Maine Central Railroad Grafton Branch

Flooding on Maine Central's Grafton Branch

Do not worry though federal State and Local authorities are on the scene assessing the damage now.....

A few weeks back I came home from work to find the ice maker supply line to our fridge had busted and leaked about 2 inches of water all over the kitchen. I immediately ran down stairs to shut off the supply to the fridge and found that I had about 6 inches of standing water in the train room. Oh no disaster! Well it wasn't as bad as I thought I'll explain. Yes the layout did suffer water damage however most of the water had ran off the layout and onto the floor in the room this was short work for our trusty wet vac. The kitchen you ask, fine other than some minor damage on the kick boards we cleaned the whole mess up in about an hour or so. The damage that had me concerned on the layout was on the junction and town modules, a complete loss. I had used plaster on these modules as these where the first ones I made and had not yet transferred to foam. I was able to save most of the saw mill portion of the junction module once it dried out however the town was a total loss along with the track work leading up to the town and the Wye. Long story short I demoed the module and replaced it with a new one only this time I used foam and added a helix in the module the following pics will explain thing a little more. I took these photos while construction was on going the photos do not go in order but give you an idea of how we built the helix and constructed things.

Another view of the first rings

Start of helix from staging

First three rings started

Currently I have the helix complete I still need to work out some kinks in the track work and finalize all the temporary supports. I am just impressed it works! The helix has a single track at a 22" radius with the last ring a 18"-19" radius ( miss judged my measuring). The first three rings are a 2.75 +/- grade with the fourth a 4% grade. Some will argue too steep of grades however the helix is coming from staging to the main level of the layout and since the biggest piece of rolling stock that will likely travel the helix will be a 50' box car and the trains are only going to be about 5-10 cars long I'm not to concerned with the grade.

 The final part of construction will be to enclose the top of the helix with the new town bench work. This will get completed once I finish all the rock formation and finalize the new track plan. One other item to note is I lost my MRC prodigy advance2 to the incident. So I have not ran trains on the layout for a month or so just limited runs testing track with my Sprog programmer. That will soon change though I ordered a new NCE system the other day!

Phase 2 of the build is to layout and construct the lower level of the layout. Yup you heard right a three level layout in a 12' x 17' room. I was forced to go this route because what I had planned for additional space for trains has now become the new family media room.