Category: Construction
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Yardley and Hillton Operation Rules and Practices
Most trains originate or terminate at Yardley. Mainline trains must have a caboose on the end. Freight Trains usually consist of between 3 and 8 cars. Destinations are: Yardley industries, the industries of the mainline towns of Middleburg and Hillton Junction, Interchange Eastbound or Westbound, and Hillton many industries. When the cars in Yardley destined…
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Rounding Out the Construction Chapter
I felt that this chapter needed more color pictures, so I added some recent and informative picture-stories to help round out this chapter where some pictures are a few years old. Value of the Duck-Under I realize that not everyone wants a duck-under layout but here is why I like mine. This picture was…
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Bob’s Diner
This is a plaster casting of many years ago. It is an old street car repurposed for a restaurant (that is better than using one as a chicken coop)! My friend Bob Wise diligently painted it by hand (there are over 100 windows) and used it on his model railroad calling it Ray’s Diner and…
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Operation Scheme of the Yardley & Hillton
Here is a summary of how I operate this railroad. There are three distinct areas of operation, namely, 1) the Mainline with industries and interchange, 2) the industrial town of Hillton, and 3) Yardley classification, engine facilities and staging. Each can be operated independently of the other two. I use a card system for freight…
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Layout Track Wiring
The main line track plan has 3 towns as purported by Lynn Westcott many years ago. Each town has a passing siding and some industries. The theory being that a layout must have at least 3 places for east bound trains to pass westbound ones. Or else everyone always passes at the same place. I…
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Understanding Hillton Dual Turnout Control
About using duplicate toggle switches for controlling some turnouts: To save money, I throw most of these turnouts by hand. The town of Hillton on my layout is too wide to reach across for throwing all the turnouts by hand. Here at Hillton I used Peco turnouts exclusively, because they work well. Still it…
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Abundant Switching Operations at Hillton Industrial Complex
This post helps to explain the track schematic and industries diagram of the Hillton industrial complex. The bracketed letters in the text correspond to those circled locations on the schematic diagram shown here. Track car capacities are shown in blue ink. My hope for the town of Hillton was for it to be a…
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Mainline Block Controls
Good ideas in control panels – Overhead block-throttle selection. Here are some of my ideas and methods for conventional train controls. This is about how I dealt with the two train control system as advocated by Linn Westcott and others. After building a model train layout so big that it was jammed against…
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Describing Operations at Hillton Junction
The drawing at the top of this page shows a schematic representation of the tracks in town. Operation here is straight up, easily seen and accessed from inside the pit. The turnouts for the passing siding are powered from the overhead mainline block control panel. The turnouts for the industry spur tracks are manually…
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Describing Wallbridge Interchange Operations
The lower end of Middleburg passing track is called Wallbridge due to its proximity to the steel truss bridge over the concrete walled entrance to the tunnel through the rock cliffs. This might be the most scenic area on the whole layout. It is a favorite spot for photographs as it is right out…
Model Railroading on the Cheap 