4: BC&SJ Timeline.
Bear Creek&South Jackson - 7
Iwantedmaximumdistance
between the sixmainline
towns. Crews in towns; not beingable to see thenext puts
some skin in theops game. Disobeyingwarrantsor trainorders
isdangerouswhenyou can’t seeall theway to thenext town.
Twoof the towns are50+ feet apart, but South Jacksonand
Mill Bendarenearlyadjacent and shareyard limits,making
themeffectivelya single town. That drops the town count to
five. Theother towns are separatedby30+ car train lengths.
Trains enteringand leaving themainlineaddops interest.
I included three junctions for theDeschutes, Siskiyou, and
Toledobrancheswhichaddalmost twoadditionalmilesof vis-
ible track.
I fit 19 tracks in thedouble-endedmain stagingbelow the
peninsula. Siskiyou staging terminates at a sector plate and
has five tracks. Deschutes staging, underOakhill, was an
afterthought and is tinywithonly two tracks and a submini-
mum radius curve.
Howdid I get here?
ByApril 2014a lot of progresshasbeenmade. Howdid I get
from theprevious layout’sMill Cityareaandpileof boxes to its
current state?Seetime line in4:
Subscribers cangetmoredetailedpdf format timeline
(
Not a subscriber?
.)
Operating theBear Creek
In the late ‘90s Iwas invited tooneof JoeFugate’s earlyop
sessions andbecameoneof his regular operators. There I
acquired thedesire to runa layout likea railroad. Since then
I’vewanted tomodel a railroad insteadof beingamodel rail-
roader.My theoryof operation canbeboileddown to:
Local trainsmove cars
betweenyards and in-
dustries
Yardsmovecarsbe
tweentrainstosend
themwherethey’regoing
Through trains transfer
freight betweenyards
Real railroadsdon’t run
trains around in circles
ormove cars randomly.
Theyonlymakemoney
when theymovea
loaded car to the loca-
tionwhere it isneeded.
TheBear Creek follows
thisprinciple, too.
FromTWC to
TT&TO
After several yearsof oper-
atingwith trackwarrants,
a temporal anomaly for a
1952 railroad, theBC&SJ
recently startedusing
TimeTableandTrainOrder
authority. Under TT&TO,
train crews read the
EmployeeTimeTableand
check their trainorders to
determinewhenandwhere
theymust clear themain
4
MRH-Apr2014
