Wordless Wednesday #23

 

It is 5:41 AM on June 23. A westbound grainer comes off the bridge crossing Lake Pend Oreille just south of Sandpoint, ID. The train is pulled by BNSF 4781and 4651 (GE Dash 9-44CW) and pushed by an unknown unit and the BNSF 7871 (GE ES 44DC). Photo by Bob Wilcox.

"Computer: Show me a story about 2021"

The Ponderay Newsprint Mill has been sold to a firm that intends to turn it into a cardboard manufacturing mill and... cryptocurrency farm..?

 https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2021/apr/29/pend-oreille-pud-officials-raise-concerns-about-po/

Wordless Wednesday #22

POVA #102 crosses Kent Creek near Dalkena, WA. Photo by Ted Curphey

Heritage 2 is the 2nd Best BNSF Paint Scheme

Scaletrains strikes again!  After falling in love with my Scaletrains SD40-2, I couldn't help myself and I ended up picking up this beautiful Dash 9 in BNSF's Heritage 2 paint scheme a few months back.  The locomotive runs and sounds great and is the LAST new locomotive that my layout requires at this point to have a full operation session.

The Heritage 2 paint scheme is my second favorite BNSF paint scheme.  What is my first favorite you may ask? Why, the infamous Vomit Bonnet of course! 

Ponderay Newsprint Closes (For now?)

 I've held off from posting this for a bit, but it should be noted that the Ponderay Newsprint Company located in Usk Washington is permanently shutting down.  This closure is a huge blow to the surrounding community and to the POVA itself.

Newspaper reports indicate:

The Pend Oreille Public Utility District previously said the mill - which until recently used about 70% of the utility's electricity - had begun a period of "indefinite idling" after a two-week pause of operations.

The mill, which opened in late 1989, has supplied newsprint for publications in the Midwest, along the West Coast, and in Asia and South America. The plant is jointly owned by Lake Superior Forest Products, a subsidiary of Quebec-based Resolute Forest Products, and five major U.S. publishers, according to its website.

This closure will no doubt have major impacts on the railroad industry in the Pend Oreille valley as the mill was the railroad's largest customer. What will the future of the POVA be like?

Well, apparently the Kalispel Indian tribe is looking to purchase the Newsprint company in hopes of re-opening the mill according to the Spokesman-Review

Tribal vice chair Curt Holmes said the tribe had its chief financial officer review all the possibilities for the plant and its 900 acres, and the primary goal is to reopen the paper mill and restore the jobs that were so vital for the community’s survival.

“I live up on the reservation,” Holmes said. “It’s hard to find economic development opportunities that work up there. My dream is that my kids and other kids, if they choose to stay, can still have meaningful employment up there.”I've grown quite fond of the Pend Oreille Valley over the years as my research has given me a great deal of appreciation for the history, the industry, the people, and the beautiful landscape found in the area. 

Whatever the future of the mill might be, it will always have a special place on my humble, little model railroad.

BNSF Breaks Ground in Sandpoint

- Photo via Bruce Kelly

Looks like the BNSF Railway got their paperwork in order and have begun work on a second bridge crossing Lake Pend Oreille at Sandpoint.  This bridge will allow the railroad to relieve some of the congestion of trains having to wait their turn to cross the nearly mile-long span. Additionally, this new bridge should open up the opportunity for more rail traffic through Sandpoint while reducing delays for local motorists at grade crossings.

POVA on the Cover of a Magazine

A friend in the hobby pointed me to the February issue of Railfan & Railroad where the POVA is featured on the cover of the magazine!  The article itself is very cool and very informative. I learned a lot I did not know about the railroad's history. I also finally got a good, clear sense of day-to-day operations on the modern POVA railroad. This helped to confirm that my freelanced approach to this railroad is indeed prototypical and should serve to re-create the feeling of modern shortline railroading in the pacific northwest nicely.

I must say, it is a bit overwhelming to have such a surge of information arrive on my doorstep after spending years and years trying to slowly piece together the puzzle that is this railroad from various blog postings, pictures, google maps, etc.

Movie Mondays #13

DJ from DJ's Trains has a video up where he shows off some of the key features of short line railroading that make it an ideal subject for model railroaders. Check out this video along with the many more videos he has where he shares his experience as a conductor on a 1:1 scale railroad.

 

Wordless Wednesday #17

An old Great Northern boxcar sits in the former GN yard at Sandpoint, ID in 2017.

Movie Mondays #12

TSG Multimedia has published a good number of videos about Jack Burgess and his stunning model railroad. In his latest video, Jack talks about the amazing structures on his layout and the amount of effort he put into make them as accurate as possible.

Wordless Wednesday #16

A POVA freight  finishes switching Riley Creek Lumber as storm clouds begin to roll in.

Keep Sandpoint Rolling

BNSF has been working up plans for a few years to expand the bridge across the lake at Sandpoint, ID. This upgrade would consist of a second bridge allowing for more future rail traffic and a reduction in congestion.

KeepSandpointRolling.com was created by the company to present their plans as well as the benefits of expanded rail operations for the community.

As a railfan, I am excited by the possibility of more trains, but I do understand the concerns of citizens looking to limit industrial intrusion and preserve their beautiful  piece of the country.

photo credit: Chris Bessler, sandpointonline.com

The Track Plan

(Note: Some minor changes have been made to the track plan since creating the video. See the image attached to this post for the latest schematic.)

Whelp, I've done it. I've finally landed on a track plan for my new layout. This plan is the result of months of design and deliberation. It incorporates nearly all of the features I love in model railroading and should provide me many years of enjoyment. I go in-depth into the design of the track plan in the following video:

The plan is simple, but allows an operator or two plenty of operational enjoyment. If I'm not in the mood for operations, I can even sit back with a beer and enjoy running a couple of trains around in circles. I've included a yard, a nice industrial area, and a couple nice, unencumbered areas where I can enjoy my favorite kind of modeling: Scenery.

True to proto-freelance modeling, the towns and industries located on the layout exist in real life. (though I've taken plenty of liberties with the locations and track arrangement to best serve my needs) The town of Usk stands-in for several towns found in the Pend Oreille Valley and just like on the prototype, the yard at Sandpoint is the valley's connection with the rest of the world. I've also included a few key scenic features found on the prototype including the old Great Northern Depot at Sandpoint, the bridges over the Pend Oreille River, Blueslide tunnel near the crossing of Highway 20, and the iconic Box Canyon Bridge.

(click to view larger)

Let's take a moment to look at the industries represented on the layout and learn about their mostly freelanced (i.e. pretend) histories:

• Lehigh Cement: With operations beginning in 1911, Lehigh Cement is the oldest rail-served industry in the valley, This historic factory once towered over the town of Metaline Falls however, the factory's advanced age along with rail service concerns required the owners to shutter operations at it's original location and build a new, modern plant south at Usk Washington. The factory ships 5-6 2-bay covered hoppers an operating session. 
• Ponderay Newsprint Company: Ponderay has been the one of the valley's largest rail customers since it began operations in 1989. The plant ships around 2-3 boxcars loaded with newsprint an operating session and receives boxcars loaded with recycled paper materials as well as tank cars loaded with kaolin and other chemicals on an as-needed basis.
• Vaagen Bro's Lumber Company: Part of the Idaho Forrest Group, this mill has been supplying America with high quality wood products for decades. Due to a recent lull in the new construction market, the mill only ships 2-3 loads of lumber on center partition cars each operating session. 
• Tri-Pro Poll Mill: The mill Generally ships around 1-2 custom built bulkhead flat cars loaded with poles an operating session.
• Pacific Steel and Recycling: A small employee-owned recycling facility which receives loads of scrap steel and other recyclable products via boxcar and gondola only on occasion.

This plan is sure to change a bit once flextrack meets plywood, but I'm pretty happy with where it stands right now. It was a lot of fun to put together and I can't wait to get started building benchwork!

Am I even proto-freelancing anymore?

I've finished the final version of my track plan and am very happy with it. (a walkthrough video detailing the plan will be coming shortly) The plan is the result of many, many hours of design and research as well as many additional hours of laying awake in bed thinking about that design and research.  The end result is a plan that incorporates all of my "givens and druthers," takes into consideration cost and time constraints, and very closely aligns with the prototype that I am using as inspiration...

...perhaps too closely?

I've always been drawn to proto-freelance-style model railroading. Creating a model that looks and acts like a real railroad without the constraints of having to match a particular prototype seems perfect for me. I will admit that much of my draw towards the freelancing side of the hobby can be attributed to my lack of knowledge about how real railroads operate. In the past, this knowledge gap could have been attributed to the fact that research was so much more difficult and time intensive. As relevant information has become more and more available online, that excuse holds less and less water.

The very earliest iterations of the Metaline Falls Railroad can be traced back to a small LEGO Trains layout I built on a table in my basement over 11 years ago. The layout was very small and limited in it's operation, but I wanted to give it a real-world location and a bit of "legitimacy".  At this point in time, all I was really looking for was a real-world location that had three key features.

1. A Bridge
2. A Tunnel
3. A Cement Industry so I could include my favorite type of railcar: 2-Bay Covered Hoppers

With these three features in mind, I started my search online. Soon enough the old Metaline Falls Branch of the Milwaukee Road (currently owned and operated by the Pend Oreille Valley Railroad) grabbed my attention and an obsession was born.

One of my custom-built locomotives now relegated to display duty on a shelf at the office.

When I finally decided to jump back into more traditional model railroading, I tore down that LEGO layout, but the inspiration that was Metaline Falls survived. I started to research the area more in-depth and found myself fascinated by the history and industry of the area. Although I was very limited by space constraints, I wanted to do the prototype justice. I decided to model the industries on my little layout around the "industrial theme" of the area. Thus, the cement factory took prominence, The real-world paper mill became a paper recycling facility, and the small-diameter lumber mill became an off-layout representation of a pulpwood mill. I even made an effort to include the Box Canyon Bridge and Dam at as close to full-sized as I could for a layout so small.

At this point I really felt like I was leaning into this whole "proto-freelancing" mentality really well.  I was taking inspiration from the real world while going my own way. It's easy when you are working at such a small scale. So many compromises are forced on you that the decisions about what you can and cannot include are pretty much already made for you. It's easy to be a freelancer when being prototypical is completely out of the question.

All of that changed when I decided to expand the layout to fill a decent sized room. Suddenly I had the room to include a respectable representation of the paper mill. I had the room for the lumber mill, and that tunnel, and a more scale representation of the bridge, and don't forget the interchange yard, or the old Great Northern Depot, or that one lumber yard down the river a bit, and while I'm at it I might as well include a trestle, or two...

Before I knew it I found myself collecting images of the real-world grade crossings from every angle I could find in order to correctly model the angle and rise of the road leading to the tracks. I'd watch vacation videos posted to Youtube by people who visited the area in order to get an idea of the variety of types of trees found along the mountainside. I began studying timetables of trains that pass through the interchange yard and used Google Earth to following those routes to their destinations in order to get an idea of where those trains go and what they haul. I've collected engineering drawings of key bridges. Heck, I even read through the past two years of meetings and minutes of the prototype railroad in order to get an idea of the real-world challenges a railroad in that part of the country faces on a monthly basis.

This is not what a freelancer does... These are the patterns of a madman... A prototype modeler.

How could I call what I'm doing "Proto-Freelancing" anymore when the plan for the model railroad has become such a carefully considered representation of the real thing? There are plenty of small changes I've made for mostly artistic reasons. I consider myself an artist first and foremost and I do think of model railroading as an art form. That said, the only really major departures from the real world I've designed are:

1. I've included a cement industry that hasn't existed on the prototype in many, many years and added rail service to an industry that in the real world doesn't have any need for it.
2. I've omitted a few industries and mashed three or so small towns worth of industries into one town for the sake of compression.
3. I've re-ordered where many of the signature scenes are located because of space constraints.
4. I secretly hate the paint jobs on the prototypes locomotives (I also find the name of the prototype railroad to be difficult to read if you don't know the proper pronunciation) so I've come up with my own name and color scheme.

That's pretty close to being it. Those first three points are things that EVERY modeler does. Even those rivet-counting freaks! The fourth point is really just an example of how that creative part of my brain won't allow me to accept something I find artistically displeasing.

So I'm not Freelancing, nor am I really prototyping. I'm only sorta proto-freelancing.  Maybe I've got to come up with a new term? Free-Protoyping? or maybe Creative Prototyping? Oh, oh that's it! "CREATIVE PROTOTYPING!"

Serendipitously enough, Lance Mindhiem just released an article while I was coming up with this post where he explores some of these same ideas I've been struggling with.

Wordless Wednesday #10

A 2-6-6-2 rolls north up the beautiful Pend Oreille River Valley on the Metaline Falls Branch

End of an Era

I stepped away from model railroading for a couple years to take care of a few life events and was was sad to learn upon my return to the hobby that an imaginary development I had created for my tiny freelance railroad had come to pass in real life. The POVA was forced to abandon the trackage north of Usk to Metaline Falls including the fabulous Box Canyon Bridge.

I had created this very scenario for my railroad back in 2013 as a convenient explanation for why I didn't model the railroad as far north as Metaline Falls. Having just a small shelf-style switching layout, there was no way to include both the bridge and the cement plant all the way at Metaline Falls.  Using the justification of "It was just too expensive to maintain the line north of town" seemed plausible at the time and unfortunately it's become a reality.

I'm really sad to learn of this development as I had hoped to one day take that railfanning excursion along the old Metaline Falls Branch. Now that it is gone, I almost want to find a way to work the town of Metaline Falls back into my model railroad as a metaphorical middle finger to the gods of eventuality. I don't think I can make that happen and still meet my goals for this layout however, so for the time being I'll continue including the abandoned trackage north of Box Canyon (while being able save the bridge itself) as part of my freelanced scenario.

I do feel a bit better however knowing that I will still be able to watch trains lumber over that majestic old bridge in miniature on my own little piece of the pacific northwest.

Starting over from Scratch

After spending some time with my current layout in it's new space and trying to come up with a design for the expanded railroad that would include those original modules, I've come to the conclusion that they just would not fit the space well and I'd be better served starting over from scratch. 

With that in mind I dove into researching and designing a brand-new layout that would make best use of the space available and would allow me many, many years of enjoyment. I don't ever plan on moving from this home, so this layout will be my fourth and FINAL layout. My dream railroad.

The track plan above (click to view larger) is still a work in progress but it incorporates just about everything I enjoy in model railroading.  The plan is simple, but allows an operator or two plenty of operational enjoyment. If I'm not in the mood for operations, I can even sit back with a beer and enjoy running a couple of trains around in circles. I've included a yard, a nice industrial area, and a couple nice, unencumbered areas where I can enjoy my favorite kind of modeling: Scenery.

True to proto-freelance modeling, the towns and industries located on the layout exist in real life. (though I've taken plenty of liberties with the locations and track arrangement to best serve my needs) The town of Usk stands-in for several towns found in the Pend Oreille Valley and just like on the prototype, the yard at Sandpoint is the Valley's connection with the rest of the world. I've also included a few key scenes found on the prototype including Blueslide tunnel near the crossing of Highway 20, a trestle, and the iconic Box Canyon Bridge.

Designing this track plan has been a challenging and rewarding experience and I have to thank the many talented people on the Model Railroad Hobbyist forums for their expertise in helping me come up with this plan. I'm excited to get started and I cant wait to share my progress with all of you!

Wordless Wednesday #9

A train on the main line of BNSF’s Kootenai River Subdivision crosses the Pend Oreille River in the evening hours heading out from Sandpoint ID.

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

Welp, my old house is finally on the market and I can take a moment or two to relax and collect myself before I roll up my sleeves and get to work prepping my new layout room. It's taken longer than anticipated to get to this point, but I'm glad I am here now!

I haven't done much model railroad-related in the last few months unfortunately, but I did purchase a couple of box cars. Now, I've told myself for some time that I have more than enough freight cars for my railroad but, as many of you probably know by now freight cars are like skittles; One or five of fifty five is just never enough.

The first car I purchased was an Exactrail Trinity 6275 Boxcar. I actually owned one of these already and I absolutely loved it. I wanted another for years, but Exactrail had sold out of stock completely and second hand models were going for ungodly amounts of money on eBay.  I held off buying one for many years hoping that Exactrail would re-release the car and Thankfully they did!  I snatched one up as quickly as possible (which was a good idea because they sold out again in an insanely short amount of time) and now it sits on display next to my original car. Both are waiting patiently for me to get around to weathering them.

The second freight car I purchased was a Pend Oreille Valley (POVA) Boxcar. I was turned on to this car by a fellow Pend Oreille Valley modeler who reached out to me one day to say "Hi!"  He lives in the area and has a wealth of knowledge on the railroad as well as a large library of old pictures and maps of the region. (I'll be sharing some of that in future posts).  I'm very thankful and lucky to have met him as I can now count the number of modelers I've found besides myself that are modeling the POVA area on exactly one finger!

The freight car was advertised on Ebay as "New in Box" and in classic Ebay fashion, It arrived as anything but.  The axels were broken off, handrails were busted, coupler boxes were missing, etc. I am glad to have it as part of my collection, but it will need quite a bit of work to get it back in shape.



Both of these freight cars are special to me though as both of them are cars I never expected I'd one day acquire.  It just goes to show that good things come to those who wait!

Wordless Wednesday #7

Canadian Pacific train near Dover, ID