Monday, April 9, 2012

001 The Utah Night Shift - Switching Layout

Well, the chances of moving to another house here in town keep increasing, and my current Wasatch and Jordan Valley is just too much to build and have to move.  So, for a THIRD time (no, I'm not female) I'm changing my mind.

Don't blame me...blame Lance Mindheim.  http://www.lancemindheim.com/

He published some books on shelf switching layouts and I borrowed one from Mark R. and bought the other.   The books are fabulous!  I really like what he is doing with his Miami switching layout.  So I'm going to do the same.


The Utah Railway operates on the UTA Trax light rail main line late at night when nobody is watching!  It seems that when Trax took over the right-of-way that there were a lot of rail customers that wanted to keep getting goods by rail.  Today they are shipping record 160+ cars on the line.  This makes for PERFECT Lance type switching.

All the work is done from about 11:30 pm until about 4:00 am.  Otherwise you run head long into a passenger train going 55 miles per hour.  Sweet!  Get your work done FAST!

I still know very little about the railroad...and wasn't going to blog this.  But I need a place to put links.

So here we go...

Next post:  on line photos!

2 comments:

  1. Scott,

    I just bought my second Lance book - "How To Design A Small Switching Layout" and I also LOVE his books! I'll be very interested to see this progress as I might be "headed to the shelves" on my next layout. Keep on modeling!

    Rick

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  2. I've really enjoyed Lance's articles in Model Railraoder and MR's Model Railroad Planning series. Looks like I'm going to have to get his books!

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