With the addition of four new railroads and refinement of the depot as an interchange operation between trains from the Northern and Southern Pacific Coast, there are two important new developments on the layout. There's a new mainline in operation now, serving the Hill Lines (GN, NP, SP&S with Milwaukee having trackage rights), and the new Freight House is complete and in business. With the Freight House, the layout is starting to implement its freight operation focused on modeling the food, manufacturing and automotive supply chains of the 1950s. Here's a closer look at both:
New Mainline for the Hill Lines from Seattle and Spokane
Introducing new railroads to the layout's operation has been both exciting and expensive. They needed to be equipped properly, and, unfortunately (or not, depending on budget and taste), the only avenue for getting the right equipment is brass. Accordingly, the passenger fleet for the new trains and roads has been built out and now is operating. At the same time, a new mainline has been added for these trains to connect to the town's depot and freight branches. The main peninsula of the layout, orphaned from mainline operation in the prior iteration of the layout as a mainly-freight concept, has made a comeback as a glamourous mainline.
This new mainline run, which starts at the south end of the depot's throat tracks, continues around the main peninsula (close to 50' of new mainline run) and terminates at the Seattle/Spokane staging yard at my workbench. Modeled loosely after the Great Northern Mainline connecting Portland to Seattle, like its prototype line, grants trackage rights to Northern Pacific (NP), Union Pacific (UP) and Spokane Portland & Seattle (SP&S). My model adds Milwaukee Road to this trackage, creating a 1950s connection that the prototype eventually granted with the Burlington Northern super merger of 1970.
Now, my freelanced city and its depot, Cascadia, are fed by two major shared mainlines: SP+UP with ATSF+WP (the Inside Gateway lines) that connects with the lower level, called Monte Vista, and the line to Washington for all northbound traffic. The two lines cross each other at a spot called Keys-Victor Junction, which necessitated the installation of a diamond crossing:
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| New diamond crossing of the Southern Pacific (with passenger cars shown) and Great Northern/Northern Pacific. The GN mainline veers off to the left through the wall to 'Washington Staging' for Seattle and Spokane destination. |
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| 'Washington Staging' shown here, a non-modeled yard serving as the destinations of Seattle on Spokane via Great Northern mainline shared by Northern Pacific, SP&S and Milwaukee Road. The Santa Fe unit in the middle powers the track cleaning train. |
With the new GN mainline fully operational, it will be the trunk for all of the northbound passenger and freight traffic on the layout. A GN-operated freight branch, called Badham Falls, is already built and operating on one side of the main peninsula, and a NP-focused branch line is proposed for the other side. To handle this significant uptick in traffic, the Washington staging yard will be expanded to double its capacity for both passenger and freight. This new, completely separate mainline with dedicated staging takes this layout to the highest level of modeling the bygone era of passenger interline operations possible in my space. It is fun to operate and exciting to model.
A Supply Chain Focal Point: The Freight House
A model freight operation gains infinite realism if it has a clear theme. I've seen themed layouts around a particular industry - steel production, for example - and mine is developing around the Supply Chain, specifically food processing and specialty manufacturing in the Pacific Northwest and Central California during the mid-50s. My freight house, jointly operated Southern Pacific, Union Pacific and Milwaukee Road, also holds freight for the other roads serving local markets.
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| Two views of the new freight house, modeled after the joint SP-NP freight house in Portland, OR in the 1950s. Architecturally, this kitbashed structure is based on Milwaukee Road's Water Street Freight House in Milwaukee. The finished structure is awaiting figures and ground cover. The scratch-built platform has the requisite freight crates, appliances in cartons and pallets for a normal day's work. |
Serving local markets and shippers, the freight house primarily handles less than carload (LCL) freight to/from local businesses, which include retail stores, automotive dealerships, specialty manufacturers and some direct consumers. Most direct customers would ship express via Railway Express Agency, located directly across the street from the freight house. The three tracks shown are for loading/unloading from the dock, backup holding/loading track in middle, and Team track in the foreground for new automobile shipments (using specialized 40' and 50' box cars in the 1950s) and direct LCL shipments to/from local businesses.
The model gains realism when its function both for the railroad and its customers determine its construction and details. Now gone from today's cities, freight houses served a vital function for railroads and their towns before containerized freight. For industries that could not afford or did not generate enough goods to warrant having their own rail spur, freight houses were the town's hub for LCL shipments. Local businesses - retailers, small manufacturers, for example - trucked goods to/from the freight house. Mostly, freight houses handled dry goods, leaving perishables and refrigerated freight to express shipment either by Railway Express Agency (REA) or the railroads' own refrigerated freight service, such as Pacific Fruit Express (jointly owned by Union Pacific, Southern Pacific and Western Pacific).
Freight houses handled shipments at the lowest rail rates, as long as customers were willing to wait a week or more for their shipments. If it had to get there fast, customers could pay double the price to ship Express. In American culture through the 1960s, 'Express' meant Railway Express Agency, or REA, which could ship anything from holiday gifts to live animals and fresh produce. Set in the peak holiday season, my railroad operation has both the REA terminal and freight house operating at max capacity. Another glimpse of the REA terminal, directly across the street from the freight house, makes the point. Eventually, streets, vehicles, figures, dirt, debris, weeds and other details will complete these scenes.
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| It's a very busy day at the bustling REA transload terminal in Cascadia. Fresh fruit in crates, express packages in green crates, fill the dock with new refrigerators, bicycles and individual parcels right off the train await trucks to pick them up and hand deliver them to customers. Before UPS, DHL, FedEx and Amazon, express meant REA. |
From Branch to Mainline: Badham Falls
With the return of the south, or main, peninsula to a mainline operation, the switching jobs at Badham Falls are now off the mainline. Situated north of Cascadia somewhere along the Oregon-Washington state line, Badham Falls is a small industrial town that creates a surprising amount of freight traffic for its agricultural products, wood products and machine parts. While colorful passenger trains of Northern Pacific, Great Northern, SP&S and Milwaukee speed by, this busy town is a respectable source of fresh pears for Del Monte's canning plants in California, Washington apples to Tree Sweet in California for juices. These priority shipments are usually sent Express, and the GN or SP&S passenger trains passing through Badham Falls need to stop at the depot to pick up cuts of express reefers on their way to Cascadia Depot to be picked up by Southern Pacific's 'Klamath' (train #19) or WP-ATSF's 'Gateway Passenger,' both competing for the business between Cascadia and Monte Vista.
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| The industries in Badham Falls generate steady freight traffic to markets in California (via SP, UP, WP/ATSF to Monte Vista) and the East (via GN to Washington). Shown here, the new GN mainline to Washington parallels the SP mainline to Monte Vista. A new depot has its house track, shown with 2 UP mail and express cars, along with a spur for loading fresh pears for Express shipment to Del Monte's fruit cannery in Monte Vista. Local industries can be seen with box cars and their car cards with waybills ready for the next operating session. |
As the layout progresses, these mainlines, along with the industries along them, will become part of a sophisticated supply chain of food processing from farm to market (including packers, processers, canneries). Citrus picked in Monte Vista, for example, will be packed and shipped from the packing houses in that town to Cascadia, where trucks will carry them to supermarkets, restaurants, frozen food manufacturers and commissaries. Pacific Northwest timber will be cut, milled and shipped out of Badham Falls to Monte Vista, where in turn it will be made into crates for packing citrus and produce for Cascadia and other markets. Oil from rich Olinda oil fields will be shipped to Cascadia via Monte Vista.
The layout's freight operations will be built out as specific supply chains - food processing, automotive manufacturing, appliances, oil - between its two major hubs of Monte Vista (set in California), Cascadia (set in the Pacific Northwest) and eastern markets via the Hill Lines and Milwaukee Road through Washington and south and east via SP, UP and ATSF by way of Monte Vista. As it is modeled out, these supply chains will create many interconnected freight jobs and operating sessions on the layout. More developments to come . . .
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