PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR
There is a lot of modeling packed in this N scale 1′×4′ recreation of the Hall-Oakes sawmill. A centerbeam flat car in on the spur
leading into the open air loading shed, while a pair of wood chip cars are sitting beneath the chip loading station.
Dawson Station A small N scale switching layout based on a lumber mill in Dawson Oregon/Kenneth Olsen N
estled in the sleepy foothills of the Oregon Coast Range is a val- ley where time seems to have
come to a stop. The mournful wail of a steam whistle echoes off the nearby hills as it has done every workday for almost a hundred years. A pair of rusting, un- even rails point toward the source of the sound, the steam-powered Hull-Oakes sawmill at Dawson, Oregon. Recently, time changed something in this other- wise timeless setting. After almost a century of use, the rails now lay idle. Fortunately, as the whistle indicates, the idle tracks did not idle the mill. I was fortunate enough to stumble into this sleepy valley before the trains quit visiting. A local bicycle club had arranged a tour, and after two-dozen scenic back-road miles, we were trans- ported to another era as we were led on a tour through the noisy, bustling mill, conspicuously out of place in our brightly colored synthetic Lycra®
and
awkward shoes. Having served in the engine rooms of nuclear submarines, I was familiar with the power and mys-
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tery of steam, but here, in an open- sided structure filled with the scent of fresh-cut wood, was a magic from a by- gone era still hard at work. Learning that the mill was served by rail twice a week sparked my imagination. Like most readers, I was captivated at a young age by the magical images of model railways I saw in magazines. My modeling aspirations, however, never made it much past an oval and single siding framed by an unfinished chicken wire mountain on a piece of plywood. In my wandering twenties I kept a boxed HO set and would occasionally add a car without much thought as to indus- try or period. As I settled in my thirties, I started another oval layout but quick- ly came to the conclusion that watching a train run in circles wasn’t going to do it for me. The stark realization was that I would never have enough time, space, or money to create a magazine-quality layout of my own. I wasn’t ready to just give up, howev-
er. I decided that the only thing to do was to build something small enough
that it could be put out of the way when needed. Anything would be better than nothing. The major hurdle would be coming up with something realistic and fun to operate while still being portable. Luckily, I came across the late Carl Arendt’s Micro/Small Layout website (
http://www.carendt.com, still in opera- tion with a new editor), which was loaded with wonderfully small and fully detailed layouts. Carl’s philosophy was that small layouts can be completed rel- atively quickly and inexpensively while still being fun to operate and display. It was at his website I learned about switching puzzles, and how such simple layouts could lead to lengthy yet inter- esting operating sessions. One such puzzle is the Inglenook Sid-
ings layout built by Alan Wright in 1979. It contained only two switches and three spurs, but by limiting the available ca- pacities of the spurs, assembling a train of specific, randomly-selected cars be- comes an incredibly interesting logistical challenge. It wasn’t until I took a full day off to follow the train down to the Hull-
JANUARY 2014
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