Adding two major yards without taking up anymore space!

 Hello!

As the "virtual operations" across the miles between my layout and John's New York Central Train Layout and Neal's Atlantic Pacific R.R. have progressed over the years, I've recently been including references to car movements at Selkirk Yard and at Mechanicville, NY to reflect more prototypical car forwarding and railroad connections from the Penn Central era.   

 In our "imagineering", trains from John's Terminal Yard heading to my West Mill or Williams Yards go over the "Selkirk Hurdle" before continuing their way down the Hudson Valley.    Sometimes car forwarding during our past Penn Central Car Movement Series has included pick ups and set outs at Selkirk.  I've tried to convey action like that at Selkirk in photos using a back drop positioned on the shelf layout portion of the Kings Port Division that I built a few years ago to create more scenes for our ops.

Here is my original post describing the shelf layout

Shelf layout

I created a removable Selkirk Yard scene for the shelf layout by printing up several photos of freight cars and the immediately identifiable Selkirk Hump Tower and making them into a once piece backdrop collage of sorts.   

As our virtual operations expanded I also created a similar backdrop scene representing the yard at Mechanicville, printing out an image of the iconic XO Tower there to suggest the location.   Here is a photo of "Mechanicville" on the shelf layout

This worked well for a while but my photos and videos of the scene were limited by the confines of the shelf layout.  I wanted to take videos of trains rolling through these scenes. 

After pondering the possibility of adding extensions to the shelf layout I opted instead for a less expensive and much easier option. 

I purchased two foam core boards and propped them up against the large Empire Grain silos behind West Mill Yard.   I also used part of a model railroad grass mat I had been given a long time ago (never throw anything away! :) ) to represent distant mountains and looked online for more images that might convey the two yards.   

Here are the foam core boards set behind West Mill.   To reinforce the idea of a new location I removed a few recognizable features from West Mill such as the yard tower and light poles.  This is a quick and easy set up.

My initial attempt to represent Mechanicville reminded me too much of a Grant Wood painting of rolling Iowa hills but it was a good start.  The light tower is positioned to cover the seam where the two foam core boards meet.

After a lot of trial and error with placing the cut outs of buildings, over spraying the distant hills with a blue color to make them look farther away (and also needing to repaint the blue sky due to some accidental blue spots despite efforts at masking),  Mechanicville now looks like this:

I was pleased to find a good photo of the former station which is located near XO tower.  Other buildings in the background were suggested by photos and videos I found of the actual scene.

Here is a sample video of a D&H train departing Mechanicville while train BM-5 arrives, reinforcing a sense of the yard's size and complexity.  

The Selkirk Yard scene was updated in a similar manner.   Here is the Selkirk Hump Tower collage set up behind West Mill Yard's trackage.  Penn Central freight cars help set the location and era, and also block our view of the fuel tank near West Mill's engine tracks.

Here is the scene set up leaning against Empire Grain

Here is a sample video of trains arriving and running through Selkirk

Now that both of these scenes are complete and can easily be installed to turn West Mill into Mechanicville and Selkirk I am looking forward to including them in our future Penn Central Car Movement "virtual ops"!   I anticipate showing trains running through Selkirk to head toward West Mill or John's Terminal Yard, as well as transfers from Selkirk to Mechanicville and vice versa to convey traffic patterns with New England.   

So, I've managed to add two major yards to our virtual ops without needing to expand the layout or take over anymore basement real estate!   I think this is going to work out well.  Stay tuned!