Meet Crown Peak No. 1 (A Quick Look)

Finally the first locomotive for the railroad has arrived!  Crown Peak No. 1 is a Bachmann On30, outside frame 4-4-0 American.  She's a small engine, locomotive and tender having a length of about 48 scale feet from coupler to coupler (12 inches) and standing at only 10 feet tall (2.5 inches) at the cab.  Here are the initial photos:

 This engine came with plenty of optional details so that anyone can customize their engine to fit within their railroad.  You can choose the pilots (cow-catcher, platform), the smoke stacks (mushroom spark arrestor, standard straight stack), and the method which the engine will be fired (coal, oil, or wood).  You can also choose between spoke and solid pilot wheels.

Full left view

Left engine view

Right engine view

Rear engine view

Front engine view

Full left view, wood load in tender.

Prototype inspiration, an MOW crew car!

The prototype had all sorts of funky stuff to draw inspiration from, and one such example sits in the Fort Missoula Museum.

The Museum has a large outdoor exhibit of railroad artifacts, among them being this:

The second photo is actually reversed, since Shays were built almost exclusively with their drivers on the right side of the engine, not the left as shown in the picture.

This car was used to transport crews on the Blackfoot railroad route, as well as a mobile office.

I'll have to draw up plans for this thing at some point.

Planning the railroad (or how to make a saw carriage that moves)

I've decided that the best thing to model first would be the saw mill and shop areas of the logging railroad. But rather than having a stationary saw mill, I'd like to make an O scale mill where all the moving parts move.  For the most part, getting the belts and wheels to rotate is fairly straight forward, the only complicated part is properly positioning everything (wheels can be made from styrene, or purchased, and the belts can be rubber bands).

What's hanging me up is the back and forth motion required for the saw carriage.

You see, the saw carriage would hold a large log in place and push it through the circular saw and then would be pushed back to repeat the process.  This process was powered by the belt system and operated by a lever that would be controlled by the saw operator.  Thus, I need a simple back and forth operation in the span of a length of lumber.  Typically, lengths would be 8, 10, 12, 16, and 20 feet.  I want to be able to cut 16 foot piece of lumber which in O scale ends up being 4 inches.the carriage needs to move twice that length plus about 2 inches to clear the saw, so I need a 10 inch movement total.

After thinking about it, I have four solutions:

 

Option 1 is to have a vertically mounted DC electric motor power a large wheel (actually 10 inch diameter, not 8 inch).  This wheel would then move a piston via the piston arm.  The result would be turning the single rotational direction of the motor into a back and forth operation at the piston.  The piston itself would be mounted to the underside of the carriage.  To adjust speed I would have to adjust the voltage to the motor.  This option is simple, but I would need a lot of space to make it work, about 10 x 22 inches.  I can be done, but that's pretty big!

 

 

Option 2 would work for a higher rpm motor because rather than directly driving the wheel via a friction wheel, this set up uses a worm gear.  The downside is that the wheel would in fact need to be a large gear with hundreds of teeth.  It is possible, but would be time consuming to construct something like this, and would probably have to be done with a large plate of steel. Also, it doesn't reduce the necessary area for this machine to work as I would still need a 10 x 22 inch space.

 

Option 3 is much more compact and utilizes what is called a "self reversing screw".  Rather than explain it's operation, here's a video from ABSSAC Industries:

 

 Rather than using a wheel or gear to make a piston-type motion, the self reversing screw works by running in a channel carved into a rod.  When the block gets to the end of the channel, it is forced into the second channel, running the other way.  This operation is bullet proof, except I would need to find someone who can make such a machine in either metal or through 3D printed plastic.

 

And finally here is Option 4.  Rather than using mechanical means to reverse the screw, I could use electric means via a time delay polarity reversing circuit.  Ever couple of seconds (or however long the time is set for) the circuit board will reverse the polarity headed to the DC motor, thus causing it to run in the opposite direction.  The motor would power a long screw which would basically be a piece of all-thread that is 3/8 or 1/2 inch in size and long enough for the saw carriage to move.  The all-thread would be moving a nut up and down it's length which would then be attached to the log carriage.

Options 3 and 4 take up much less space, requiring about a 2 by 12 inch area to work properly.  option 4 may just be the cheapest of the 4 presented.

Kicking around two ideas

What should I choose?  That's the hardest question in this entire build.  With my first locomotive on the way it's time to sit down and think about what I would like to model first, and I have two options that I've narrowed myself down to:

Firstly I thought about modeling a logging camp.  These camps were temporary and would consist of one or two sidings and a passing track for trains to meet and for cars full of supplies to be dropped off inside the camp.  A good example photo that I found is this one from mendorailhistory.org

The tracks went right through the middle of the camp, kinda dangerous in the morning for the men on their way to the cook shack!

Such a design would be light on track, heavy on scenery, and would allow for a lot of creative scratch building.  The camps varied quite a lot from a line of tents to temporary hard wall structures and even modified railroad cars!  Not only that, but these camps were always located a short distance from where the men would be felling trees.  If I were to expand with more modules a natural scene would be a log landing, a place where logs would be loaded onto flat-cars and shipped down to the mill.

In places like Minnesota, these camps would be set up over the winter and taken down in the spring, thus clearing large tracts of land over the course of the winter.  In the Glacier area of Montana, these operation would likely have gone on all year round.

There's plenty of info on the logging camps themselves:

http://tworivershistory.net/big-blackfoot-railroad.html

http://bigskyjournal.com/Article/montanas-original-man-camps1

One of the more well known railroads, the Big Blackfoot Railroad, ran two Willamette shays, one of which is still in existence at the Fort Missoula Museum!

Obviously, modeling a logging camp has a lot of potential!  But the other idea I had was to model a log landing into a river with basic engine services.  Many of these railroads, especially those located in the Swan River Valley, the Blackfoot River, and the tributaries of the Clark Fork and Flathead River were dozens of miles from other railroads and thus did not have connecting track.

As the articles above explain, these logs would often be dumped into a river and sent downstream to the mill.  This was possible on the deep, fast rivers like the Blackfoot, but perhaps not as efficient on smaller streams.  And when a river couldn't be used, the railroads would be.  Sometimes, in the case of the Big Blackfoot Railroad, the railroad hauled logs from the landing down to the river and would be dumped on a spot of the Blackfoot that could cleanly float the logs several miles to the mill.  Eventually though the Milwaukee Road bought the Big Blackfoot and connected it's tracks to the mainline at the mill.

So really it is quite hard to think of what I would like to model!

First, a 'Welcome', Then some Info!

Firstly, Welcome to the new blog!  About 5 years ago I started a blog called "JJWTrains" to practice my writing skills, share my thoughts on the hobby, and showcase my models.  However, after 5 years the direction of my hobby has changed somewhat.  Rather than having a massive blog featuring trains from all over the country, I decided it was time to settle down and start on a focused project, and that's when it was decided that I would start a new blog with a different vision.

Rather than focusing on many railroads, the Crown Peak Logging Co. will focus on a very special region of Montana known as the Crown of the Continent.  Home to the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, Glacier National Park, Swan Lake, Bigfork, and Flathead Lake, the Crown sits at the top of the world, hosting to headwaters to the Columbia and Missouri Rivers, which in turn feeds and drains water to half the Continent!

This blog will focus on the history and geography of the region. "But wait, what about the trains", you say?  Don't worry, there will be plenty of that here in the form of a new On30 project known as the Crown Peak Logging Company!  Rather than heavily researching a prototype, I'll be drawing inspiration from the region's rich logging history and applying that to my own railroad, my own brand, and my own vision of what the Crown of the Continent is.

--James W.