Over the last couple of months, a number of the guys from the Gateway Garden Railroad Club of the greater St. Louis area have worked to create a new “Ready Track” switch yard on the inside of our modules. A couple of objectives were designed into the new trackage. An ability to turn motive power around without picking it up off the tracks. The capability of getting to either the inside loop or the outside loop from any tracks in the yard. And the ability to keep the display yard tracks open and not clogged with trains that were currently not running on the track. Andy Clarke (Andy C.) and Bill Payne were the major thrusts in getting this project to completion. These pictures show the progress made and also gives a unique view of the wiring of the track control panel before it gets a finish coat of paint and covers all of Bill’s quality work.
Hope you enjoy the pictures as much as I enjoyed “operating” on the layout this past weekend. For a couple of hours, both Saturday and Sunday, we ran a shuttle service using a rail bus from the “Clear Creek Station” over to “Bertha’s Brothel”. It was advertised as “Get on the Shuttle at Clear Creek, so you can get off at Bertha’s”. We were running an Amtrak train on the outside mainline and an excursion passenger train on the inner track. The rail bus would wait until these trains departed the Clear Creek Station, take the mainline after the Amtrak and make the “Quickie” run to Bertha’s and then stay there until Amtrak rounded the corner and chased us back to the Clear Creek Station siding. What a kick. I was told a “good time” was had by all.