Hello!
Over the years the many Penn Central Car Movement series that I have participated in with John's New York Central Train Layout and Neal's Atlantic Pacific RR have motivated several changes on my own layout, most notably my efforts to increase the number of industries, businesses, or consignees that might send or receive cars in our three-way virtual operations scheme. Since space on my layout is limited I created a number of what I refer to as "facade industries" or building flats that I temporarily set up while running our virtual ops.
A few examples of these building flat "facade industries" include:
Half Moon Wholesale Lumber Distributors
Van Winkle Canning and Woodstock Hills Natural Soda
Quality Fabrications
...Agway and Bell Pole (across the tracks from the grain elevator) among others.
While I would have liked to permanently added many of these industries to the layout, space limitations required me to come up with creative ways of temporarily representing them while photographing car movements for our PCCMs. I originally used a small diorama with removable structures to give the impression that businesses like Agway (seen below) and others were involved in pick ups and set outs of our PCCM freight cars..
Hoping to expand the facade industry scenes I eventually built a small shelf layout on a lower level of the original layout's benchwork. It was independent from the rest of the layout.
On the positive side, this set up was an improvement visually and even let me film locomotives occasionally moving with freight cars in front of the various industries.
The downside was that the lower level location of the shelf often had me sitting on the floor to take photos and it took time and effort to set up the various industry scenes by switching out buildings and foreground scenery.
The biggest drawback was that I had to physically remove cars from the main layout and stage them by hand on the shelf layout to simulate their movement from yard to customer.
A new idea occurred to me one day while I was working my West Mill Yard. It occurred to me that I could extend two of the yard tracks a few feet further along the front of the layout's fascia and include an engine escape turnout. It didn't take much time or effort to add this section but it provides significant payoffs in increased yard capacity and locomotive movements. Here are a couple of shots from early development of the idea. I was able to recycle track and scenic materials from the shelf layout for this project so it didn't cost a dime!
Looking at this new section in front of the fascia I had the inspiration to locate my interchangeable facade industries there.
As an example, here is Agway sitting behind the tracks seen above with a temporary backdrop behind the grain elevator
Three immediate benefits result from this arrangement:
1. I don't have to sit or stoop to set up or photograph these industries as they are now placed at regular layout height.
2. Cars can stay on the tracks in movements from yard to consignee!
3. I will be able to video more realistic set-outs and pick-ups in front of the facade industries.
The next consideration was creating a way to include foreground scenery for the facade industries like I used to on the shelf layout. I'd want to be able to easily set up a scene in front of the tracks to convey a sense of depth to the scenes and place structures related to the industries there for pics and videos.
My solution was to build a platform on top of a rolling cart I was already using to store rolling stock.
The platform aligns temporary scenes in front of the tracks on the new yard extension...
I then experimented with some backgrounds for the facade industry scenes and finally came up with this easily installed and removable Masonite panel covered with blue paper for sky and tree images printed off my computer. I searched for images of the Catskills and cropped segments of trees. I then copied them repeatedly and layered them on top of each other to create a tree covered hill effect.
Focusing my phone camera closely on the industry scene with the rolling car platform in place creates videos like this set-out at Van Winkle Canning:
And this example; a set-out at Agway and a pick-up at Bell Pole:
I really like being able to show more detailed action at these industries and look forward to making more videos for PCCM series posting!
When not in use for PCCM operations the cart is easily tucked away and the West Mill extension is used for my solo operations.
After creating the backdrop for PCCM ops at the location above I looked at some of the photos and videos that I've taken with backdrops I've used for my scenes representing Selkirk and Mechanicville. I represented these scenes by temporarily removing and adding features to West Mill Yard including a two panel foam core backdrop that I placed in front of Empire Grain.
Here is an early photo of the Selkirk backdrop disguising Empire Grain at West Mill. The hump yard is simply printed images of the hump yard office and freight cars cut out and pasted to foam core.
A lot of my Selkirk images in PCCM posts looked like this. I decided that there was room for improvement, especially the background.
After finding some useful Catskill Mountains photos online and gaining experience cutting and pasting them to create a backdrop (the old fashioned way with scissors and glue!) I decided to try to improve my Selkirk scene.
First I increased the length of the hump yard with its paper cut-outs of freight cars. Then I added new background hills. I also utilized a roll of cloud printed paper I found at a Michael's craft store.
Here is an image of the backdrop revealing the disguise at West Mill
A cropped photo creates an improved Selkirk scene for PCCM pics and videos. Extending the length of the hump yard backdrop allowed me to take a photo of the yard from father back than before which adds more depth to the image and makes the yard look suitably massive. I added more printed cut-out light towers as well. The towers hide seams between the printed images of the background mountains.
All of these efforts have spurred a momentum that is prompting me to make some similar improvements to my Binghamton Yard scene on the other side of the layout. More on that later!
Thanks for taking a look, and keep an eye open for these new scenes in future PCCM photos and videos!
