Down to the River...

Having temporarily exhausted my supply of things to do in Gallitzin, I decided to start on something I've been wanting to tackle for a while now, the Conemough River near Johnstown. This involved digging a channel through the foam base down to the plywood. Once again my hot knife proved its value, slicing through the foam without making a mess.

Now, you may notice the river stops short of the PRR main line. Eventualy, I plan to construct a magnificent stone arch bridge at this location as per prototype. But I'm not really looking o tackle that at this time.

I did however build a bridge to carry the Southfork Branch. This seemingly simple project actually required a bit more work than first anticipated. As you can see, the bridge is simply a pair of Atlas warren truss bridges set atop a Chooch Enterprises pier. The pier was easy, I took it out of the package and hit it with a brown wash. The bridges were a tad more problematic. Each came with a piece of Atlas Code 80 track attached to it. I thought it would be a matter of removing said piece of track and replacing it with the Peco c55. Well, no such luck, the ties on the Peco track are just a hair wider than the Atlas ties. So I had to spend a good bit of time filing the bridges to get the track to fit. In the end though I think the bridge looks pretty slick.

On the subject of the Southfork Branch, it's short but will ultimately serve about four industries and keep an operating crew fairly busy. Now, when I'm running Pennsy equipment, this line will most assuredly be a PRR branch. But when I'm running Conrail or NS, I'm thinking the line may be operated by RJ Corman, giving me an excuse to add yet another railroad to the fold.