Bachmann ore cars hard at work.

[Terry Toenges]

Since I had trouble with my On30 Porter, I had to find a different loco to pull my Bachmann On30 ore cars and their Santa load. I dug out my old Lifelike HO 0-4-0 Teakettle. This was the first steam loco I bought when I started playing with trains back around '97 or '98. I was going to do a layout named after my Grand kids and call it the Fort Michael and Shelby Canyon Railroad. That never came to pass because I had a 4 X 6 table and bigger and layouts were calling me. I did do some modifying on it back then. That was my very first loco project too. I cut the pilot off and put step boards on it. I put on a different stack. I filed down the coal load and wired in a rear light. I cut the doors out so it would be open. I put knuckle couplers on and added some decals. When I got it out recently to use with the ore cars, I wanted some figures so that big motor wouldn't be so visible. I got some Arttista "S" scale figures. The loco is somewhat oversized for HO and HO figures looked much too small. These S ones look pretty good. After all these years, the loco still runs great.
https://youtu.be/vvowQL-E-jM

[Terry Toenges]

I was wrong on that first layout. It was a 4 x 8 table I built. I looked at a few pics I had of it.
Yesterday, I tried to duplicate it in Anyrail and I couldn't do it exactly.  I was only using black roadbed track when I first started out but I had to saw off a few pieces like one leg of the crossing and a couple of curved pieces. With Anyrail, I had to use some gray pieces since I couldn't saw them. It was kind of a folded dog bone.
I never finished it. I started a different one in the big house that was going to be the FM & SC. In the garage house, it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer because no furnace and no AC.

[jonathan]

That's a cool little layout.  I'm confused.  Does this layout still exist?  Just haven't worked on it in a while?

Regards,

Jonathan

[Terry Toenges]

No. It's long gone. It was my very first attempt at a layout when I didn't know that I shouldn't be using steel track and 4% grades. I was just playing around with Anyrail to see if I could duplicate it because I didn't even remember for sure what my track plan was.
I started with one of the cheap Bachmann Warbonnet train sets and then got some other stuff like more track and turnouts, the Lifelike Amtrak set and a few more cars.
I found the Lifelike Teakettle and it was cheap so I bought it. Then, I discovered Bachmann's old time 4-4-0's and old time cars and I knew that's the direction I was going to go. Then, it was out with the diesels and in with the steam.
I never bought another diesel until last year when I bought a pair of Bachmann's DCC Warbonnets with sound.
I was kind of wondering if I should try to do that layout again. I would still have to use the 4% grades, though.

[Terry Toenges]

This is the plan.

[OLDERTIMER]

  hi Terry, That's very much like what I'm planning to do on a pingpong table, only 5 x 10 or 6 x 10. Paul G. 

[Terry Toenges]

I had to add a couple of inches on the back and on the left side for this to fit on there. I think just screwed extra "one by four's" along the sides for a base to add strips of plywood on top to extend it. With the availability of all the different gray roadbed pieces, I could probably make this a lot easier now with having to saw pieces of track.