Construction Update 2.

Okay, this took a bit longer than I had hoped to put on the Internet, but construction was hindered by rain and cold temperatures.  The weather should start to warm up any day now, and should stay that way for a good amount of time, so hopefully I can make some progress!

However, I have managed to get a couple things done:

Building Research

I have been researching buildings that I want on this first section.  I've settled on Forks Creek for the setting due to an extremely tight canyon.  In real life, this was a junction where the north and south branches of Clear Creek joined together.  The railroad had a wye which used two bridges (three?) and later on, a tunnel, to make the junction.  While I won't model the full wye, I will be 'modeling' the Forks Creek Concept with a heavy dose of artistic license.  Forks Creek had a water tower, station, freight shed and a couple of smaller supply buildings.  It appears to also have had a siding down the tracks where the water tower was and possibly a coal bunker.  Below is a map that I quickly drew to describe the scene:

While not to scale (or proportion), this illustration provides a rough idea of Forks Creek.  The grey are the canyon walls, the brown is the flood zone, black consists primarily of structures (including the two buildings, water tower, and the bridges), and the red which is where the tracks went. I will be focusing primarily on the track with the structures, and the water tower.  Bridges may come later, and if this railroad ever gets big enough to warrant a junction, Forks Creek May expand.

So then what sort of buildings am I looking at?  Lucky enough, the railroad up Clear Creek is well photographed, and a great online collection of photos is narrowgauge.org.

The photos below come from the website's Ted Kierscey Collection of photographs from around Forks Creek.  Photos belong to Mark L. Evans.  If wishing to comment or ask questions, please go directly to him at his website, I do not own these photos and I am only using them for education purposes.  Again, I do not own these photos.

This photo shows the two main buildings I am concerned with for this first module.  The building in the foreground has "refreshments" written on it, which must mean it is a building intended for tourists, and is likely part of the station.  The building behind appears to be the actual station, stationmaster's quarters, and freight shed.  Both buildings would have regular trains of passengers, and both would receive frequent shipments of food and supplies.  

In this photo we can clearly see the station/freight shed/crew quarters building.  While it might be a cool thing to model in the future, I will be not having a turnout right in front of this building so that I can park cars on the siding without fouling a turnout.  This is the first bit of artistic/modeler's license I've taken out for this project.  In the right edge of the photo, just above the last passenger car, is the water tower and freight/coal shed which I will have on the second module.  For now, the whole scene will be compressed into two, 6 foot modules.  In the future, I can add about 6 more modules to make the full wye.

So there's a look at the buildings I plan to model.  I don't plan to take any more photos from the archive out or respect of copyright laws  However, I will reference this web collection in the future.

Construction

I did manage to make some progress on the first module before all the rain hit.  So below is a summary of my module progress up until now:

I have managed to sand down the rough edges, and I have also added ceiling tile (update 3 coming tomorrow or next day) as road bed.