Taking Along a Piece of the Past

Every incarnation of the Blacklog Valley has been an experiment.  I like to try out new ideas, incorporate new techniques.  The goal is to make the next layout better than the last.  The second Blacklog Valley was built on a wooden grid instead of plywood on sawbucks.  You could stand on it.   But the real breakthrough was using wooden splines on risers to support the track.  The splines were made from furring strips with one inch wooden separators.  To make the curves, I would wrap the furring strips in wet towels and carefully bed them into shape.  The splines formed beautiful curves.  On top was a strip of Homosote cut to fit with a jigsaw. 

I really loved those curves -- so much that when we moved from Pennsylvania to South Carolina in the mid-1980s, I dismantled the benchwork, rented a U-Haul, and moved the entire layout myself (I didn't trust the movers to respect those curves).  The layout in South Carolina was reconfigured, but I kept the splines and the loops at either end of a folded dogbone.  Unfortunately, not every experiment was as successful.  The South Carolina layout incorporated a hidden staging yard -- not all that unusual, except that in my case it really was hidden!   There was no way to see the staging yard tracks, and almost no way to reach them either!  Needless to say, when we moved to New Rochelle, New York ten years later, the hidden staging track was eliminated.

As you can see, when I rebuilt the layout (for the fourth time) I kept those beautiful splines with their graceful curves.   The New York layout was a continuous loop of track with three peninsulas forming the letter E (or maybe the number 3, depending on where you were standing). 

The main line had over 70 feet of track, which allowed for some whopping long trains!  The grandchildren loved it.  Our oldest grandson wanted me to add more and more cars ("More cars, Pop Pop!") and make it go faster and faster.  At one point the train was so long the engine nearly caught up with the caboose!

It was fun watching the train go round and round, but after a while it got ... how shall I say this? ... boring!  I began to realize that trains exist to carry cargo and passengers from point to point.  In other words, in order to be interesting, a model railroad has to have a purpose for existing, a "raison d'etre" as the French would say.  The grandkids loved to play with the trains, but in my mind I was already planning for the next incarnation of the Blacklog Valley Railroad, although it would be another ten years until those plans began to bear fruit.