Bayou country railroad

[Trainman203]

I've been putting photos of my layout up for a while but it would be good to tell the story.  It's probably unique in the world in being set in the 1940s as a short line in the Ark-La-Tex region of the Deep South, drawing largely from a MoPac branch back home, originally built by the Frisco in 1909.  It has pea gravel ballast as per 1943 MP track profile information for that branch, and oyster shell road paving typical of south Louisiana ........ no hills, no rocks of any kind, and heavily wooded countryside ( lots of trees don't only mean "eastern" scenery, the Deep South has plenty of trees too.) I am going to try to add a bayou scene pretty soon.  No white water, no waterfalls, just a lazy placid brownish green creek.  

This is basically a rookie layout, my first one as an adult, but it's the same location , period and theme as the one I had in high school.  Nothing has really changed concept-wise.  I  still have the same road name I've had since 1962, the Midland Western, and still have the same town names.  It is supposedly a bridge between two MP lines with interchanges on each end which allow me to run longer trains than 6 or 7 on-line ag type industries would generate.

This layout has a limited life of maybe another 2 years before I retire and move to a smaller town.  Therefore it won't ever be a highly detailed masterpiece, but rather an attempt to capture some of the open space feeling that my long gone MP branch had.  There's only 20 switches on the whole railroad, but it can take a whole Saturday long op session to pull the interchange, service the local industries, pull out of town, switch the two online communities with two industries each, arrive at the other end of the line, break up the train, set-out/pick up new cars at the other interchange, work the local industries, make up the return train, and do the entire sequence again going back.  

My retirement layout won't be much different, only having longer yards, more actual countryside mileage between communities, more space for town structures, and some more lineside set out locations. I'm already beginning to look for the availability of houses with the right "building out back" for the railroad.

The scenery is approaching 75 percent.  Here's some pictures of an area recently completed - the throat of the yard at Thunder Grove.

MP 1319 pulling into the Thunder Grove yard.  The MP interchange is behind:



2-10-0 No.3 working the Thunder Grove yard.  This engine is about to be lettered Louisiana and Arkansas No. 103.



Frisco 2-10-0 pulling the Midland interchange.  Still need some grass and weeds here, an evening's project if I ever felt like it.

[Desertdweller]

Trainman,

I really like your railroad, especially the location and concept.  It is refreshing to see a location not often modeled.

A flat railroad in a flat setting!  Lots of trees!  A railroad in that area would likely be hauling timber and sawmill products, maybe a paper mill, rice farming, cotton, and corn.  Great possibility of mixed train operation.

Your MP connection reminded me of a "pike-sized" passenger train, the Delta Eagle.  This train, although operated on the east edge of Arkansas, would fit in well.  This MP train could be easily kitbashed.  Start with an E-6, add a baggage door on each side where the rear engine would be located (look up EA-6).
It would pull two coaches (one each for Blacks and Whites).   A short train for a short route.

If you cut carefully, you may not even have to repaint the shell.

Les

[Trainman203]

We follow the old MP Delta Eagle route every November on a yearly trip to Arkansas. It's now the "Delta Southern." Looking at the track it's hard to believe anything could roll on it. It's very sad to see a once fine railroad down to the condition it is in now.

In some  places farmers have removed rail for their own use.  One year we saw a boxcar over on its side along the ROW and the next year it was still there.  There were two abandoned  MP cabooses set out along it at different points.  One finally burned and was scrapped, the other just disappeared. Trees grow between the ties in some places, yet every year we see a CF-7 somewhere along it with some MOW equipment.   This line lives on yet though, it appears that some kind of grant has it on life support for the moment.

[Trainman203]

Les, my on line set outs are a team track at each of four communities, two oil dealers,  2 co op warehouses, a cotton warehouse, a wood yard, and one siding I don't know what is yet.  Plus two interchanges.

I'd still like to have a rice elevator, a rice mill, and a sugar mill, but the layout is just too small. A sugar mill , like a paper mill, is too big and complex to properly depict on any layout.  At one time I was going to include a north Arkansas zinc mine but that would mean hills and rocks that I just don't want to model. 

A salt mine would be nice though.  There were two of them within 10 miles of where I grew up.  The one the MP served was drilled into by an oil rig and destroyed in a spectacular 1980 flood, to be seen on you tube.  The railroad accordingly was soon abandoned.  The other one is still in operation but they've long since switched to barge shipping and that spur is gone too.

[J3a-614]

I concur with Desertdweller, it's cool to see someone modelling something that isn't seen every day.

The comment about the sugar mill reminded me that a lot of sugar plantations had their own narrow gauge railroads that would make great prototypes for people into such things, especially in larger scales like On30 or the garden railway stuff.  Lot of interesting engines and cars that weren't like anything else. 

A lot of the steam engines on sugar plantations ran on baggasse, the refuse of sugar cane.  This was squeezed into small bales that the fireman could throw into the firebox.  The stuff had plenty of heat but it went up like tinder (the fireman would fire continuously while the locomotive was in motion), and it produced the biggest bunch of sparks you ever saw unless there was a really good spark arrestor on the engine. 

There were also some cool lumber railroads in such country, often running with woodburning power.  One line very much like that, though not located in that particular part of the country, was the Argent Lumber Company in South Carolina.  At least five locomotives from that road survive with one operational and another probably close to being so. 

http://www.taplines.net/argent/argent.html

http://www.mcrr.org/PAGES/six.html

http://www.mcrr.org/IMAGES/6-Baldwin/6swamp2.jpg

http://www.mcrr.org/PAGES/two.html

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1301543

Wood fired, no air, and link and pin couplers, and running until 1959!

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1301537

https://www.flickr.com/photos/whitebutton/8633216873

http://www.ctamachinery.com/cama_photo_album/argent_lumber_co_engine_4.html

[Trainman203]

There were three steam powered sugar mills within 5 miles of my house when I was a kid.  One of them at one time had a 24" gauge railroad and I believe two of their engines are still on the property.  Grade crossing rails remained in many places until the 70's.  A local scrap yard had an 0-4-4T on display out in front for awhile, don't know what happened to it.

Disneyland and other amusement parks picked up a lot of these sugar cane engines in the 50s.  I remember one in particular at a scrapyard in nearby Lafayette that went to some big park in Ohio, "Cedar Park" maybe?

The scrap yard also had T&NO 4-6-0 no 319 out back.  Someone up north bought it in the late 60s, I saw it going out on a Mop flat car. It too has disappeared.

The sugar mill  in town had a beautiful 6 chime whistle that every day during the grinding season sounded 4 times a day ...... 6 AM, noon, 6 PM, and midnight.  This Tsunsmi whistle is almost spot-on, really takes me back.....

http://www.soundtraxx.com/dsd/tsunami/playsound.php?s=sw1

I remember it all the way into the 1980s, and thinking how lucky I was, to still get to hear such a beautiful bygone sound in a modern age.

Oh what riches there were, that I did not know till they were gone.

[Desertdweller]

Trainman,

I feel the same way about railroads that are gone, or are "mere shadows of their former selves".  Most of the railroads I have worked for are shortlines, operating remnants of Class Ones.  I have made it a point to try to learn something about each of the predecessor roads.

The saddest part was a former New Haven line.  Miles and miles of dense but abandoned track in what once was an industrial colossus.  It is easy to get the attitude that "nothing is as good as it used to be".

One of the lines I worked on (and helped manage) was a former Gulf, Mobile and Northern line that was the route of the first streamliner in the South.  It was an 80 mile long, 10 and 20 mph shortline.  Now it is mostly abandoned under new ownership.  Our southern terminal (Houston, MS) at one time had a cotton compress.  I have never seen one of these modeled.  It would have been a large warehouse with a steam-powered compactor.  The compactor used two big, vertical cylinders to pack loose cotton into a cube.  By the time I saw it, all that was left was a concrete foundation, the steam press, and the boiler.  The building might have contained a cotton gin (a plant for separating the seeds from the fibers).

The compress would be easy to model.  A large, rectangular wood frame building with a full-length loading dock, a tall smokestack and several smaller steam exhaust stacks, and maybe a water tank.  It would need its own siding.

The real beauty of modeling a period and place is we can revisit these "good old days" on our own terms.
My "good old days" railroad is somewhat like yours in some ways.  It is flat, located in a river valley.  Several bridges cross a major stream.  But it is an urban setting in the early 1960's at a major regional passenger hub.  The passenger trains of seven Class One railroads call at the terminal there.  It is "American Graffiti" days forever there.

Les

[Trainman203]

I may have already posted this photo.  It shows what I want the layout to look like ...... mostly open countryside.  The air conditioner was running in the summer when this picture was taken, but there is a sky board in front of it now.  All this area is going to get, more than now, is maybe a wire fence and a pole line.

To me, many model railroads are just too crowded and jammed up with too much stuff.  I'm trying to get away from that.  My layout is 50' long and 15" wide (at most) with 4 communities.  I have less than a dozen structures on the whole pike.

Incidentally, that is all EZ track in this photo.

[Desertdweller]

Trainman,

My railroad is N-scale.  It is U-shaped and covers 52 sq. feet.  All main lines and other major tracks are EZ Track.  I find it works quite well.  The molded ballast can either be covered with bonded ballast, or painted whatever color you choose.  By using different ballast colors, it is easy to differentiate between track owned by different railroads.

Mine is an urban setting, but uses lots of trees and smaller buildings as well as large ones.  It represents Denver in the early-mid 1960's.

Operation is centered on passenger operations.  20 train pairs of seven major railroads call at Denver Union Station in the order the actual trains operated there.  Although a double-ended terminal, there are no through train movements through the terminal.  All trains originate or terminate there, except the California Zephyr, which changes power between CB&Q and D&RGW.  The Colorado Springs section of the CB&Q Denver Zephyr is switched out and sent south on the D&RGW Royal Gorge.  The reverse happens when this train arrives.

Not all trains are grand streamliners.  The D&RGW ran a heavyweight local to Grand Junction (discontinued in 1959, but I kept it going).  The C&S ran a mixed streamlined/heavyweight local to Billings, MT.  The CB&Q ran a heavyweight mail train to Omaha.  The AT&SF ran a short train to LaJunta to connect with mainline trains.  The C&S ran a mixed streamlined/heavyweight Texas Zephyr and a heavyweight mail train to Dallas.

The outer main line handles Joint Line freights.  These are C&S and D&RGW freights that circulate around as sort of moving scenery.

Possibly the biggest challenge is finding period-correct motor vehicles.

Les

[Trainman203]

Didn't the C&S run steam engines in Denver as late as 1959?  The Climax branch was steam til 1962.

[Trainman203]

The Midland Limited in Thunder Grove, stopped in front of the Midland Western offices and Hattie's Hotel.  I still have to pave the oyster shell street in front of the buildings.

[rogertra]

Can we see some wide shots please?

Cheers

Roger T.

[Trainman203]

Not sure what you mean.  Looking down on the layout so it looks like a layout?  The photos so far are framed to show completed areas.  There are still a lot of bare areas.

[Trainman203]

The layout isn't wide.  This is the widest part.  To get a wide shot you have to look down the track.  This is the town of Thunder Grove.

[rogertra]

Not sure what you mean.  Looking down on the layout so it looks like a layout?  The photos so far are framed to show completed areas.  There are still a lot of bare areas.

Overview shots.  Yes, the closeup details look really good but wide shots, taken from four or five feet away, even showing unfinished areas, it's all good.

I post unfinished shots here and on other forums so people get the overview of what I'm attempting.  Sometimes you get useful tips as well.

Cheers

Roger T.