Speedrail Industrial

Speedrail Industrial is a business park located off Hwy 49 north of Charlotte. I plan to model 4 industries there. To the left is the beginnings of laying the trackwork last week. Below are actual pics of the 4 industries and what I have so far.

Foils, Inc - A metal recycler which is actually just north of the industrial park. Served by a single siding running thru the property.

The next business inside the park is Mallard Creek (Chemicals I think). Just a small pumping station manned by camera surveillance.

Next in the park is an Gas Company, but I don't have my notes with me, and the name won't come to me. They always say the mind is first to go. Anyway, the gas company will be located in the rear of this picture.

The track leading off in the foreground is Foils.

Southeastern Packaging is a rather large facility, actually located on 2 different sidings. This must be a warehouse of sorts. The tracks disappear under the building roof so that they can be unloaded out of the weather.

Station Signs

During the first Ops Session, John Barnett suggested that I make station signs in the prototypical Southern Green. I had made a highway sign with an online program called SignMaker located here.

I went back there and figured out how to make a simple name sign without all the highway markings, printed them and mounted on some plastic. There are quite a bit bigger than scale size, but I made them for the benefit of operators.

One of the goals I had building the layout was to minimize the amount of labeling on the fascia so as to keep the operators' focus on the layout. This should help in that regards.

Between High Point and Thomasville

This is a small area between the High Point Yard and Thomasville. Just opposite of it is Southern Film .

The bank rises a bit more than the prototype and there's actually an illegal garbage dump to the left. I may try to add it in later.

Jamestown Scenery

I continue to work on the upper NS level. Starting with the Danville staging
yard, thru Reidsville and on to Jamestown. There are a couple of industries served there, one being Univar and the other Homeland Container. There's also a siding probably a team or house track.

I have been putting in what scenery I could leaving room for the buildings which will have to wait until I can kitbash or scratchbuild them.

So that operators can have clear access to the turnouts and sidings for cars, I've had to make the aisle side scenery pretty sparse. For the most part, it is just grassy areas. The static grass seems to hold up well to resting arms, and objects laid on it. I just have to keep undulating the ground so it doesn't appear to be just flat.

Reidsville Scenery

Have done a little work so far this week. This is the view coming up out of Danville staging thru Edna Signal by Reidsville.

The back side of the street will be a city block. The entire level will be fall scenery. It helps to be able to ride around now and see the colors. Harder to imagine fall colors in March.

Looking south from Edna, the woods separating Reidsville from Jamestown. That looks like 20 miles, right?


I've went back and updated the train tags with the new symbols and added EOT tags.

Scenery In the Yards

With all the visitors out of the way, I went back to scenery. I pulled all the trains out of the yards (in part to test a short problem which turned out to be a defective PM42) and ballasted both yards. I also added a few background trees to Charlotte Yard, but couldn't do much as there just wasn't any room.

I was able to do more with Danville Yard and incorporated two pieces I had salvaged from my old layout. They don't fit perfectly into the new scenery, but I wanted a bit of the old with the new.

First Ops Session

17 months and 14 days after I started cutting trees down, I had my first Operating Session. I expected plenty of problems and the first crew was carefully selected having already experienced their baptism of fire. Now that we've proved it can run, I can open up a session to more users.

The first 10 minutes were a disaster. Engines not running, yard throat shorting out, engines mysteriously unconsisted, etc. etc. etc. After a while things settled down. We did experience an unknown Digitrax problem after the first hour that we haven't yet solved. The PM 42 was giving us shorts on the first district, but there were no trains there. Resetting the command station worked for 10 minutes and the short reappeared.

Larry Keller* goes down in history as running the first train on the CCSB 2.0 (The Asterisk is because Gil Brauch picked the first train order, but had problems out of the yard. Larry bypassed him to become the first. I am sure this will be be debated for years to come.)

 Jeff Lindstrom works the WSS/HPT&D.Jeff has learned to never volunteer for anything again.

The first Ops crew: (L to R) Larry "Paint Bank" Keller, Marcus "I Can Dispatch Anything" Neubacher, Robin "Watch This" Eanes, Jeff "Southbound" Lindstrom, Gil "Road Boss" Brauch.