Apr10 Written by:Tom Farin
4/10/2008 3:57 PM
I've started 5 garden railroads. None ever saw a golden spike celebration. Each time as I was getting close, it was time to move. My most recent attempt was brought to a frustrating close by the City of Madison who seems determined to build a street right through the portion of my property containing my 1500 square foot shed and my landscape timber beds.
The silver lining in this cloud is that I'm now again single. There's nobody to secure railroad right of way permissions from other than the guy I see in the mirror. So my railroad is being constructed where it belonged all along. On the hill running from the deck at the rear of my house down around the pond at the base of the hill. This shot looks from the rear of the pond up toward the rear of the house. The railroad will loop the pond and run up the hill to a basement window below the middle of the three windows in the bay on the left side of the house in this photo. Almost all the grass on the hill from that point over to the row of shrubs comiong down the hill on the right side of the photo will be removed and replaced with garden railroad and scale plantings.
Trains are going to have to work to get up the hill. From the deck, the hill drops 11 feet to the front of the pond over about a 75 foot distance, a straignt up the hill grade of around 14%. Of course that is way too steep. My ruling grade on the railroad will be 5%. So the main line will need to wind back and forth to make the grade more climbable.
The North Pacific Coast Railroad was a narrow gauge line that began operations in the 1870s. From a dock in San Francisco, the NPC ran steam ferrys across the Golden Gate to San Quentin Landing (briefly) and to Sausalito. From Sausalito, the line ran 80 miles North and West ending at Cazadero, California.
How did a guy from Wisconsin end up modeling this RR? I'll blame David Fletcher for that one. Fletch got me involved as archivist for the Mason Bogie Masterclass Project. One of the engines, NPC No 2, the San Rafael sparked my interest. Then on a trip to Seattle I wanderd into Borders and came across a copy of "Narrow Gauge to the Redwoods" - the bible on the history of the NPC. Photos, track plans for the major cities and towns, a great story ... I was hooked.
The NPC packed a lot of railroad in 80 miles. Steam ferrys transporting commuters who hopped on "The Narrow Gauge" for a commute to and from work and to visit Mount Tam and the resorts and camps along the Russian River. The NPC had an active freight operation hauling redwood lumber from the mills on one end of the line to the growing city of San Francisco. In between were farms with potato crops, eggs and milk to get to the market. Livestock rode the rails.
The NPC shops in Sausalito were state of the art for the time. They actually scratch built one steam engine, and converted a wrecked 4-4-0 into the first of the cab forward locomotives. The line was full of tunnels, spectacular bridges and lots of trestles. There are dock operations to model. The line ran down creeks, up estuaries, and along a significant river. The Carter Brothers had a shop in Sausalito. I could go on and on.
That's one heck of a lot of railroad in just 80 miles. I have the space to model the whole line, and that is my intent. I figure selective compression will take it from 80 miles to around 4 miles in 1:1 scale. At 1:20.3, that is 0.2 miles of mainline track or around 1000 feet.
In my next post, I'll take you on a tour of my version of the NPC.
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