Connection to the Modoc line

Last winter while attending the International Railfair in Sacramento I was able to purchase this Western Pacific book that I had been looking to get for awhile.  While looking through the book something caught my attention.  There was a mention in this book that the Southern Pacific had trackage rights on the WP between Weso to Flanigan to make a connection to their Modoc line.  I was surprised that I had not been aware of this before and had to dig deeper.

Looking through some other books and on the internet I found out that this arrangement started in 1962.   Prior to that the SP Modoc line had crossed the WP at Flannigan and made a connection to the SP main line at Fernley.   This is a Google maps satellite view of how Flannigan looks now that I added some labels to.  The scars from the old connection to Fernley are still visible many decades later.

I made up with this simplified drawing showing this arrangement.  The Modoc line itself is also now abandoned and is a rail trail. 

I had never considered any SP traffic coming off the WP line at Weso on the layout and all of the interchange traffic has been from SP manifest trains running east and west between Roseville and Ogden.  Now I can see the possibility of also having trains running between Klamath Falls and Ogden also stopping and exchanging cars.  I have already redone a couple of Freight waybills that reflect this routing.

Here is a Klamath Falls to Ogden manifest coming off the Western Pacific line at Weso and starting on the east bound paired track.   This change will add an extra element of interest to operations on the layout.

Another new Youtube video

Recently I created a new video that features most of my Southern Pacific collection.  This gave me a chance to run some things that I have that are outside of the layout's modeled era.   The idea came from seeing a Youtube video of a commercial produced by the Southern Pacific in the 1980's and then finding a few other videos using the same music and featuring HO scale layouts.  So I thought there should be an N scale version and here it is, enjoy.

Video - Westbound SP TOFC Palisade to Weso

I recently put up a new layout video on YouTube.   This one follows a Southern Pacific TOFC train between the Palisade tunnels and the west end of the paired track at Weso, just east of Winnemucca.  The era for this video would be in the early 1990's.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sljcpPF6VlE

New additions to the locomotive roster

Lately I have been adding some additional motive power to the layout, filling in some gaps in the 3 different layout eras that I use.  In most cases I already had the locomotives but as this layout is DCC only I don't consider them on the active roster until they get a DCC decoder installed.

It all started when I found SP MP15DC 2696 on a sale table at a club open house for $40.00.  I already had the correct decoder for it so installed it right away.  It will join 2690 and will work in any of the 3 layout eras.

UP 910 and 912 are GP40-2's that came from WP in 1983 and were overhauled and repainted in UP colors.  They got TCS Z2 decoders installed in them and will work in the 83-88 and 89-96 eras.  910 still needs it's hand rails painted.

SP 7514 is an SD45 that came out of SP's GRIP program in 1984 as a SD45-2.  It got a TCS M4 decoder and will work in the 83-88 and 89-96 eras.

U30C SP 7912 got a Zimo decoder and will work in the 75-82 era.


GRIP (General Rehabilitation and Improvement Program) was a major locomotive rebuilding program undertaken by Southern Pacific at their Sacramento Shops during the late 1970's and through the 1980's.

A section house for Battle Mountain

Before Fox Valley Models became a well known brand of N scale locomotives and rolling stock they had a few laser cut wood kits.  I picked up this section house kit at a train show quite a few years ago now and had never put it together and recently re-discovered it in my stash of stuff.

I have always enjoyed laser cut wood kits.  One thing that was different about this one was they had designed it to use Tichy windows and doors which I was already familiar with from scratch building projects and really like.

Here is the finished structure after assembly and painting.  I did not really like the roof paper that came with the kit and used some that I had printed myself.   Any manner of junk could be placed around this section house but for now I just scattered some pallets there.



For now it is in an area between the Barite facility and the bulk oil dealer but it may move later as it does sometimes happen that railroads move these small maintenance buildings.  The small structure to the left is not an outhouse.  It is a concrete telephone booth used by the Southern Pacific before the days of the 2-way radio.

Building a 1970's era SP MOW boom truck

Working on those drop bottom dump trucks got me to thinking about adding some Maintenance Of Way trucks to the layout.  Then seeing this photo of an old SP boom truck on a truck collectors website inspired me to try to create something like this in N scale.

As a starting point I used one of the Athearn C cab tractors that I had.  The cab was removed and the frame was cut into 3 pieces.  All three pieces were then glued to a .125 square tube with CA.

The back side of the cab was carved out as shown in this photo so it would fit on over the square tube.

This is what the model looked like with all of the pieces finished but before painting.  Scraps of styrene, steel wire, and aluminum tubing were all used to construct the boom, bed, and shelter.

The cab, shelter, bed, and boom were each individually air brushed before  assembly on the chassis.  The smallest SP decals I had were from the Microscale bridge set but I hope to soon have some smaller ones.

Some weathering and a few items thrown into the bed.  The boom cable is some black thread, some small copper wire rolled up and painted rust simulates a coil of cable, and some small chain piled up and held with CA holds down the end of the boom cable.

This was my first MOW vehicle project but I do plan more.

2009 to present - Expanding my SP locomotive roster

When I re-entered active N scale modeling in about 1990 I had decided to keep as narrow a focus as possible in terms of era and railroad.  My initial interest was on the Southern Pacific between 1958 and 1965.  This era fit the theme of my Ntrak modules and first two layouts and I was able to build a good representative fleet of locomotives for that era.

After I got interested in modeling the Palisade Canyon, it opened up the possibility of acquiring many more locomotive models which has been a lot of fun.  Initially I started with expanding my SP roster to the years beyond 1965.

From various sources I compiled a list on an Excel spreadsheet of locomotives sorted by year between 1977 and 1996 and used this as a guide.  This spreadsheet is shown here.

Some of these are not available in N scale but most are.  So I began to purchase locomotives and assign them to one of the three eras that will be represented on this layout. Most of these were found at train shows and on ebay.





So I got a start on expanding my SP roster but also needed to build up a Western Pacific roster of locomotives for my 1976 to 1982 era and I'll talk about that in a future post.

2005 - Defining the modeled era(s)

As I learned more about the railroad operations through the Palisade Canyon, it occurred to me that a layout could have more than one era.  Around 2005 I figured out that it would be interesting to have the layout be set in three different eras.  These eras follow the mergers that took place in the railroad industry during the last 25 years of the 20th century and would allow for sets of locomotives and rolling stock for each era.

So, based on the merger history of the railroads that operated the paired track, these are the eras:

The SP / WP era: 1976 - 1982

In this era, the Southern Pacific and Western Pacific were the operators of the paired track arrangement across Nevada as they had been for many years.  A few of Western Pacific's locomotives are still in the silver and orange paint scheme but most are in one of the green and orange schemes.

The SP / UP era: 1983 - 1988

During these years, the Western Pacific has been merged into the Union Pacific.  UP's paint shops were fairly quick to assemlate most of the aquired WP locomotives as well as those aquired from other railroads such as the MKT (Missouri, Kansas, and Texas) and Rock Island.

The UP / DRGW era: 1989 - 1996
In this era the Southern Pacific Railroad has been purchased by Rio Grande Industries which also owned the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.  They merged the two railroads and kept the Southern Pacific name and the scarlet and gray paint scheme but changed the locomotive lettering to a style similar to what the Rio Grande had used.




In the Midwest, the UP has taken over the Chicago & Northwestern and the Missouri Pacific and by now UP's paint shops are only patching the UP emblem and new road numbers on the the acquired locomotives.  As those locomotives find their way into the western reaches of the UP system, it means even more variety of paint schemes.


Besides using different railroad equipment that would be appropriate for each era, vehicles, structures, and other details could be exchanged to show the layout in different periods of time.  At this point I began to expand my locomotive roster to cover these 3 eras.