David:
“Construction started in this area, Tallman. And equally
we were starting with the staging because because that’s how
the railroad runs. Then we simply followed on around the cor-
ner into Irvinville and then on to Lebanon and beyond. As each
crew got farther and farther along, another crew would start
up behind them. So everything is in stages.
“Once all the trackwork was in here, then along came ballast-
ing, along came the turnouts, which are whole separate crews.
Then we continued on through. Then scenery. The goal was
to get operations up as quickly as possible. From the time we
started this, which was approximately three years ago, we were
up and operating in six months. We had it all the way through
to Lebanon. Then we just continued.
“It was fairly well formed that there were four phases to what
we were doing, this being the first phase taking us to Lebanon.
Columbia Cascade and Western - 7
8: An abandoned
branch curving
off into the woods
at Shelburn now
serves as a conve-
nient lead for the
crews switching
the grain elevator
and other industries
there. Shelburn also
provides a crew to
switch a paper mill
at Lyons, several
miles away.
8
The second phase continued on around toward Lyons, termi-
nating at Shelburn.
“Then the major phase started from that, which was continu-
ing on past Shelburn, into Lyons, on into East Lyons, and then
around the corner to Mill City, and around to Gates. So Mill City
was a lot of the second phase.
“Now we have started to finish this last quarter of the space,
which is phase 3. We anticipate we will have this running in
about 6 to 8 months.
“Our goal is to have the whole railroad running for the NMRA
national convention in Portland in 2015. We have actually
been able to exceed our expectations, partly because we have
a very reasonable general manager as far as construction who
gives us deadlines we can meet.
“And, we’ve got a really good group of people working here.
There are seven or eight crews. The members get to choose
which crew they want to be on. Each crew has a foreman. The
foreman is responsible for the overall progress and success for
that particular group. There has been turnover, but new people
stepped up as others departed.”
MRH:
“Guys, you have what I would call floating staging. In
fact, you have it named the USS Granite Mountain right now,
and there was a USS Lyons on it previously. How does it work?”
Rick:
“Well, we got into a dilemma: How do we operate? We
hadn’t been operating for nearly five years and we were get-
ting operating withdrawal. We were able to go to a lot of other
layouts and operate, but there were a lot of guys who were
getting the twitches.
“We were trying to figure out – we can’t really build the whole
layout at once, because that’s going to take a long time. We did
MRH-Feb 2013
