Florida Layout Update - December 2019

Greetings followers of the Atlantic Pacific Railroad and my blog!

We're down in the Southern Command (aka Boynton Beach, FL) for the winter. I'll be going back and forth on two occasions between now and April 4th, when we go back next December. 

The last time I was down here and was running the layout, I had some issues with the track plan on the lower level center. The issues that I saw had to do with the industries and switching. 

Here's a video of what I had put down and why I am changing it. 

As many of you who know me, if I see or told something doesn't function the way it should and a recommendation is made to change it to make it better, I will do it!

That being said, here's what I did:

First - Tearing up the existing track and cork. I will savage and reuse most of the track. The cork, goes by the wayside. 

Next step - sand and clean the excess remnants of the cork and place some track down to get a feel on how it will look...

Now that I have a good idea on what it will look like, I picked up the tracks and put down the cork. Once the glue dried, it was painted and now ready for track.

Now it's time to put down the track. I did make a couple small changes, basically adding a second track to one area in the middle and one area on the left side. 

The other track will take you to two (possibly 3) industries. One will be a small warehouse that I have up north and will come down the end of January. The other building will be modern Walthers Warehouse building to serve both tracks. 

We did tweak this area and had the track leading to the front tracks come off by the yard on the east wall. Works better and if there's another operator it won't interfere with the pellet and plastic industries. 

The track out of the yard has two switches. One will take you to either the main line or to the plastic pellet transfer facility. This will handle covered hopper cars. 

The second switch takes you to either the two tracks in front of the pellet facility which will house the Acme Plastics Industry. It will be a rectangular building and it will work well with the other industry. This will be served by box cars. 

The track on the east side which handles tank cars will remain the same. It will handle propane & ethanol cars. 

Another change to the lower level (and upper for that matter) are the way the industries in the corners will be built. Due to the small area, and wanting it to look big, I'm going to build the structures as flats. I can make a structure look huge! Take for example the ADM grain structure. 

If you look at this industry, the footprint is fairly large. This building is going to be on the upper level west corner. How do you make this industry look big? You make it a flat! I will be taking the concrete square building and make it a flat which will be about 12" - 14" in length and in the corner I will take the silos and instead of assembling them as you see above, I will use the halves and make on long set of silos! 

We're going to do this to the cement industry 

As well as the sand industry

And the warehouse which will be American Hardware (already a cornerstone flat type industry)

The upper level is pretty much set, nothing has changed as far as track and I do have the operation part of the upper level in place and tested. 

The lower level switching will be a combination of shoving with one area that will need to be pulled from the yard and then shoved. I like this as you have to make a couple of moves in order to service the one area in the middle or the lower level to the right side. We're not talking about switching a train with 12 cars. We're talking about 3-4 cars at a time. Pull empty cars, drop off the loads. Head back to the yard to service the next industry. 

Total time to do this project - 5 days. The tracks are powered up and have been tested. The center is less congested, functions and will make switching the industries fun. I do have 2 guys in my development that are into model trains; one who used to have N scale and lives around the corner, so he can walk here. The other guy is nearby. One other friend lives in Ft. Lauderdale and expressed an interest to see it in action. If I can get 2 guys here together, we can have a great operating session. Yardmaster assembling the trains, 1 guy working the lower level industries, the other working the upper level. More on the upper level down the road.....

Unlike the northern layout, this one will need paperwork / switch lists.  Many of you know the APRR Northern Division doesn't use paperwork and not a fan of paperwork. However, this layout needs it and I'm going to work on that as I progress on building the industries and putting them in place. I've used them on a couple layouts, and this layout is a perfect candidate to use the switch list. Not too big, but will take some time to operate. 

Next trip down I have some structures already built from my previous layouts which I will use here. They fit and I want to use them since some have meaning to others (I measured before I came down). 

Thanks for reading and have a Happy New Year! See you in 2020!