Indian Valley Railroad, NS
This layout is inspried by the Pennsylvania Railroad's narrow gauge lines. The theme, however, is free-lanced. Total main line run is about 300 feet. There's a little extra in the town area in that the inner loop is powered to enable guests to run their conventional engines. The rest of the layout has un-powered tracks as the owner's engines run on battery and are controlled by AirWire - DCC.
When you look at the pictures, you will at one point see a kind of "jungle". This growth happened in just 2 weeks while we took a break from building this layout. Cleaning up took about 2 days.
04-23-2015
This plan features a mainline run of about 300 ft. The staging area at the top is located in a shed to protect the rolling stock from the weather. The left leg of the U-shape has a more urban setting while the right leg is more scenic.
The owner had a very nice backdrop painted on the shed walls by a local artist.
04-26-2015
Staging tracks laid out in the shed.
It is always amazing how much gravel is needed for proper roadbed. The two piles in the picture total to around 7 yards of gravel...
04-27-2015
Making progress laying out the main lines.
04-30-2015
Time to hook up the turnouts. And rocks came in for the scenic part of the layout.
06-15-2015
We took a break from building for two weeks and this is what happened to the layout:
06-17-2015
We had to take everything up and start over on the urban part. The most important task was to put down a weed barrier before relaying track.
The curved trestle in this picture is firmly cemented to the rocks so it doesn't move when trains are going over it. My friend Steve from Austin, TX scratch-built this trestle using only redwood, nuts, bolts and whashers.
08-08-2015
Here's a short video clip featuring last test runs before the owner's open house:
