The Pleasant Valley extension of my model railroad

December, 2019.
My current model railroad has been around for 21 years. It hasn't been shown on a public tour in 20 years; I don't have much scenery to look at, and I have to clean up my storage shelves before presenting it again. It's easier to clean up my photos than to clean up the room.

I finally 'graded' a new line into 'Minnesota', in model form. I had most of the lumber from years ago, bits and pieces and leftovers stored in the garage. I did buy two new 1x 3's to make some ledges to connect existing shelves, for a total of $2.86 of new wood.

Here's the track plan from the year 2000. It's in the end of a basement, and there is a dividing wall that has a tunnel through it, named Tunnel City. The new addition is on the bottom of the page, and it's actually stacked on a shelf above a lower level.

I think this web page might not work well with tablets, because one of my pictures below is a panoramic that is 2600 pixels wide. You may have to scroll, or zoom the screen on the tablet.
The plan below is just the extension: I turned the plan over so it looks like I see it while I am standing in the aisle. I drew it alongside the earlier tracks, but actually its on a shelf stacked 10 inches above the 2000 line.
It goes around a reversing loop.
That has become a handy way to run a train to the 'end of the line',
and have it ready to come back without a lot of yard switching work. The loop 'siding' is long enough to hold a 60 car train, or two shorter trains. And eventually I may lay the track to match the plan, making two reversing loops and even more capacity to stage trains.

This is the left end of the loop. It dodges around plumbing and shelves and house utilities.
To squeeze it in, some of the loop has a short piece of (tighter than normal) 15 inch radius track (this is HO scale).
I am still using up track that I had from 40 years ago. Some of it came from a used track sale from a model railroad club that stripped out all their brass track so they could start over in Nickel Silver.
I even have some really old fiber-tie track, the kind that is moisture sensitive and can change its gauge.
I have to crimp my rail joiners extra tight so they bite into my old brass.

The picture below belongs to the right of the above picture. I had to move the camera and set it up on the other side of the furnace.
The new line is on top.
The right side heads downhill to the junction at Tunnel City. (Scroll right)

When the train gets to the tunnel in the basement divider wall, it can go around a wye and twice around the original railroad and then back through the wye junction to go back to the new loop. So it's like running loop to loop with a lot of distance involved.
And if I swing the bridge into place on the right, I can run trains around the whole basement like a thrice around, and still get into a reverse at the wye to get trains back to the new loop.

Patriot LED light tube strings were on sale at Menards, so I put them under the shelves to light the level below, and added an old strip of wood for a light view blocker.
There's not much to look at for scenery in this area, at best its a painted wooden plank. But the light helps check for derailments and see the couplers for the small amount of car switching that I do here.

. . . . . to My Main Index Page on the TrainWeb site.

This page was filmed in December 2019