2020 Work

Made with Xara

Southern Pacific Coast Line Scenes

At the start of 2020 I was hobbled by a fracture in my leg resulting from a bad fall on some ice but I did manage to finish the shop area of the lower San Luis Obispo yard.

This is the store area for the San Luis yard. The power house is here too. In the real world, the gas storage tank on the right was outside the yard as it was not an SP tank. In my compressed world it ended up next to the power house.

With this scene complete I have turned to doing some repair work. Replacing blown decoders is at the top of my to do list.

The first decoder I am doing this winter is a Loksound Micro going into a small S4 switch engine

There are still some places in the San Luis Obispo section of the layout with room to add things. One of them is where this warehouse will be. Still need to add track and and build a dock, add ground cover, etc. On a more ambitious note, I think I am going to try to build this rock bunker which will end up near the warehouse shown here. This photo shows only half of the bunker but that is probably closer to what I will try to build. Mine won’t be as tall as this one though.

And here is how it turned out. the house in the background of the picture above is in progress on the work bench.

I had a small place next to the San Luis Obispo Depot that I was reserving for some small buildings. I finally got around to building them two of them. In the background on the left is a Section house and to the right is the the Trainmen’s bathroom, both scratch buitl. In the foreground are two small building made from kits some years ago. The larger is a stand-in for he Signal Office and the small one is a storage shed. The partial building at the back left is part of the baggage storage room for the passenger depot.

The last project for the year was to modify some old boxcars to Maintenance of Way (MOW) cars. When I lived in Santa Margarita there were always a bunch of MOW cars on one siding. I had no idea what they were there for but now I know they were cars to support the crews of the helper engines that sat there waiting for a train to come along that needed help to get over the hill. Probably there was a car that served food and another one that had bunks in it. The B&W picture below was supposedly shot in late 1956 and shows the MOW row of cars. Next to it are the cars on my siding. They all will enlarge if clicked on.