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| The partially finished roundhouse. Its roof pieces lie on the structure at the left side. Tracks from the rest of the railroad will enter in the wide space between the other turntable tracks. |
Since finishing the new turntable at Oakdale, I have been working on an old Model Masterpieces kit of the Colorado Midland roundhouse at Colorado City. It is a kit with sides made from cast dental plaster and looks terrific. Unfortunately, the looks are outweighed by the trouble to put the darned thing together. The window openings are considerably smaller than the nice window castings, the side pieces are of different thicknesses and so on. In short, it takes a lot of fiddling and trimming to get the kit in a reasonable state to be assembled. It finally happened, though, with the original 4-stall kit plus two of the 2-stall add-on kits coming together for the final structure.
The track was laid out according to the plans with each track being 10° from its neighbor. A few additional "garden" tracks were also laid for MOW equipment, spare parts and so on. To complete the interior, which will be hard to see, I laid down a layer of cinders. Before putting the roof on, though, I need to wire the tracks and make sure the electrical is all working.
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| The current plan for the electrical switches. As can be seen, there is not a lot of room for the panel. The wheel at the right controls the turntable rotation. |
Since there might be in excess of eight locomotives in this area at once, I decided to put individual shutoff switches for the stalls. This, of course, requires a panel of some sort to visually indicate what each switch does. There is limited space on the fascia on the railroad at this point so I am struggling a bit to find a good place to put a panel. I have found a place but I may try to size things down a bit before committing.
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| Two of the switches which will be needed to access the engine terminal area. |
Before doing all that, though, I still have to lay track from the existing railroad down to the turntable providing areas for the coaling tipple, sandhouse, ashpit and water spout along the way.
