The Columbia & Western (three track staging) C: Up
Helix: B. 3 turns up to West staging and
Cascade on Middle deck. C.4 turns down to staging on Storage deck
Helix: A. 2 turns to Shields on Middle deck
Kraft Slocan City B: Up C: Down East Staging A: Up Troup Jct.
Storage Drawer 8 x 25 car trains
Robson West
Winlaw
Nelson
Swing Gate 3 South Nelson Castlegar South Slocan/Fraine
Reverse loop under South helix
D: Down D: Up
Helix up 4 turns to Trail staging and Castlegar
Swing Gate 1
South Staging
Salmo BN
Staging Drawings by Ken Lawrence Workbench and Painting area
Mark Dance’s multi-level, N scale Columbia & Western Rwy. Room size: 20′×21′
scene at Shields. At scale speeds that two-turn mainline helix would be tra- versed in about 1.5 minutes, which was the limit of acceptable hidden running for me. I also hoped that a deep, single deck scene set high above the Lower Arrow Lake might provide a dramatic keynote for the layout. How’s that for turning a negative into a positive? It was time to lay out the stations. The locations of Nelson and Castlegar placed the junction with the Slocan Sub on the southern wall but, if the Slocan Sub were to leave the Boundary in a prototypical manner, it would interfere with operators following the Boundary trains. I wasn’t going to place a duck under on the main aisle and, given the infrequent Slocan trains, a swing gate might work allowing Slocan trains to temporarily bridge the main aisle to
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reach the middle of the room. This sec- ond gate would have to be very easy to use from either side and would ideally swing horizontally, providing a stable location for the prototype’s siding. The location of the balance of the Boundary stations were a result of keeping a min- imum of two train lengths, preferably three, between sidings and finding con- venient corners to locate turning wyes for the pushers and plows. After picking 42″ as the height for Nelson and Castlegar’s switching ar- eas, I sketched section views to estab- lish viable viewing heights and placed Farron summit in the Northeast corner of the garage 64″ above the floor. It would all be downhill from there in both directions! The final critical loca- tion was leaving length and height for a full scale rendition of the Kettle Riv-
er bridge at Cascade which, though a “must have” scenically, cramped space for the western visible terminus of the layout. The cramping seemed less of a problem as the western end of the lay- out was logically, or so it seemed at the time, at the foot of the grade at Cas- cade and not the busier towns of Grand Forks or Midway. Looking back, per- haps I would do things differently now. This design would provide about sev- en scale miles of mainline between the visible western and eastern ends of the layout. At scale speeds this would be a 20-minute run from visible end to visi- ble end (or nearly two fast hours at 5:1), which would be lengthened with meets, switching, brake and thermal tests. That seemed reasonable. Creative use of the middle peninsula might allow two scale miles for the Slocan and Kaslo
MAY 2013
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