GSMRM/EBMES O Scale - Layout and Operations -
			Updated: February 11, 2008

O Scale

O scale is similar in size, but not quite the same as the Lionel trains many people had as kids. The scale is 1:48, so an O scale boxcar is 1/48^th as big as its full size counterpart. In O scale, _ inch on the model equals 1 foot on the real thing. 110 actual feet on the model equals 1 scale mile. Look for the mileposts along the right of way, small white markers with a number on them indicate scale miles from a starting point down in one of the yards.

O Scale Layout Size

The O scale layout occupies over 4000 square feet of our building. Unlike the HO an N scale layouts, O scale is not a model of any particular region, instead it is intended to capture the flavor of the West while providing us with as long a mainline run as possible. We currently have a mainline that is about 13 scale miles, or 2300 feet long, plus over 2400 feet or yard trackage. Not much by protypical standards, but certainly respectable for a model railroad.

Layout Construction

A variety of construction and scenery techniques are evident on the layout. We have a master track plan that we’re following in the construction. First, a framework of lumber is built to support the layout. For the roadbed beneath the track we cut narrow wood splines that are then glued together. This spline allows us to form very natural sweeping curves, and is very strong. To this is glued a layer of Homasote, a paper product that provides the basic shape of the roadbed to which wooden ties are glued and rails are spiked. Almost all of the track is laid by hand. We then glue ballast to the roadbed to provide a more natural look.

To build the scenery we first construct a frame of plywood to form the contours. Over this goes a lattice of cardboard strips, then newspaper, and a layer of Hydrocal, a cement like product similar to plaster of paris. To form rocky areas, we pour hydrocal into a mold, then attach it to the basic shell. After that we paint the bare hydrocal and add a variety of commercial and natural scenic materials to form grass, weeds, bushes, and rocky areas. Trees are a combination of commercial and home made materials. We’re always on the lookout for natural scenery materials to use. Buildings and other structures are a combination of scratch built and commercial kits.

Track Plan

Layout Scheme

The O Scale layout doesn't attempt to model any specific area, but generally resembles the Western United States. The layout is noted for its high mountains, deep canyons, wide rushing rivers, steep climbs, long straight-aways, and snow-capped peaks. Although a specific era was not targeted during construction, most of the structures would mark this as a mid-1930s to mid-1950s motif.

Yards

Two yard areas are visible to the public. One is the recently constructed passenger terminal yard near the front door of the building. It has four tracks and is designed to handle up to 12 car passenger consists.

The other yard (a 6 track freight yard) is approximately in the center of the layout. Today it also represents the top of our layout, but in the final plan this yard is only half way to the top. We refer to this as the "Midway Yard."

Two additional staging yards, with a total of 13 60-car tracks, are outside the view of the public. It is here we build and dispatch the trains we run. There is also a staging yard for trolley that is hidden from public view.

Standard Gauge Operations

 

Today we have over 2300 feet of track in standard gauge, plus over 2450 feet of yard trackage. We run with three mainline cabs using a manual power block control system, with two hand-held throttles in use on the lower part of the layout. There are 24 different power blocks on the trackage. Long range plans feature computerized block control system and the addition of several more cabs.

One of the features of this layout is our ability to run very long trains. Our yard tracks and sidings are about 55 feet long, giving us the ability to run trains of up to 50 cars. We have operating positions for about 7 operators to run at the same time. A dispatcher at a control panel behind the scenes routes power and throws switches to allow to mainline engineers to run trains on the two lower level tracks using handheld radio control throttles. Another operator controls trains on the “Midway Division”, which includes the large yard and engine facility in the center of the layout. This is currently the end of the line, where trains reverse direction and head back the way they came. Eventually this will become the midpoint of the layout as trains climb their way onto upper level “Zenith Yard”, almost 10 feet above the floor. We also have a Passenger terminal operator, a narrow gauge operator, and a trolley operator.

Most of our membership's primary interest is in standard gauge. Although Southern Pacific represents our single largest unit of equipment, Santa Fe, Milwaukee Road, Pennsylvania, Great Northern, and Western PacificC&NW, and several other heralds are frequently found on the layout. Standard gaugers are an eclectic group.

Trains

The trains are probably the most impressive part of O scale. A long freight train may weigh as much as 75 pounds. Like their prototypical counterparts, O scale trains need time to slow down and stop, requiring that the engineer think ahead. With this much mass, a sudden stop such as running into a “dead” track, or a sudden start like turning the power on with the throttle open, can lead to expensive damage to cars and locomotives. Since a tumble to the floor can be very destructive to a brass locomotive, we have protected most of the track with clear plastic barriers to keep derailed equipment from falling.

Unlike some of the smaller scales, there isn’t a whole lot of O scale equipment available at your local hobby shop. Many of the cars and locomotives you see here are highly detailed brass models, or built up from craftsman type kits. As the hobby grows, more true scale equipment is becoming available, particularly 3 rail equipment that can be easily modified to run on our 2 rail layout. Many of our models were built from scratch and have given us 30 or 40 years of service.

Some trains you might see:

Freight trains – Several different freight trains can be spotted around the railroad. Models of older trains, dating from the 1940’s through the mid 1960’s can be identified by the walkways extending along the car roofs. In the early days of railroading these allowed brakemen to walk along the top of the train to set the brakes by hand. This practice was eventually outlawed, for obvious safety reasons. Older trains will also have a caboose, something we haven’t seen on most real trains since the mid 1980’s. More modern freight trains run without a caboose, instead they have an electronic flashing device attached to the last car which monitors the air pressure in the trains brake system. Modern trains are often made up of intermodal cars carrying containers or trailers, large boxcars, autoracks, covered hoppers and tank cars.

Passenger trains – A variety of passenger trains make an appearance on the O scale railroad, from modern Amtrak trains pulled by the latest and fastest electric locomotives, to old time heavyweight Pullman trains pulled by steam locomotives. Several version of the Hiawatha may be seen. The Hiawatha ran between Minneapolis/St. Paul and Chicago on the “Milwaukee Road” at scheduled speeds of almost 100 mph, pulled by a streamlined steam engine! Later versions were pulled by Union Pacific Diesels and painted in Union Pacific Yellow and Gray. We have a modern Amtrak Superliner pulled by three Amtrak locomotives. The “Broadway”, a Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train can be recognized by its consist of maroon Pullman cars and doubleheaded K-4 Pacific type steam engines. The “Empire Builder” is a long green and orange Great Northern train pulled by a string of diesels. Another couple of trains making an occasional appearance are the “City of San Francisco” and the Southern Pacific “Daylight”. These models were commissioned by the real railroads for the 1939 Chicago Worlds Fair. Over 60 years old, the models still provide reliable service. Also keep an eye out for the “Grand Canyon”, a famous Santa Fe Railway train. You may not see all of these trains, as our members bring them home and rotate others onto the layout over the course of our run season.

Electric Railroads

Electric railroad locomotives receive their power from an external source, usually a wire suspended above the rails or a third rail. Electric railroads first found a home carrying passengers in large cities. Steam engines were noisy, smoky, and frightened horses, so quiet and pollution free electric trolleys were developed. As the cities grew, the electric railroads grew with them, often extending to the suburbs to carry people to work.

Several electric railroads ran throughout the Bay Area. The Key System carried passengers from the East Bay to San Francisco across the Bay Bridge. The Sacramento Northern ran from Oakland all the way to Chico and carried passengers and freight.

Mainline railroads also used electricity in some areas. While expensive to construct, electrification resulted in lower operating and maintenance costs. The most famous electric railroad in America was probably the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had thousands of miles of electrified trackage. Their most famous electric locomotive, the GG1, was in service for over 50 years! Some railroads in the West, notably the Great Northern and the Milwaukee Road, electrified portions of their line where they had easy access to Hydro-electric power. Electrification eliminated the problems of smoke and exhaust building up in the long tunnels.

Today, the very fastest passenger trains use electricity to propel them. In the Bay Area we have BART linking many cities together. Sacramento, San Jose, Portland and San Francisco all have electric light rail systems, and many other cities are seeing the advantages of moving people with electricity.

Trolley Operations

Today we have a trolley operation near the middle of the layout. We have also laid the track for a city trolley system in the Yaquina Bay area and hope to begin operations there sometime in the near future. Trolley lines also run on the south end of the layout, but are currently not operational.

Gold Mining

Gold has been discovered in many regions of the Western United States. The “49ers” first discovered placer gold in California. Placer gold is gold that has been eroded out of the ground and deposited by the action of running water. Millions of years ago, before the Sierra Nevada mountain range was formed, huge rivers ran from North to South, eroding gold out of veins and depositing it in the gravel along the bedrock of these rivers. Later, as the mountains rose, this gold bearing gravel was left high and dry. Eventually, the rivers of the Western Sierra that we know today as the Feather, Yuba, Bear, American, and others cut through the earlier deposits and re-deposited the gold in their own channels. Early miners extracted hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold from these rivers using simple tools like pick, shovel, and gold pan.

Soon miners discovered that the ancient river channels were fabulously rich with gold. In order to extract the gold, water was diverted from higher in the mountains into huge water cannons known as “monitors”. These water cannons washed the gravel out of the hillsides and into wooden boxes lined with riffles where the gold was recovered. This process was known as hydraulic mining. The environmental damage caused by this mining technique was enormous. Millions of tons of silt washed into the lowlands, destroying cropland and plugging the navigable waterways. Eventually laws were passed outlawing the practice of hydraulic mining.

Another place that gold was found was in veins of quartz. This type of gold is known as “lode” gold, a lode being the name for the vein or veins containing the gold. Mining this gold called for blasting tunnels through the rock and removing the quartz, a technique also known as “hardrock” mining. The quartz was crushed to a fine sand to recover the gold. Hardrock mines could be as simple as a one or two man operation using hand tools, to multi-million dollar operations financed by huge corporations. Railroads were often used to move the ore from the mine to the mill, and to bring supplies to the mining areas.

The models here depict both hydraulic and hardrock mining operations. The large wooden mining structure model was built in the late 1960’s by former EBMES President Charley Trombly for his home layout. Most of the dirt and rock in this scene is from actual gold mines in California and Nevada.

Narrow Gauge Operations

In order to tap the vast mineral and timber resources in the West, thousands of miles of narrow gauge railroads were constructed. The distance between the rails is known as the “gauge” of the track. “Standard” gauge rails are 4 feet 8 inches apart. “Narrow” gauge railroads were typically built to a gauge of 3 feet. Since the equipment and track for narrow gauge were much smaller than standard gauge, construction and equipment costs were lower.

The narrow gauge railroads of Colorado are the most famous, but narrow gauge was used all over California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia as well. Narrow gauge was particularly well suited to logging railroads, which often laid track into areas where the timber was cut, then removed the track and placed it somewhere else. Special steam engines were developed which could operate reliably on track that was less than perfect while climbing steep grades and traversing tight curves. Eventually, logging trucks replaced the railroads as a more efficient way of getting logs from the forest to the sawmill.

The narrow gauge railroads may be long gone, but their legacy is preserved here in model form. Narrow gauge is represented on all three layouts at the Golden State Model Railroad Museum in O, HO, and N scales.

Oil Refinery Model

The oil refinery model you see here was built in 1971 for Standard Oil. It is an exact scale model of one of the processing units in the Richmond Refinery. Scale models like this are used as part of the construction process to help visualize the relationship between all of the parts of the plant and make sure it all fits together. This is one of the few cases where the model was actually built before the prototype!

The model was donated to the Golden State Model Railroad Museum by Chevron.

People

There are currently about ten members of our club involved in O scale. We work on the layout most Friday evenings, and every other Saturday during the winter season. Modeling skills range from very experienced to new modelers just starting out or switching from another scale. During run sessions we communicate with each other via two way radios.
Most of the model trains are owned by the individual members, although there is some club equipment that has been donated over the years. All of the structures, buildings, bridges and scenery are property of the club.
If you think you might be interested in joining, feel free to talk to any member. They can usually be found with a radio on their head and wearing some sort of train T-shirt. In addition to club activities, many members get together for trips to train museums or famous train watching spots. Experienced or not, come join us, model railroading is a great hobby!

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If you are interested in learning how to become an O Scale member of the East Bay Model Engineer's Society click here.

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