never move forward since I didn’t have a firm grasp on how
the place should look. So the scene stalled and sputtered.
Fate intervened when a couple of the turnouts in the mill yard
were mangled during an operating session last fall.
Although I don’t host regular “every other Wednesday night”
or some such work sessions, I will on occasion have some local
modelers over to get things done on the railroad. We usually
don’t get half the things done that are on the to-do list, but
the work session itself, and the inevitable post-session “bull
session” are always a great deal of fun.
This month I’d like to share with you what happened during
the work session held last January. One of the main items on
the list for that session was to “Repair/replace the mill yard
turnouts.” The session ended up seeing several improvements
made to the layout, although it seemed at first like a massive
series of backward steps.
After the gang arrived, two members of the crew got to work
on the peninsula shift (see below) while the rest of us got
started on the mill track repairs. Perhaps thinking this was
the perfect opportunity to do some small tweaking to the mill
yard to improve how the scene fit together at some point, we
started discussing the track arrangements. At this point I men-
tioned that if I had it to do all over again I wouldn’t have the
freelanced mill town; I’d include another CV town, “like this
one.” And I produced an aerial photo of Randolph.
I’m not sure who said it first, but everyone was thinking the
same thing. “This paper mill isn’t coming together. So why not
replace it with this really neat prototype scene?”
