Friday, August 29, 2014

The Morning Wolverine Leaves Sturgeon Falls

It's been a while since I've done an update on my train set.  I haven't done any major changes to it but I have made a couple of changes.  If nothing else, it gives me the excuse to take pictures of my set up.
 As I've said before, Sturgeon Falls is supposed to be an average Michigan town and I decided that it would be along Amtrak's Wolverine Line.  I guess that gives me a better sense of where it would be.  Based on roughly where it is, the earliest it would see the Wolverine would be at 10 in the morning or so but again it's my world, so the trains can be on my schedule.

The Wolverine backs out of the station after picking up the group of passengers from the first stop of the day.  This is the first Eastbound train of the morning and because it's the Wolverine, it would be train number 350 something.
 The Wolverine heads out of town and goes past the yard.  The Union Pacific and CSX trains wait for their loads.
 The switches are set and the Wolverine makes its transition to the main line.  This would roughly represent the configuration of the Wolverine except for the fact that the cars on the real one are slightly different but sometimes you take what you can get.
 The train passes the Hot Box detector with no defects.  Again based on about where I am setting Sturgeon Falls, it's next stop would likely be Kalamazoo.
 The early morning Canadian National Train rumbles past the yard.  The sign on the back of the yard tower makes a statement about behaving safely around trains.
 The yard hasn't quite started to stir yet but it will be busy later.
 The CN train rumbles past downtown. 
 A shot of the back engine.  This particular engine is made by a company called Intermountain.  I like the detailing on these versus some of my other trains.
 Just a shot of my favorite engine.
 And my second favorite engine.
An overall shot of my set up.  One of the things that I changed was that I switching the "siding" from the side of the layout to the back of the layout.  This gives me more space to tuck away a train and enables me to move trains to the main line while keeping a train on the local line.  If I wanted to do that before, I had to swap out the trains because the siding wasn't long enough.

I know that I want to add a couple more buildings to the yard area.  I may add an office for the grain elevator.  I think I also want to add a maintenance office like I saw in Milan and Fostoria.  I'm thinking about adding a tool and die shop to the lower right hand corner.  I might even add a couple more buildings to the downtown area.  But I will have to say that it is coming along nicely.

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