice looking street and crossing work.

Carl

[tehachapifan]

Dave,

nice looking street and crossing work.

Carl

Agreed! Streets and roads seem to be one of the hardest things to realistically model and yours is one of the best I've seen.