I'm not (yet) going to plan what to do on my BA&W analog specifically, at least in terms of what buildings do I want to have and stuff like that, but I do want to talk about it at a high level. The "launch" module will actually be in two parts. It occurs to me that although Olson's book suggests that that BA&W was an addition that he thought of and added after the main 4x8 J&S was complete, that this is instead merely an artifact of the writing in post. WIP stuff in the early chapters seem to indicate that the track heading off of the 4x8 to the 2x6 BA&W "expansion" were already there from the very beginning. In this day and age when amateur content providers are replacing professional ones on mediums like blogs and YouTube vlogs and elsewhere, we're finding much more about projects than we did when they were articles in monthly magazines. People can post daily hour-long videos of themselves painting a single structure or engine, or whatever. We have an overabundance of information on projects that we follow, although what we follow is a cottage industry rather than everyone in the hobby reading the same 3-4 page printed articles. But a perhaps unanticipated consequence of all this context we have is that the way it was done in the early 80s when the J&S articles were written is that we can see how it was all arranged in an almost narrative-like structure, where it appears as if things were done one after another, because that's how they talk about it (and in some cases they strongly imply or even state that it was so), but in reality that's not how it was done at all. The reality was much more organic, with all of this stuff being worked on in parallel, not in sequence. This narrative structure comes across as a kind of quaint affectation related to the medium, at best, although in today's environment of cynical, mistrusting consumers of what is obviously fake news vs the total transparency of bloggers and vloggers, it comes across as borderline dishonest. I don't think that was it's intent at all, so I go for the more charitable interpretation. Either way, I'm going to plan on building the BA&W analog along with my J&S analog, in parallel, "at launch." I haven't yet completely figured out how it will attach to future planned modules, and most likely some after-the-fact modification may be made to the scenery at the very edge to make it fit (at the least), it's still my intention to finish what are two conceptual modules, the initial 4x8 and the narrower spur/bridge, at the same time. Probably later today, I'll talk about my admittedly vague plans for the subsequent modules, but for now, let's talk a bit about how I'm going to change the BA&W concept to be my Mirabeau spur/bridge.
And I also don't want to talk too much about my modular strategy, but in order to do this, I think I need to address both it and a few other minor questions as well. In a nutshell, and I'll talk about this in more detail later, my modular strategy is to have major and minor modules, a major module being like the original 4x8 J&S, and a minor module being like the BA&W 2x6 spur. In the case of the first two modules, I'm going to build them both together (like Olson himself seems to have done, honestly) and I want to have them complete before I really start working on additional modules, so I can use them while the others are in progress. Few model railroaders, in fact none that I know of, see adding additional 4x8 loop modules as a viable way to expand an existing 4x8 layout, narrower spurs/bridges to connect them or not, but that's what I'm going to do. This is not only to ease construction, but also so I can have complete stuff to run while the additional modules in are being worked on, and also to be able to treat them separately if needed. I imagine that in order to facilitate the illusion of travel that I'll do loops across a single module, sometimes, to simulate miles traveled in that territory, rather than having to loop across the entire layout. Each module will be geologically quite distinct, with the second 4x8 module being focused on forested hills and mountains that resemble Appalachia in many ways and will heavily feature the coal industry, and the third module being a western Rocky Mountains analog that features more mining and logging as the signature industries. Because of the nature of Ruritanian America as I envision it, there's not really any place for major urban or waterfront scenery (I suppose I could have a major river port at some point, but I have no plans to do so.)
Let me first establish some context. The initial module, as I've said before, will be heavily based on the J&S, including mimicking almost exactly the track plan and layout of towns, structures and industries, albeit with some customization. A copper mine on the long spur will be the signature industry, up in the Lamar Mountains which will be relatively low-elevation, desert-scrub mountains not unlike the Chisos, Chinati or Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas, or most especially the Davis Mountains in and around the small town of Fort Davis in Jeff Davis County, Texas. The major settlement in this module will be the town of Jefferson. In addition to a freight house with a team track slash LCL dock, there will be a passenger station here, and a small stockyard servicing the stock of the various ranches out in the (unmodeled, mostly) hinterlands. In addition to such obvious railroady services like a water tower, this gives three potential reasons to stop, spot cars, pick up cars, etc. in Jefferson: passengers, cattle and LCL loads. Track arrangements in Jefferson include both a passing siding and a short spur which will be in the interior of the loop around the module. Jefferson is also where one of the tracks that heads off to the BA&W analog starts (more on that later.) I'm considering making a small change to the J&S track plan. Where there is a spot that has an old narrow gauge leftover, really just a scenic element coming off of the mainline that looks like a place where track used to be before the rail was pulled up for scrap, I'm considering making that an actual tiny working spur, and considering it one end of an interchange track with the great world outside of my model railroad, so that freight from this end of the railroad can be sent in for use within the railroad, or passed through the railroad to a future interchange on the last module, representing some kind of thru-traffic of sort that just passes through. If I do do this, it will have to be small. There won't be room for more than one or two cars to be left at the interchange track. But I like what it does to operational possibilities. And I'm not even an operational-focused type of guy at all.
In addition to Jefferson, there will be two other significant stops on the original J&S module; Davis, the tank town which will have a freight depot or LCL dock, as well as obvious locomotive services. While the trains are stopped, however, some traffic of goods (and occasionally even people) to load or unload on occasion for customers who are closer to Davis than to Jefferson will happen. While in a literal sense to get from Jefferson to Davis you simply go around the foreground curve of the loop (or the background curve, maybe, if you're heading the other direction) the two scenes will be separated enough by vertical elements to plausibly imply that they are further apart then they actually are. This illusion will probably be maintained by requiring at least two full circuits around the full loop in order to represent distance before a train can claim to have traveled from one to the other. The final stop, on the other hand, will be up the long, steep spur that starts at the nearest edge of the loop, travels over a bridge above Jefferson and ends in the hills on the far distant edge of the layout. This will be the Lamar copper mine, in the Lamar Mountains. From either Jefferson or Davis (or to Jefferson or Davis, for that matter) will also require two loops across the countryside before taking the spur to represent distance traveled. This is a big second reason why I actually like the 4x8 loop as the basis for new modules; it allows me to do looping within the same ecological zone to represent travel. (The first being that I like the ease of construction and the "complete" and potentially autonomous feel that each module will have.) I know operational and prototype replicator type modelers probably don't really understand this approach, but that's OK. Not to be deliberately antagonistic, but I don't really understand their joyless, spergy parody of the hobby either.
Now I say autonomous, but in reality, I will see the BA&W analog as an integral part of this module in many ways, and although you obviously can't loop this analog into the distance runs, it will be an important stop anyway. To get to Mirabeau, the small town represented here, will require twice as many loops (four) from any stop on the Jefferson/Davis module, but there will be significant reasons to do so on probably almost every run of the train. For one thing, locomotive services will be reduced to (in direct modeling, anyway) just water towers at Jefferson and Davis, while at Mirabeau, there will be a small little yard of sorts with an ash pit and a coal depot in addition to the water tower, and an implied service/repair area (although that probably won't be directly modeled in the interest of space.) Therefore, it will be important for trains to make periodic stops at Mirabeau. Although there's a lot that's implied rather than explicitly modeled, I'm not intending to imply that either Jefferson or Davis is sufficient to keep locomotives out there running indefinitely. Regular stops at Mirabeau are important for regular upkeep, refueling, etc.
When I say small yard, that's maybe an overstatement. There is an area with several close spurs that, like a yard, allow for switching of small trains. However, these tracks have to do double-duty, as is often the case on small, short line type pikes, and they will also service some local industries while they're at it.
In addition to the railroad industry itself being an important reason for Mirabeau's existence, I intend to imply another major industry here. If I'm implying Trans-Pecos Texas rather than central Arizona, like Olson did, then I probably should have focused more on ranching and oil rather than ranching and copper mining, given that copper mining is a fleeting thing in Texas. I'm going to do it anyway, because I really like the visual of a copper mine, even if mine doesn't end up looking exactly like Furlow's Folly no. 1 (and it likely won't.) But Mirabeau will be where the oil industry takes over. Like everything else in Ruritanian America, this isn't a major corporatized affair, however—small, localized, "mom and pop" industries are the order of the day, even when you're talking about drilling and refining. Actually the drilling and refining will all happen "off screen" and rather than crude being transported by rail to the refineries, it will be transported by small pipeline to local small refineries. This will then be outbound by additional short pipelines to local distributors. And this is where the railroad comes in. At Mirabeau, I intend to have a few tanks modeled (not unlike how the BA&W's Grandt's Harbor did, incidentally) and a small office for a refined petroleum distributor, and the capability to pick up tank cars for outgoing delivery.
There will also be another small depot and pickup for passengers and LCL freight, as there probably will be at every little town along the pike, but I'm actually intending to see Mirabeau as a bigger, almost boomtown type of place. I'm considering a small (tiny really) sawmill here too, if I can make room and make it feel natural. Keystone has a small sawmill kit called Danby (111) and Woodland Scenics has the even slightly smaller Buzz's Sawmill (5044) or the even tinier Rural Sawmill (243.) If I can fit it, a scrapyard on the other side of the track from the sawmill would be a good addition too, as well as giving yet one more address to potentially spot cars. This sawmill is kind of a preview of coming attractions, as the lumber camp isn't intended to be modeled until module 3, however. But by preparing in advance for it by having an industry serviced by the lumber way back in module 1, I leave open more interesting operational facilities. Note that I don't have (and neither did Olson) a receiving industry for all those ore cars from the copper mine. In real life there was supposedly a smelter in Clarkdale. So there's another industry to add somewhere in a future module, if I can make one small enough to be feasible.
All of this would be concentrated on the left 5-6 feet or so of the 2x8 foot spur, however. The industries and car spotting addresses would give way eventually to a few small buildings that are not related to the railroad, but will be scenically interesting; small shacks on docks and wharves that hang out over a shallow bayou. This gives me the opportunity to put out the too late to be funny by the time I build it in-joke of Biden & Son Swamp Tours on a tiny shack with a few rowboats. In addition to this little swampy village outskirts, I'd like to build a little shanty town with some tents and other temporary structures. Just a few; three or four would establish the concept nicely. Now, I said earlier that Ruritanian America doesn't have a central bank or fiat currency, and that bank panics, over speculation, and all that were more a thing of the northeast, which caused the Great Depression. That said, itinerant workers jumping trains and living in shantytowns is a pretty iconic visual to establish the vaguely 1930s-like time frame of the railroad. And it gives me an interesting detail to model on some of the empties that I'll have floating around on the railroad all of the time. And even if there isn't a Great Depression in my alternate history timeline, there's still probably hobos hopping around looking for work in what is essentially a primitive "frontier" region. And since Mirabeau is supposed to be a relatively booming town, it makes perfect sense that shantytowns might have sprung up when the worker population increased beyond the ability of accommodations to keep up with.
All of this Mirabeau detail is quite small, and will occupy an area of only about 2x6-7 or so max; the rest of the extension will be scenery, and track extension and elevation to enter the next module. Not to say that there won't be any countryside structures out there on the track extensions; in fact, I strongly suspect that there will be some kind of little diorama like scene there. I just don't know what it will be yet. Maybe I'll need a bit more of that space for what I want Mirabeau to be after all. But either way, I want to have a little space to model the bayou with lily pads, alligators, cypress trees and live oaks draped in Spanish moss. This also accommodates the transition into the forested pseudo Appalachia module which will be next.
The Mirabeau spur will be operationally fairly complex, with a fair bit of switching, several "addresses" for the train to visit and plenty for it to do, in a very small space. It will also offer a lot of tantalizing modeling and setting-building opportunities, which I find an attractive prospect. I am a little concerned that I'm trying to do too much in too little space, and when I try to actually fit it in, I'll struggle and maybe something will have to be cut. But let's be optimistic and I'll also have to be careful, judicious, and economical in my use of space. But there should be plenty of room, I think, if I do indeed do so. Let me post once again Olson's plan, reminding you that I'll have a little bit more space on the right end of it, but that in terms of track, I'll need to use most of it just to get the attachments to the next module, which should mirror the first foot or two of on the left hand side in most respects. By using the real estate along the back wall, along both sides of the "mainline" double track, and along the various sidings, and shifting most of the water scenery that he has further to the right, I should have plenty of room, I think, as long as I keep my structures, industries and scenery small and suggestive rather than "prototype" scaled.
Although very rough, here's an idea of what I expect my new revised track plan to look like. Ignore the structures, the water and the very rough mouse-drawn track clean-up, and just focus on the track plan itself, and I think you've got a pretty good idea of what I'm going to do.
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