E&N Malahat mountain range free-mo-N modules.

[craigolio1]

I’ve been making great progress on my Malahat Mountain modules lately and have had some people asking questions about it. I don’t know why I never did a build thread on it, but I figured I’d start one now just for fun.

The Malahat mountain range is on Vancouver Island, a few KM north of Victoria. In the middle is Gold Stream Provincial Park.

The Esquimalt & Nanaimo Rly (which was absorbed by the CPR in the early 1900’s and became the E&N subdivision) crosses the mountain range on its way north, and includes two spectacular bridge crossings. These two bridge crossings were to form the basis of these modules.

The first is the Niagara Canyon bridge. The original crossing was a timber trestle built in the late 1800’s.





 It was replaced with a steel structure in 1908. The exact bridge used was actually the original bridge built to cross the Fraser River when the CPR was first constructed. That’s right. After building it in England and shipping it to around the world and up the Fraser, roughly 10 years later they took it all down, moved it across Georgia Straight, and up to the top of the Malahat. These projects baffle my mind.



The design is a double cantilever pin connected truss bridge which is 525’ long, which when built was an engineering marvel, so it is well documented.

The bridge and the E&N right of way form the Western boundary of Goldstream Park, and is a popular hiking destination. I’m not sure of the exact history but the area around this park was all logged at some point, how ever a lot of the forest east of the ROW was spared. I believe it was private land being held for some scheme to do with water, and in the 1950’s became a provincial park. At any rate, much of the old growth forest was spared which makes it a very special place. Its ease of access means it has been well documented on the internet with loads of good photos and drone footage available.

In the picture below we are viewing it from the east or park side. On the left you can see the trails leading up to the bridge.



A few KM north is the Arbutus Canyon. It’s crossed by a steel deck plate bridge very much like those offered by Micro Engineering. This area has no trail access which makes it harder for the Instagram yoga crowd to get to, so it is not nearly as well documented.




This crossing was also originally a timber trestle that was replaced by steel in the early 1900’s.





The original bridge was maybe 10m farther upstream. To the right of the bridge in this picture.




What’s really cool with this bridge is the the original grade alignment that led to the timber trestle was reactivated at different times on both the north and south sides of the bridge. In my modelling period there was a siding installed on the original ROW that was used for a bridge maintenance project, the rails later removed.  On the north side there was a project in the 70s I believe. That track was left in place and is now grown over in the woods. It’s barely visible from the ROW but once you go into the woods it’s right there like an Easter egg.





In the picture below, the ROW that’s in use, or was - it’s been abandoned at least ten years now, is in the back.



I’ll be modelling both of these.

A little farther North up the line is the E&Ns only tunnel. It’s about 120ft long and on a curve.



Unfortunately I don’t have space to model it on my home layout but I might make an additional module for it later on. More on that later.

The plan:

My layout room is kind of odd. It’s 20ft long and 6.5’ wide. It was supposed to be a cold room and is under my front porch. It’s has one narrow entrance and no windows!  Perfect.

I designed my layout to have two permanent turns at each end, and down each side is a serried of Free-mo-N compliant modules which can be removed to travel with.

This series of modules consists of four models and is a total of 14’ long. The left most module is Niagara, followed by a super elevated curved and MOW siding.  This leads into the Arbutus Canton module and finally on the far left is a very short one which has the original right of way hidden in the forest.

Construction started with the two bridge sections. Here you can see Niagara and Arbutus in place on wall brackets. (That was a bad idea - they got legs soon after this).



Here is Niagara with a wooden standin for the bridge, which is made to scale.







And Arbutus.



Arbutus was to be made from Micro-Engineering and Atlas parts so I made a foam board and wood standin based on the size of those components.







This is the section between the two bridges which will have the MOW siding.



This is the end section which will have the hidden bit of original ROW.



And here’s the whole thing on my garage floor.



That’s all for now. It will take me a while to bring this up to date.

Craig.

[Dwight in Toronto]

Thank you for sharing the history, backstory, and wonderful photos … big thumbs-up re: the research.
Modules are going to look phenomenal - hope to see them at one of your upcoming meets someday!

[craigolio1]

Thank you for sharing the history, backstory, and wonderful photos … big thumbs-up re: the research.
Modules are going to look phenomenal - hope to see them at one of your upcoming meets someday!

Thanks man. You can always swing by and see it in my basement. You just can’t tell anyone about the mess!

[craigolio1]

Once I had the landforms carved it was time to add rocks. Over the years I’ve amassed a pile of rocks collected from my yard as I’ve been digging.

I used the age old method of painting on latex followed by a layer of cheese cloth to make molds. I believe I did three layers.

I made my castings with plaster of Paris.



Initially I did them in white but began adding black acrylic paint to the mix to make them grey. I remember reading this somewhere so that chips don’t look so stark.



I used large pieces, broke some of them up, and used small broke bits to fill in gaps. Basically just trying lots of arrangements until I like what I had. I good them all in place with construction adhesive. I did this because I seem to accumulate partial tubes of the stuff. It’s not the greatest choice though as it’s crazy hard to cut once it’s dry. Latex caulk would be better.

I also had a partially used can of spray foam around and at some point experimented with this for filling in gaps. It worked well but I wouldn’t buy it for this purpose. It’s a pretty expensive gap filler.



To fill in gaps between castings I used this really cool cake icing plunger that my daughter bought. I filled it with a loose mixture of Sheetrock 20 (fast drying powdered dry-wall compound) and squirted it into the cracks. It worked great!!!  Don’t tell my daughter.



After it dried a bit I used balls of tin foil to stamp detail into it.



Along the way I began building the river beds as well. I used broken bits of rock castings and pieces of cedar bark to get the basic forms, (bought in a big bag at Home Depot for cheap!) .



I also bought a big bag of lime stone screenings and sifted it through various dollar store strainers to get half a dozen grades. I used this to further detail the river beds and also stated working on some fills and embankments as such.

For example, when Arbutus was realigned, the made a fill on the mountain side so the ROW could be moved to the left. Here’s my representation of that.



The way brain works doesn’t allow me to finished things in the appropriate order, and at some point I decided I needed to start trees. Here’s the beginning of some 150-200 footers which will be made using @grove den method.

[Scottl]

This looks so good.  The river bed is spectacular!

[craigolio1]

This looks so good.  The river bed is spectacular!

Thanks Scott!!!  It’s way farther along though!!!  Just need time to find all the pics.

Craig

[CNR5529]

Needs more trees 

Seriously though, @craigolio1 had the Malahat out at last year's Doubleheaders layout tour for a shakedown run befor the serious forestation scenery work started, and already it stole the show on the FreemoN layout. The views were spectacular with the trains soaring hundreds of feet over the valley floor.

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[craigolio1]

Needs more trees 

Seriously though, @craigolio1 had the Malahat out at last year's Doubleheaders layout tour for a shakedown run befor the serious forestation scenery work started, and already it stole the show on the FreemoN layout. The views were spectacular with the trains soaring hundreds of feet over the valley floor.

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Oh man you ruined the story line!!!  I’m almost at the Gong Show where I built that bridge. Remember when it twisted?!!!

[CNR5529]

Bahahaha I completely forgot about that!!!! Time to get out the popcorn, again.

[craigolio1]

Once the landforms were all in, the modules got a coat of brown latex paint.



And then a coating of glue and a bunch of dirt from my garden. The dirt was killed in the oven and then scattered onto the glue. I didn’t sift it. I left small clumps and such to give the ground some nice texture.

I see here I have track down. Nothing special here as it’s just a single track. However there is a fast trax #10 curved turn out and the curve is elevated. I used Micro-Engineering C55 flex track and Atlas Z scale rail joiners. More on that later.



Once I had the tracks in I needed a way to install the modules at home and on the road, and quickly align them. The two main modules are quite heavy. They each have two sets of legs…. One set to set them up on the floor, and another to set them up on my shelf. (I abandoned the wall mounted brackets as they were sagging). The two smaller modules don’t have legs. They bolt to the larger modules and to the two permanent turns in my basement.

I came up with a very simple levelling system. These L shaped things have threaded inserts and screw to the bottoms of the module end plates.





Now the smaller modules just rest on those and can be very quickly aligned by turning the screws underneath. Once aligned bolts through the end plates capture everything into place. I can get the whole module set installed in my basement in about 30 minutes.



With the modules in… I was running trains!! Well more like staging them.

[craigolio1]

the next project I wanted to tackle was to build the Arbutus Canyon bridge.





One neat feature of this bridge is that the south end of it is curved and super elevated.



I used the wooden deck portion of my standing as a template and cut a combination of Micro-Engineering and Atlas parts to fit.



The longer parts have curved bottoms which met the profile of the ME parts on the towers.





I had originally planned to use ME C55 bridge flex track,  but as I studied the bridge more, I saw that the ties were aligned with the bridge sections and not curved with the rails like flex track would be, so instead I used Central Valley tie sections from their truss bridge kit, which are available as separate parts.

I cut some ties out so they could be replaced by PCB ties for soldering the rails on.



To attach the rails I made a whole bunch a track gauged by cutting styrene squares and rubbing them back and forth over a piece of flex track until they wore down to the height of the ties.



I spaced them every inch or so and applied JB Weld epoxy to the ties under the rails.

After which I slid PCB ties in and soldered them in place.

[craigolio1]

Next came painting.

The prototype is very rusty these days.



Les so in my modelling period but it still needs to look like it’s 80 years old and spends most of its life getting rained on.

I decided to use the Kosher salt technique.

First I shot it with Rustoleum brown primer.



Then wet it down and applied Kosher salt.



And then shot it with Rustoleum flat black.



The result was awesome!! 



With a bit of softening and blending I would have the look I wanted.

[craigolio1]

And then it happened.

I noticed a rail had popped off.



Why did a rail pop? It was in the same climate controlled environment all night. Up investigating I saw that one of the ME sections had twisted like the blade of a hockey stick. The only thing I could think of is that the paint attached the plastic.



I disassembled the bridge and tried to fix the parts with hot water but it was a lost cause. I had to rebuild and repaint that section. This time I used a Tamiya primer before I shot the Rustoleum.







The bridge went back together and the finished product was perfect…. But I didn’t take a picture. If basically looked the same.

[craigolio1]

Some time after I finished the model, I had an opportunity to head out to BC and actually visit the bridge!!

My eldest son was going to U Ottawa and was on their swim team. He was competing at the National University Swimming Championships , aka U-Sport and U-Vic was the host school! I accompanied him and spent most of my time supporting him at the pool.

But as it turned out I had one day free and my sister, an avid outdoors person, agreed to make the hike with me!



BC Parks and the ICF doesn’t want anyone going on the trestle but the Instagram yoga bunch are unstoppable and have cut holes in all of the fences.






Alas, there hasn’t been a train on this bridge in over ten years so we felt comfortable trespassing…. Plus we had to to hike to Arbutus. It is not patrolled and there is no video surveillance. Haha.




We hiked to Arbutus and happened upon some slack liners who were using the end of the bridge for their craft. Very cool.



It was a beautiful day.



The real gold of this hike was to be able to look down at the creek and the bridge supports.

I was very careful not to drop my phone!




People who hike and take pictures here don’t look down very often so I had no idea what was down there.

[Dwight in Toronto]

It’s really fascinating how the desire for, and adherence to modelling authenticity is the culmination of a veritable cross-continental adventure.  Good on ya, mate!