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LAYOUT DESIGN
The Hampton & St Martins Railway is built in an L-shaped 18x25-foot area in my basement. It is a hybrid of multi-level and multi-deck designs. Railway construction started around the year 2000 as a multi-level layout - background scenery extending from one level to the next level.
I soon realized a major flaw in my design - too much hidden track. This was caused in part by the mistaken need to have every village located at a proper elevation relative to its neighbours - Henry Lake and the Gully Bridge were at the highest elevation on the railway and St Martins was at sea level. Trying to replicate the elevation change created about 60 feet of very hidden and mostly inaccessible track.
And so started the process of redesign and rebuild. Progress was slow; periods of up to 6 months went by where I did nothing on the layout. Then a moment of inspiration would take me to the basement for a couple of weeks of intense activity only to be followed by another lengthy pause. My biggest breakthrough was in 2009 moving St Martins from a peninsula on the bottom level to a new deck on the highest part of the railway. This eliminated the inaccessible track.
I just had to adjust to the idea that sea level was now at the highest point of my layout - that does come up for discussion occasionally :-)
In 2012, several changes occurred adding the Hammondvale ore concentrator, the Glebe Mine area and Patterson Siding as well as widening the Barnesville yard. The following two pan photos show many of the changes. The first photo is from 2012 as I was considering making changes. The second photo is 2017
CONSTRUCTION
Construction is mainly L-girder typically using 3/4" plywood cut to nominal 1x2 and 1x4 lumber dimensions. Plywood was used to minimize issues with seasonal expansion, shrinkage and warping
The exceptions to the use of L-girder are the upper decks which have been built using metal L-brackets mounted to the wall
The sub roadbed is mainly 3/4" plywood. The location in this photo is a hidden area behind Hampton where the St Martins branch (inside track) climbs to meet the CN mainline (outside track) as they come around the loop entering Hampton.
St Martins on the other hand, was built entirely on 2" styrofoam with the intent to make it easier to install trees. In hindsight, this wasn't a great idea. The styrofoam joints are not as easy to level and ground-mounted turnout throws are much more difficult to anchor securely
Tying the 3 levels of the layout together is a 4-turn helix approximately 52" in diameter with a 1.7% grade.
The outside track is the main line connecting staging to the Saint John yard. The helix is made of two layers of 1/4" Meranti plywood with the joints offset to provide smooth transitions. You may notice the vertcal bracing on the bottom two turns of the helix is notched out - the result of correcting a mistake......passenger cars couldn't clear the bracing on the double track section.......... live and learn !
The bottom two turns are double-tracked; the inside track is the start of the branchline's 4-turn climb from Upham to Patterson Siding.
Vegetation on the layout is dense - 100 trees covers only a few square inches, making it the most important scenic element on the layout. The total number I would need made it easy to decide to make my own rather than buy them. The earliest trees were made of wild spirea, but I found they became too brittle once they dried. All the trees on the layout are now astilbe and oregano, gathered over several years from my own garden and from a friend who had a good planting of astilbe (thanks Dave) - both seem to retain their flexibility over the years. Both plants are harvested in the fall after the first frost once the seed tops have turned brown. At first I stored them in a grocery bag, but found they tended to flatten permanently if left to dry laying down. I now store them standing up speared into a block of styrofoam.
With a bit of trimming, astilbe (dark green tree at the centre) does a good job representing conifers such as fir and spruce. Clusters of oregano make a very passable hardwood tree (lighter green on left next to the building roof). I first create a finished shape with the oregano by gathering together 3-4 flower tops and wrap the bases together with floral tape (available from craft stores, such as Michael's). For both astilbe and oregano, the tree tops are dipped into a 50/50 mixture of water and glue, the stalk is spun between my fingers to remove the excess, sprinkled with various shades of ground cover, then planted immediately.
Shrubs and small trees are either Woodland Scenics Clump Foliage or small leftovers from the tree-making process
SCENERY
The topography and vegetation of the region is a series of heavily-forested hills and valleys in a northeast-to-southwest orientation, at right angles to the general direction of the railroad. From Hampton to St Martins, the railway's elevation changes quickly from near sea level to over 200 feet then dropping through a series of wide curves into the Hammond River valley. Several miles later, it crosses the River and claws its way to a height of almost 600' before a precipitous drop again to sea level at St Martins.
The model railroad attempts to depict the hilly character of the area. Except where rivers have carved their course into the terrain, there is not a lot of exposed bedrock. During the last Ice Age, glaciers smoothed out the contours and left a thick layer of gravel and till. The layout terrain is created using mulitple layers of styrofoam stacked and glued together. This was then carved smooth, covered with a layer of dark green or earth coloured paint, and ground cover applied to the wet paint on sloping surfaces. Alternatively on flat areas, the ground cover was usually applied dry, sprayed with "wet" water or alcohol and soaked with a 50/50 mix of white glue and water.
Rockfaces made of applied plaster carved with a palette knife and a metal-bristled brush before the plaster fully set. Once dry, the surface of the rock was painted with various shades of earth colours followed by staining with an India ink or raw umber wash to accent the crevices.
Some astilbe takes a more gnarly form giving me the raw materials to model apple trees. After creating the basic tree, I use a generous application of the cheapest hairspray I can find and sprinkle small plastic beads made by Woodland Scenics. I don't recoat afterwards because the hairspray tends to dissolve the colour on the beads
In this scene of a log loading setup, you may notice a number of stumps. They are actual trees cut from the dead inner branches of a spruce tree.
To create these, I cut the base of the "stump" through the thickest part where two or more branches divide.
The next cuts are made halfway through from each side, one a bit higher than the other representing the undercut and the backcut. This will result in a realistic look and colour - no painting required. An older, weathered stump can be created with a touch of an india ink wash.
TRACK AND TURNOUTS
Rail is entirely Code 100 flextrack on the CN mainline and hidden areas with Code 83 on the branchline. Turnouts are almost entirely Peco Insulfrog with a few Walthers/Shinohara and Atlas turnouts at Barnesville and St Martins. The non-Peco turnouts are all operated using Caboose Industries groundthrows
The layout is powered by a plug-in MRC Prodigy system It has limited power, but suffices when running the railroad by myself. When I have operating sessions, I borrow our club's NCE system with radio-controlled cabs.
BALLAST
On the CN mainline, ballast is a mix of various Woodland Scenics colours.
The model branchline is much like the prototype where the original roadbed was supplemented with cinders and clinkers, residue from the low-grade coal obtained from coal fields 60 miles to the north. Woodland Scenics cinder ballast represents this.
STRUCTURES
Structures on the layout range from ready-to-install on the layout, and plastic kits through craftsman kits, to scratchbuilt. No matter the material used, they have all been selected to fit the style and era for my railroad. Scratchbuilt structures are constructed to match local prototypes and for which no kits exist.
One product that I have had a lot of fun with is the Bar Mills "One-Kit" which is somewhere between a craftsman kit and a scratchbuild. In this photo, the two buildings on the left, and the railway station on the right, were all built using the Bar Mills product
At the other end of the model spectrum, the four background buildings on the far right came from a local dollar store - resin castings intended to be hung on a wall as a key holder. Again, the ones I selected were suitable to the style of architecture found in the area I am modeling, and , as background flats help to create a sense of depth in the scene. The key hooks have been removed in case anyone is wondering.......they were a bit large for HO.
This is a scratchbuild from Dec 2014 using Mt. Albert stripwood and castings from Woodland Scenics and Model Tech Studios. This represents the Reid Bros. sawmill located at Upham. There are a large number of other scratchbuilt structures on the layout, and several what I call semi-scratchbuilt ones using Bar Mills "The One Kit"
Other craftsman kits have come from Bar Mills as well as JL Innovative Design, Dyna Models, Campbell, Branchline's Laser Art kits, B.E.S.T., Railroad Kits, and Mount Blue Model Co. among others
BACKDROPS AND FASCIA
Backdrops on the layout are either the sheetrock outer walls or 3/16" Masonite (also used for the fascias), with handpainted hillsides backing up the scenes
LIGHTING
Lighting is primarily PAR20 Halogen, and recently, LED spotlights. I found that when I later added the upper level decks, the area under the decks were left in shadow, so I added closely spaced Christmas lights mounted on a reflective backing to illuminate these areas
The computer screen on the wall in the first photo is used to display a fast clock, available for free from Dotric Fast Clock. A Google search will find them easily
FREIGHT CARLOADS
Operating a railway with flatcars, gondolas and open-top hoppers benefits from having removable loads to match the movement of cars from its origin and back. The Hampton & St Martins Railway has a number of these car types, so I created two types of loads.
The first is ore loads. I cut a piece of hardboard (Masonite) to fit the inside dimensions of the gondolas or hoppers. Since I have cars from Roundhouse, Tichy , Accurail and Athearn in mine and ballast service, I marked the brand of car on the underside of the hardboard. I then glued a block of styrofoam on the hardboard and carved it to shape, then applied a heavy coat of black paint and, while the paint was still wet, sprinkled crushed stone or ballast on top of the paint.
Log loads and sawn lumber were created in a similar fashion replacing the hardboard with a piece of rigid, clear plastic; the "logs" were then stacked and glued to the plastic
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