Model Railroading on the Cheap

   The Hillton heavy materials track is straight behind the machine shop – the gray frame building at the right edge of this picture. This spur is intended for the machine shop material storage yard.

   This East end of Hillton can get busy with all kinds of freight. Here we might see such things as the lattice braced steel frames (Central Valley) in the foreground along with a few pipes, a flat car load of large concrete tile, to be used by the County highway department as well as the low-boy flatbed semi-truck just barely visible under the overhead crane. In the distance (top left corner) we can see the Bulk Material Conveyor is unloading a hopper car of gravel into a dump truck, the Mirage Warehouse (with a box car) and the Modern Cold Storage building can be seen with a couple refrigerated trucks (with homemade refrigeration units attached) parked out front.

   All this became possible after rearrangement of tracks at this end of Hillton Industrial complex.  Originally I had too many tracks with no room for trucks or roadways. This was a good move.

Modern Refrigerated Warehouse

   The Modern Refrigerated Warehouse in the background is the compromise that I settled for instead of an icing track for the fancy private owner refrigerator cars of the 1920s. This is probably better for modern times. The spur track holds just one refer car, but can also serve refrigerated highway trucks. Such are the compromises on a small layout. I am quite happy with the space utilization and the ability to use both rail cars and highway trucks.

   These flat paper buildings on this and the previous page are home drawn and printed with the computer and pasted onto sheet plastic support panels (to resist gravity) on the backs of Holden City tall buildings on the lower level. Use Walthers Goo because water based glue won’t hold to vinyl and cardboard warps with time and water-based glue. This gave me two two-faced buildings in the space of one, a really nice trick on a small layout.

   The overhead crane was made by modifying a Bachmann signal bridge. The crane bridge straddles both the gondola car on the spur and the low-boy flatbed truck that is difficult to see in this view. One is liable to see all kinds of large material shipments at the east end of Hillton.