Sandy Lake & Northern

[deemery]

The SL&N is a freelance railroad set in the 1890s.  The railroad exists to connect the northwest PA oil country to New England mill towns, through the modeling mechanism of removing all the land between the Susquehanna and Merrimack rivers.  Primary inspirations are the Rutland and the Colorado Midland, in part because those run through mountainous terrain and in part because there's a lot of documentation on their 19th century construction, operations and rolling stock.   There's also an HOn30 line based very loosely on the Monson, that connects a slate quarry down to a finishing factory and the standard gauge interchange.  

When we moved back to NH, I looked for a house with a totally dry unfinished basement.  We finished 2/3 of the basement space into 2 rooms plus a 3/4 bath.  Half the expense was for the bathroom. I knew I wanted a sink, and that required an up-flushing system.  The toilet prevents me from tracking modeling dust upstairs, and the shower was inexpensive to add to the bathroom.  My thought is this would make a good in-law apartment or a 'lock the teenager in the basement' facility for future homeowners.  If you can afford it, a sink is absolutely worth having in or close to your workshop space.  

Unfortunately, the building inspector made us build a closet in one corner for the electrical panel, but I worked around that (literally) in the track plan.  I did some special things for wiring.  Both rooms (train room and workshop room) have overhead lights AND outlets for track lighting, switched separately.  The 'track lighting' outlets will be used for layout wiring.  And each pair of outlets has one outlet permanently hot, with the other switched.  So both rooms have a bank of 3 switches, for 'overhead lights', 'track/layout lights' and 'switched outlets'.  The latter makes it easy to turn off all the layout electronics, all the power tools, etc.  

The flooring is vinyl plank that includes a layer of cork, on top of the concrete slab.  This stuff has held up very well to the abuse I've given it, including spilling some solvents (wiped up immediately.)  I was able to dent it when I dropped a hammer claw-side down.  But more importantly, the cork underlayment part makes it very comfortable to stand on the flooring.  And the color is close to the red oak flooring in the rest of the house.  

dave

[GPdemayo]

I'll be looking in on your layout progress Dave.....

[deemery]

Here's the original track plan:

You can see that annoying utility closet at the bottom left corner.  The bathroom is located more-or-less at the top of the plan, to the right of the square section in the middle of the plan.  There's visible staging and the main yard in the workshop space.  The yard is for "Phase 2" if I ever get that far.  There's a drop gate located between the stairs and the workshop space, that would be normally closed, but is there so I can just sit and watch the trains go around...  There have been some modifications to this as built, particularly in the visible staging.  I added a turntable and single stall enginehouse butted against the wall to the bathroom for the yard switcher. 

dave

[deemery]

So that's the introduction.  There's more than 100 pages over on Railroad-Line that I've captured as PDFs.  My thought is to make those available for downloading, in case people want to follow the historical progress.  

Thoughts?  

dave

[jbvb]

I made PDF copies too. But I've moved two threads by copying the text and photos to this forum.  One I uploaded the photos from my picture management tool (Digikam, free). The other I used the Insert an Image button in the toolbar above the typing area and gave it the URL of the photo on the old site.  I haven't started my main layout thread yet; the title of this sub-forum is Layout Tours. I need to ask if this is the right place for Layout Construction.

[ACL1504]

Dave,

Looking forward to this one also. I like what you had on the RR lines.

Tom 

[deemery]

If everything works correctly, this website should have the archived articles from Railroad-Line.  These are PDFs, so you'll need a PDF viewer (if your web browser doesn't handle PDF itself.) The photos won't be clickable to see larger images, but if there's an image someone particularly wants to see, let me know and I'll add it here. 
Website with PDFs from Railroad-Line posts

dave

[Larry C]

Dave nice you were able to save your entire build thread to a PDF format since you've worked at it for so long. I'll be stopping by to see how you're progressing.

[Jim Donovan]

Dave glad you could save your work. Looking forward to the progress going forward.

Jim

[deemery]

While waiting for the glue to dry on my Lamson build, I played with some fonts from my computer and on-line.  Opinions sought on the options below.  I think I used Railfonts "Clinch" (Clinchfield RR) on the 2 cars.


dave

[ACL1504]

Dave,

My answer won't help you much. I think what is important is what is pleasing to your eyes. I say trust what you think they should look like.

I went through this with my own decals and I'm very happy with the A&S RR decals.

Tom 

[kyle creel]

Ditto; Dave whatever you think is going to 'present' your RR line to people in the manner that best represents your vision of the RR is the RIGHT choice.  I've been a big fan of your endeavors and love what you've done so far.  "It's your bicycle-ride it however you want to".

KYLE CREEL
G&D Ry.