Willamette River Railway - Portland Terminal Trackage

Hi all!  I'm working on wrapping up the design for the Willamette River Railway.  There are a few things I need to do:

1.  Finish the port trackage
2.  Install the siding for the Power Company
3.  Wrap up the drawings and make a final post

Let's start with the port traffic.  Normally the LDSIG group is a bit more helpful.  I only got a couple of post.  Mainly they are big layout snobs, so if you post something small they ignore it.  I'll challenge any of them to a small layout design contest any day as I believe the smaller the layout, the harder it is to design.  Click on the pictures below to enlarge.

First, let's head to the HQ of the Portland Terminal Railroad Company in Portland.  With the magic of Google Maps we can be there in a second.  The area covered by this railroad which is 60% owned by the UP is quite vast.  It could be a house sized layout all by itself and never capture all of it.  How about that turning loop in the yard?  That is what I want to do.  Just grab certain key affects from the area to give the layout the flavor of the railroad.  As you can see here this is Guild's Lake Yard.  I have a separate map of it.  One interesting note about the loop track is "you can only go one direction on the loop or the loco will derail" and the speed limit is 5 mph.  Stable track!

I know that steel comes in and out of this port, and some comes from Japan.  Kyle Weismann-Yee of the Brooklyn Sub Yahoo Egroup was kind enough to inform me that Gunderson is a rebuilder of railcars and is a big employer in the area.  Let's check them out.

 Here is an excellent loading dock!  Steel is offloaded from ships and put on special flat cars for use in building ships I believe.  Note the great curve, the crane, how the lines are painted and the lights.  Simple, but very interesting.  It would be easy to model.

A bit blurry, but Google does have some great angles.  Note the crane.  This is right across the river from the Brooklyn(?) yard.  Guard shack, water tower, fence.  Great but simple detail.

Here are some of the special steel plate cars.  This adds a lot of interest and they would be easy to build.  They could shuttle back and forth to another facility, or ship as outbound freight.

Google can give you a nice shot of the front of Gunderson's building, too!  Here it is on Front Street, so we probably need to add Front Street to the layout.

Look at the great scenery across the street!  Thayne, here is your prototype scenery shot for the front area.

Here is Gunderson Marine.  The rail car service company is called Greenbrier Rail Services. Apparently they build most anything in steel.  The pier is excellent and shows some fun modeling opportunities, especially the small trestles going to the pier.

In the port area you can see some interesting solutions to how building are built around the right of way. One solution is to square off the building in sections, or just cut an angle off.

These buildings are curved to fit the right of way.  Oh!  And a ton of fancy trackwork!

Ashland Hercules has a plant next to the yard.  I love chemical plants!  They are interesting to look at and take a ton of different cars including tankers, flats, box and covered hoppers.  We'll add them to the list.

Here is an industry with a name and an open bay door for railcar service.  Maybe this would be a good industry.  We'll zoom in to street level.

Well, looks like Pacific Tool isn't using this for rail cars...so we'll keep looking.

Specialty Steel Services is another good railroad customer as they move steel in and out.

Wow!  This is perfect!  The Boyston Metal Works.  They scrap almost anything.  Its dirty and just perfect for a port.

Here they are loading gondolas with scrap.  Lots of fun, beat up car work here.

They have their own switcher and cars.

 Oops!  Looks like some train cars, wheels and other railroad items made it to the scrap heap as well.

Let's take these industries and put them into the port: Gunderson/Greenbrier, Ashland/Hercules and Boyston.