More Inspiration

While packing books for the move, I rediscovered a fine hard cover logging book about the Caspar Lumber Company railroad called "Mallets On The Mendocino Coast." I forgot how cool this logging operation along the rugged Northern California coastline was! The standard gauge rail operations lasted into the late 1940's with an array of steam locomotives including a small shay, a Climax, a few small tank engines and two massive articulated Mallets with tenders.

Thumbing through the book provided additional inspiration for my planned On30 coastal "Swamp Logger." The Caspar had a fleet of compact coastal steam freighters that hauled rough-cut redwood to the San Francisco Bay Area docks. With my planned harbor trackage, I would love to build one of these steamships and tie it up at the Pier One complex.

I've also found a few photos of narrow gauge steam engines to base my HO-to-On30 2-8-0 tank engine project on. A couple nice shots showing all the piping, domes and cab structure as well as the tender to tag onto the tail end of my new logging engine. As much as I'd like to say I can fab all the parts for my steam engine conversion, but I will have to make a trip to the hobby shop, which is a couple hour drive from where I live. Of course I can order parts over the Internet, as well. What's on the parts list? Lots of details typical for the classic steam loco - 1/4-inch scale back head details, piping, whistle, bell, headlight casting among other goodies. I also need to mount a pair of On30 trucks under the loco's tender which will be widened and contain the power pickups, DCC decoder and sound system components as mentioned in my last posting.

Thanks to the Internet, researching logging photos and history is relatively simple and provides lots of inspiration for these types of projects. Yet, I'm an analog guy in a digital world, and like to have a piece of paper, magazine or book in my hands. One of the other inspirations I garnered from the Caspar book was how woods crews switched out loads and empties using a wye and a single run-around track at the interchange between the woods and the run to "town.". What's cool about this is I had planned a similar track arrangement for my On30 logging layout. Reading about how they used the woods switcher to help the woods road engine set out and exchange loads for MTs and be in the clear to head back with the MT's to the log landings and have the loads ready for pick-up for the trip to the mill was very interesting. This insight helps reinforce how to operate my On30 models in a prototypical way.