Finished Track Plan

Finished drawings are listed on the left of the Blog screen. I'm very interested in getting your comments before I call this complete. Thanks! Scottgperry@comcast.net.


Final overall track plan.

Benchwork drawing.


Track and Grade detail.

Structures.

Let's Build an Adobe House

"Senior, this is a REALLY small house you are building for me!"
- Pedro

I'm fired up and can't walk, so let's go down to the basement and build an adobe house. I've drawn the plans and have gotten tips on how to build it from Colin Claxon, so this should be quick. Here are the drawings:





Oops...forgot to put the scale on there. This is o scale, and the grid marks are one foot square.

Update: the font and rear elevations were updated as I dropped the vigas (wood roof supports) down so that they are one foot from the top of the structure.

Ole Adobe!

"Be it every so humble, there's no place like a square box made out of mud bricks in the middle of the hot sun. Wait, is that rain coming?"
- Peppy

I love adobe structures! That's one of the main reasons I wanted to look at modeling the Mexican railroads. While I've never built one I'm thinking they would be fairly simple to construct.

Here are some photos...
The smooth and curving sides...solid wood doors...
Large wooden supports over windows and doors, thick and rugged bricks...
Teh ubiquitous wooden roof supports and the earthen colors...
The broken away stucco and the arches...
Oh...and the bullet holes.

Such character these buildings have! I'm thinking I'll start with a small square house. It can be the jump off place for several structures as the are all cubic in shape for the most part.


Here is a sketch I've made of a simple home using the key features that I find so attractive in adobe buildings. My thought is to cast plaster sides and then assemble and round off the corners by sanding. I'm open for other construction ideas.

Ok, my daughter wanted to draw, so I sat down with her and sketched a few more using her watercolor pens.


I decided that the town of Agua Caliente needed a bar. Why not use Rose's Cantina?Greasy Gonzalez's Oil Depot will need to stand out a bit more than this, but its a start.
The enginehouse needs to be a focal point on the back side, so it may include some interior details. I'm going to use Colin Claxon's fine "garage" model as a design base for this structure.

On30 Group Member Colin Claxon is a fantastic adobe structure builder and I'm learning from his work.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/On30/photos/album/953421824/pic/list

He says...

Scott,

The "barn" is 3/16 foam core with Durham's water putty over it. Some of the structures are 3/16 balsa. The exposed adobe brick are Fimo modeling clay. It was painted with washes of acrylic craft paint.(painted wet on wet) If you build one, the vigas go over the shortest distance not like I did it.

Thanks for the nice words.. Do check out Tom Yorkes models. They are quite good.

Colin Claxon

To learn about adobe architecture go to:
http://www.ihomesmagazine.com/newmexico/architecture.htm

And Now - Commerce

"The business of railroading is business"
- Peppy

Ok, so we have a mine and a smelter. We'll run trains back and forth. Oh goodie. Surely there has to be more than that? Of course there is!

In order to understand what our railroad does, let's make a flow chart of the industries and how they interact.

Let's start with what we know. We know there is a mine and a smelter. So the silver ore moves from the mine to the smelter and they smelt it. Once they get the silver out, which is only a fraction of the rock that was brought there, they have tons of rock laying around. Maybe we can haul some of it back to the mine for fill dirt?

So, you ship silver ore to the smelter and they smelt it. Then what? Just sit on piles of silver? Oh no. They must have a customer!

The customer, represented by the cloud symbol, is off line. Probably a merchant of silver bullion or a jewelry manufacturer. Since we can't model the whole world, we'll say that the Mexican Central Railroad is the customer since they are so nice to take the silver off our hands in boxcars. Likewise, the smelter will need supplies. Smelting requires machinery, lubricants, fuel and lots of other commodities including chemicals. So the smelter becomes the customer of the MCRR. See how this works?

Well, what about the mine? They need supplies, too, because they have machinery and commodity needs. In that case, we'll add the mine supply warehouse. It will interface with the MCRR and accept deliveries for the mine. Now we have commerce going back and forth between all industries including our "invisible" industry, the MCRR.
I guess our locomotives are going to run on thin air or whatever Obama says they are allowed to run on, right? Incorecto, por favor! The mine and its trains run on black gold: oil. So we better provide them with some. We'll need a fuel oil distributor. Since the locos are going to buy this oil, we better set up the locomotive repair shop as an industry. We'll also send oil to the mine. To make things even more interesting, we are going to sell some bagged high-grade ore directly to the MCRR by way of boxcar.
Of course you know that without people, the whole process stops. So we better figure out a way to get folks from off the railroad up to the mine since there are no Corvettes or Ferraris in 1900. Over the rugged mountain terrain even a mule will have a hard time, so we'll add some passenger service to our mix. We'll start by adding three stations, one "invisible" and off line, and the other two represented by real depots on the layout.

There! We have a really good sketch of commerce on the railroad with key industries and supporting industries represented and an "off layout" world that we can interact with! Again, this is our sketch and we may change it later.

Digging Into Ojuela Mine

"2,000 feet of elevation makes me dizzy. More tequila!"
- Peppy

The Ojuela mine is about 2,000 feet in elevation per the topo map.
This fairly flat plain on top of the mountain made for a good place to shuttle rail cars.


Click on this photo to enlarge. You can see the detail of the operation. It appears that many of the structures are still in good enough shape to figure out what they are. The bridge is in good shape. It will take a while to figure out what all the items are in the photo, but we won't go to deep because we won't have the room to model them on a small layout.

Designing the Layout - What Does it Do?

"My philosphy of railroading? Get it from here to there as quickly and cheaply as possible. That leaves more time for tequila!"
- Peppy

When you are planning to build a layout, planning is a key part of the process and one that should be given the utmost importance. For the Penoles Mining Railroad (PMR) we need to start with the first and most important question:

What does the railroad do?

For the answer we must go to the prototype. The Penoles takes silver ore from the mines down steep inclines to the smelter where it is processed and shipped out by rail to the cities who use it. There! We have a purpose. Moving silver ore. We have an origin (mines) and a destination (smelter).

Time and place are important for many reasons. While we don't want to be too prototypical (which takes lots of our modeling time and oh so many pesos) we do want to capture a snapshot in time so that our modeling can be targeted to the time period, which adds realism. For this layout we'll need to use 1900, plus or minus a few years. The place, why Ojeula, Mexico of course!

Once you have a time and place, the next thing is to look for key features on the prototype that you want to represent on the layout that make the layout feel like the prototoype. Notice I didn't say look like the prototype. There is a difference. In this case the mine alone is large enough in O-scale to consume an entire basement. The suspension bridge is over 1,000 feet long, which is over 20 real feet long! What we want to capture is "flavor".

Flavor in this case will mean sleep slopes, inclines, the suspension bridge, the rocky countryside and the mine.

So our layout will have a mine and a smelter. Also a suspension bridge. That was easy! In order to maintain locomotives we'll need some kind of service buildings. We'll also need a town where people live that work in the mines and probably some miner's homes.


Summary:

Purpose: move silver ore from the mines to the smelter

Time and Place: 1900's Ojuela, Mexico

Key Features: silver mine, smelter, suspension bridge, town, engine servicing facilities