The Columbia & Western
of 5:1 and found that an operating day from 05:00 until 20:00 would permit most of the prototype’s trains to be run in a three-hour session. The stringline also helped me understand the load on staging tracks, yard, passing sidings, etc., and also the number of operators required, which I compared to the number that might both fit and realis- tically be available. Today I maintain
operating scenarios for as few as four and as many as ten operators. To establish expected train lengths it
was “prototype to the rescue.” In my time frame the Boundary sub frequent- ly ran three or four engines on very short trains owing to the steep grades and high probability that at least one FM unit might die on the hill either heading out or coming back or both. I
Recreating the scene at Lafferty
set a target train length of eight feet, long enough for 25 cars and four en- gines. This in turn set yard length, sid- ing length, distance between sidings, and staging track length, and even the amount of rolling stock needed! With the high level parameters es- tablished, I set about to squeeze 129 miles of Boundary Subdivision and 60 miles of Slocan/Kaslo Subdivision into the garage. CP’s tracks followed the waterways of the area, so it made sense scenically for operators to be “standing in the wa- ter” facing the tracks with the hillsides rising behind even though it would re- quire East to be to the operator’s left and West to their right. I hoped this would not be a problem for operators as long as I maintained this orienta- tion consistently around the layout. I first located Nelson yard, Castlegar and staging, as they would take up the most room. Looking at various options, I sketched the yard at Nelson along the east wall of the garage and Castlegar, with its large pulp mill, along the west wall with staging beneath. I was inter- ested in a transfer table for staging be- cause it would save considerable linear space by removing the ladder tracks at each end of a through staging yard. It also would allow the staging tracks to
the September 2010, edition of Railroads Illustrated). On Mark’s layout, there were several challenges in replicating
the view. Firstly, the required camera position was occupied by the hillside adjacent to the track. Secondly, the required camera angle was facing back toward the front of the benchwork and the aisle. Thirdly, as is often the case on a multi-deck layout, the lower deck extended further out into the aisle beneath this scene. Finding a se- cure position for the camera was a high priority, as the desired im- age would have to be a composite of several similar exposures for focus stacking. Mark proposed a solution using a front-silvered mirror placed on
the track ahead of the train. This reflected the object 90 degrees, enabling the camera position to be established nearly perpendicu- lar to, and on the opposite side of, the tracks. I positioned my tripod in the aisle adjacent to the scene and used a 28 inch camera bar to cantilever the camera and ball head over the lower deck. I then trained the camera into the mirror as seen in the accompanying photographs. Some work was required to ensure that the mirror was posi-
O 56
n a layout designed and built to include specific prototype scenes, it seems natural to try to recreate photographs which mimic those taken in the prototype location. Such
was the case when Mark asked me to try and replicate a view recorded at the Lafferty water tank on the CPR’s Boundary Subdi- vision. The view appeared both as a painting by John R. Signor on the dust jacket cover of J.F. Garden’s book The Crow And The Kettleand as a centerfold photograph by Mike Schaefer which ap- peared in the July, 1972, edition of T
rains magazine (reprinted in
tioned vertically and secure. It was adjusted together with the cam- era to achieve the desired composition while shooting into the mir- ror. Nine exposures were recorded, each with a shift in the point of focus from just before the lead loco to the road overpass in the distance. After as- sembling the digital expo- sures with Helicon Focus software to achieve the desired depth of field, the composite image was re- versed in Adobe Photo- shop®
.–Timothy J. Horton MAY 2013
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