Thinking Ahead

Well, aside from a few tweaks and there, I think the style of benchwork I've been building and using over the past several months is the one I'll be going with for the re-start of the Rio Chama.  As I look a year in the future though, I've been wondering what the basement layout will become.

On one hand, I like the simplicity of a flat shelf style layout.  In addition to being easier to build it also means I could go multi-deck if I wanted to go for the gusto.  On the flip side, the vertical scenery inspired by Colorado is really amazing and something I know would be awesome to build.

Part of that boils down to my choice of setting/prototype.  At this point, it will realistically be one of the following 3:

• Rio Grande Southern, 1940's (Rocky mountains, tons of vertical scenery, "very colorado")
• Chili Line, 1940's (New mexico, flatter scenery, more desert, a slight mix of mountains)
• D&RG, El Paso to Guaymas, the line that was never built (A mix of mountains and desert)

The most flexible of the 3 is the last one.  General William Jackson Palmer's original vision for the D&RG was for it to go from Denver to El Paso, with a future expansion from El Paso to Guaymas Mexico, connecting Colorado to the Pacific Ocean.  Obviously Palmer was stopped short in New Mexico, but it would be quite a railroad to imagine the D&RG having made it all the way to the Pacific.

The railroad would have needed to pass through the Sierra Madre in the state of Sonora, Mexico, which would have been a brutal engineering effort.

While in real life it would have been a nightmare, it sets itself up as a vast modelling opportunity.  It means it's possible to re-write history and model the D&RG in a place it could have exited, coupled with a very liberal license for what it might have looked like.  The nice part is that the Chili Line could serve as further reference for what the D&RG looked like as it moved out from Colorado.

But back to the benchwork.  How would the lap joint sectional benchwork work out for vertical scenery?  I was thinking it might be possible to do if the joists were taller, say 24", and were cut out as a profile of the mountains.  Something like this:

This would probably work if the layout was completely shelf style, but what if the mountains were back to back like in a peninsula?  I'm not sure.

And then there's the issue of grade.  There's two ways to handle grade:  Actual grade and simulated grade.

The problem with grade is that just like real railroads had trouble with it, so do the models.  I know this first hand and I've tried to avoid grades ever since.  Giving up grades though also means giving up either multi-deck or at least storage/staging on a lower deck.

Grades can be simulated by making the height of the scenery.  This is only a problem when the same body of water appears on the layout more than once as it should remain at the same height throughout the layout.

And then if the shelf sections start becoming 2 ft tall, can the shelf/rail system still support them?  And how to multiple vertical sections meet up?

Clearly there's a lot to sort out over the next 8-9 months.  Maybe this means I should try building an expansion to the current section layout, one which is very mountain-esque?

Though, knowing me I'll be doing something completely different in a year so I don't know why I bother thinking about these things...