Here’s one of my recent acquisitions – an old glass plate negative clearly showing the two-story station at the Miles Glacier Bridge.  There’s no information with the negative, but the busted windows show that the building hasn’t been used recently.  The lack of overgrowth and generally good alignment of the track structure, however, suggests that this was either very near the end, where trains were infrequent, or shortly after abandonment.

USGS photos in the mid-1950s show the building gone by that point, even though the track was still present.

The other key question would be why such a large structure?  No other CR&NW structure I’ve ever seen was a fully two stories.  The Chitina depot had a second floor, but the second floor was basically the usable portion of the attic under the roof and was thus significantly smaller than the main floor.  My only guess would be that this was a combination station and section house, unlike other locations where the station building and the section house were distinct structures.  Given the notoriously deep snows in the Copper River delta, it could be cut off for weeks at a time.  Also, having everything inside a single structure would be advantageous as you wouldn’t have to dig your way through 10-15 feet of snow to the tool shed, the kitchen, etc.

If anybody has more details about the Miles Glacier station, I’d love to hear them.

It’s been a while since I’ve had much time to work on the layout, but I decided after a mind-twisting week of meetings in Memphis it was time to get back to the basement and do some work.

Chitina is coming together.  So far, I’ve got the mainline, the front and back sidings, the enginehouse leads, the wye, and some of the industrial track down.  I spent most of yesterday and today doing the electrical work – extending power from the main electrical panel, installing track feeders and sub-buses, putting in block detectors and the auto-reverser, and starting the installation of some of the switch machines.  The track is pretty dirty, but at least it’s now all electrically hot (and held together with more than alligator clip leads).

Pictures later this week, I hope, along with an explanation of my Chitina and how it was derived from the historic version.

I’ve often found myself wondering about elements of the CR&NW’s history, and wishing there were some email list where I could interact with other folks interested in the line.  Many other railroads – current and historic – have fan and historian email lists, so I figured why not create one?

For those interested, I’ve created a Yahoo list – you can join here.

After six years, I’m finally getting the chance to return to the upper end of the CR&NW.  Tomorrow morning I’ll be leaving from Whitehorse, and will be spending the a good part of next week between Chitina and Kennicott.

At 2232h tonight, Friday, June 12, 2015, I joined the rails of the upper deck mainline to the south Chitina control point switches.  That, folks, means the mainline rails are continuous all the way from the mine through the bottom of the helix, completing the upper deck mainline.

That’s not to say there’s not yet work to do.  I need to finish the yard tracks at McCarthy and Chitina.  I’m hoping to at least get part of Chitina done this weekend, depending on how much real life gets in the way.

I didn’t make as much progress over the Easter weekend as I’d hoped (so, pretty much par for the course), but I did get the end of track moved forward as far as the south Strelna control point.  I also installed the first pieces of backdrop.

Strelna, A Very Brief History

Strelna, in reality, was a rather boring place.  The real station had a water tank located south of the mainline and west of the low trestle over Strelna Creek.  Near the tank base was a switch that lead to two spur tracks to the north-northwest, one ~530′ long, one 634′ long.  Just a bit past the spur switches was the east siding switch, a ~1350′ siding, and the west siding switch.  The station was a small – single level, probably two rooms given the freight door on the west end – and appears to have been situated between the siding and main near the east siding switch.  There was also what appears to be a motorcar shed to the south of the tracks, across from the station.

Strelna was often mentioned in the early days as the potential start of a branch line to the copper prospects to the north of town.  The major player was always the Hubbard-Elliott copper prospects, located about 16 miles north of Strelna and over the ridge on Elliott Creek. The Elliott Creek basin apparently did produce somewhat, with the ore begin hauled down to the railhead at Strelna, but I have so far been unable to find any production numbers.  Various sources mention both a surveying a 17.5 mile branch line and a 17-mile tramway linking the mines to the CR&NW’s mainline.  The branch would come in just west of Strelna, at a location sometimes designated “Elliott Junction”.

The Hubbard-Elliott claims never seem to have amounted to much despite their oft-touted prospects.  The concern was still reported in limited operation in the early 1920s, but beyond that there is little record.  I suspect either the claims were exaggerated, or the brutal weather, poor financial backing, and lack of transportation access doomed them.

There was also exploration and development work done on Nugget Creek, about an equal distance east-northeast of Strelna, near the headwaters of the Kuskulana.  Nugget Creek interested prospectors – and got its name – from a two ton native copper nugget found in the streambed.  However, exploration never produced much – a few hundred tons of ore at the most – and Nugget Creek was abandoned by 1916.

Strelna on the Layout

Strelna – the model version – got a bit of a redesign over the past week from what I originally drew in the plans. I wanted to reflect the possibility that the copper deposits were proven viable, probably by SX-EW extraction rather than traditional milling and concentration, but I didn’t want to model another fictional branch or have Strelna turned into more of a town.  Basically, I wanted it to remain as a decent size passing siding and a handful of industry tracks for inbound materials and outbound mine products, but little else.  Strelna just isn’t far enough from Chitina to justify any duplication.  Anything Chitina would provide – such as fuel oil, LPG, etc. – would just get trucked to Strelna.  Duplication of facilities wouldn’t make any sense.

The model version isn’t as unfaithful as it might seem at first.  I started with the prototype – a siding approximately 1350 feet in length, or roughly 8.5 feet in N scale, located on the north side of the mainline.  (North, in this case, is towards the aisle.)   The 8 ft siding fits perfectly with about the maximum size of ore trains I want to operate.  The siding, like all major sidings on my present-day CRNW, will be controlled via CTC.  I plan to place a set of culverts just past the north siding switch to cross Strelna Creek, and put concrete tank footers up close to the culverts to mark where the tank used to live.

The prototype of Strelna had two short spurs north/east of what I’m referring to as the “north siding switch”.  These were likely used as tracks to set out supplies for the mining concerns to the north and northeast, as well as for the hotel at Strelna (which burned in the late 1920s).  I’ve decided to move them halfway down the siding and expand them to support a theoretical producing mine based around the idea of the Hubbard-Elliott properties being developed, though on a much later timeline than Kennecott.

Given that I don’t want to model another entire mine complex, I’m going with the idea that the “new Hubbard-Elliott mine” is mostly solvent extraction, and therefore doesn’t load out concentrate or raw ore.  It only loads out copper cathodes, which will be transferred – truck to boxcar – at a facility on the “loading track” spur.  As far as inbound loads, most will be extraction chemicals (primarily sulfuric for running the SX-EW leaching process), blasting agents, and fuel.  The occasional load of heavy equipment or construction supplies would be completely reasonable as well.  These will go into the two offload tracks, where they’ll be transferred to trucks for the return journey to the mine.

The pictures aren’t the most current – I took these two weekends ago.  Since then I’ve finished the Strelna spurs and started wiring the whole mess, which involved putting a double-wide electrical panel under the south siding switch area.

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I haven’t had time to take pictures yet, but before I left for Chicago, the benchwork is now all the way through Strelna and at the northeast end of the Third Copper River Crossing (the one east of Chitina).   Unfortunately, in addition to being out of town, I’ve suffered a few other setbacks.  The 500′ spool of 14 AWG DCC bus was stolen shortly after being dropped off on my front porch by the delivery guy, so I’m out of wire for a couple days, and I’m waiting on more flex track and turnouts.  Because of those two items, it’ll be a few days until rails catch up with the benchwork, but I’m hoping by the end of March to have the upper deck mainline connected to the helix.

Pictures when I get back to Colorado.

I’ve had a number of other things going on over the weekends (or it’s just been too darn nice to not get one of the convertibles out for a drive – pass up a 75 degree day in February, I don’t think so!), and haven’t felt like I’m actually making much progress lately.

This past week marks an end to the unproductive streak.  I’ve completed the roadbed from Nicolai Junction to the south siding switch at Strelna.  Track now extends down as far as the McCarthy end of the Kennicott River bridge.  I’ve also placed temporary bridges in the three large gaps – the Kennicott River crossing, the new Gilahina bridge, and of course the famous Kuskulana bridge.

I have other matters to attend to tomorrow, but I’m hoping to find a few hours to work on extending trackwork.  I’d really like to see the end of track at Strelna early next week.  At this rate, it may yet be possible to achieve my goal of track and electrical complete by summer.

Pictures tomorrow, after I clean up the disaster I’ve created in the layout room…

I finally feel like I’m making progress again.  For the last three months or so, work has just been beating the snot out of me, and I haven’t had as much time to work on the layout as I would have liked.  However, that’s now starting to improve, and the mainline is starting to appear on the main layout.

The first matter is a bit of a track plan change.  You’ll notice on my original track plan, Nicolai Junction – the place where the fictional Nizina Branch breaks off the prototype mainline – was originally pretty inflexible.  Because the single track mainline split into the siding and main for Kennicott, and then the branch broke off the siding, the whole thing could get jammed up if you were loading a train at Kennicott and it was fouling the switch.  Plus, the McCarthy siding was short, so it wasn’t capable of holding a full ore train.  So, the track plan adjustments begin…

I extended double track up from the McCarthy switch, made one mainline diverge as the Nizina Branch and the other diverge as the Kennicott main, and then connected the Kennicott siding into the mainline.  There are also crossovers between the two main lines going both ways, so that traffic moving off any line can move onto any other line without being blocked.  The new Nicolai Junction will also now be the northern end of CTC on the layout, extended up from my original plan of ending it after the north siding switch at McCarthy.

Here’s the new line diagram:

I’ve also completed the tracks in front of the old Kennicott mill, and posted a 1:160 print of the mill for scale and alignment.  I intend to model the old mill at full scale, as one of the signature elements of the railroad.  To make sure it was going to fit, I printed 1:160 versions of the front and side elevations of the mill – based on the National Park Service CAD drawings.  Thankfully work has a large HP plotter which makes this much easier…

The electronics for Nicolai Junction are being installed on a fold-down panel located below the junction.  That way the wires all stay up and out of the way, the LEDs don’t shine down on the lower deck, but it can be lowered if maintenance or changes are needed.

Now, about turnouts…  Originally when I started the CR&NW, Atlas code 55 was still nowhere to be found due to their Chinese production issues.  Because of that, I made the decision to go with hand-laid turnouts using FastTracks tools.  However, it’s taken me far longer to get to trackwork than I initially expected, and the Atlas turnouts are now available again after about three years.  While the hand-laid turnouts look incredible and work well, they’re painfully time consuming to build.  The two in front of Kennicott took me a solid afternoon to build and tune.  Consequently, I’ve decided to use them where the switch is a prominent foreground visual element (such as in front of the mill building), but just go back to good ol’ Atlas switches elsewhere.

That’s it for now.  Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have track extended down to the McCarthy control point and some of the backdrop up, so it’ll look a bit more like a model railroad and less like a bench stuck to framing.

The CR&NW seems to have had at least one, possibly multiple, Ford Model Ts converted to railroad wheels.  One of my recent acquisitions is this old CR&NW snapshot of a gentleman and one of the Model Ts (looks to be a later version, based on the larger radiator) posing in the middle of the Miles Glacier bridge.

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Note the larger radiator and the single large headlight mounted on the driver’s side.  Contrast this with the smaller radiator and different headlamp arrangement found in a photo of Walter Angier posing with another supposed CR&NW Model T in 1919, as posted on Cora Sowa’s website about a sixth of the way down this page.

I’m not a Ford Model T expert by any means.  However, given what I can dredge up, both cars appear to be 1917s or later, based on the black steel radiators and other design changes.    However, either there have been some serious modifications to the same car between the two images, or the railroad had at least two of these critters.