My trusty Sievers Benchwork had supported my previous HO- scale railroad and easily handled the more modest demands of the Y&S. It took me about an hour to reconfigure my modules to fit the O-scale dimensions.
Trackwork
Lighting Four-foot, standard commer- cial fluorescent fixtures every six feet or so, plus incandescent spot- lights at about the same interval gives a nice blend of lighting. Va- lances of ¼-inch hardboard mask the lights from view and create a shadow box effect throughout. Finally the Benchwork!
I used Atlas Code 148 flex track laid on a cork roadbed and bal- lasted with Scenic Express Light Gray Blend Fine No. 20 for the main line and Dark Gray Blend No. 20 Fine for the Youngstown yards and secondary sidings. Switches were a combination of Atlas No. 5’s and shorter ra- dius and vintage Roco’s for the tight spots. I installed Caboose Industries throws throughout, ex- cept for an impossible-to-reach switch behind a building in the Youngstown Yards I finessed with a Humpyard Purveyance Mechan- ical Track turnout that works like a charm.
Scenery Give me plaster, ground foam, and some dirt and rocks and I will give you a railroad. I hand-carved all my Plaster of Paris rock faces with an X-Acto blade. My trick is to let the soup-consistency plas-
ter start to set up, and then start carving like a maniac, letting the blade “break” off chunks of rock the way Nature does. After the carved plaster had dried (takes a few days), I sprayed it with water, and then dyed it with thinned-out acrylics — brown, sienna, and ocher. I followed the acrylics with a wash of thinned-out black to bring out the detail. Trees are mostly sedum, har- vested from my garden and hung to dry for a few months in my garage. I sprayed the trees with green, rattle-can paint. After it dries, I spray them with cheap hairspray and immediately dust them with Woodland Scenics ground foam.
Ground cover is everything from real rocks to ground foam and everything in between — the more textures, the better. The backdrop hills and moun- tains are the same range of color blue, with different amounts of white in it to make them seem more hazy and distant. Gray paint airbrushed along the divid- ing lines of colors creates a sense of separation.
A word about radii…
Despite extremely tight quar- ters, I still wanted continuous running as well as switching. This required a 24-inch radius on three of my four corners, and lim- its me forever to 40-foot cars and switchers. But it’s a compromise I accept every time I happily watch the trains go around and around. I masked the radius in one cor- ner with a cut through the terrain. The South Tunnel hides the other.
Smiths Ferry Coal Loading Facility According to my research, the Y&S management team used its ICC “Interurban” classifica- tion as a legal smoke screen to ship coal at a fraction of the cost of the competition. It then bra- zenly delivered the coal to the Youngstown steel mills beneath
JUNE 2015 47
Local Job An EMD switcher works the local industries on the railroad. Cars are pulled and spotted and then switched at the yard in Youngstown. The layout is also designed for continuous operation.
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