Land is formed

Land for is formed for my "Laurium and Lake Linden" railroad. This photo shows the underside of the module, which I am trying to build as light as possible since it will eventually be mounted to the office wall with shelf brackets.

I plan on elevating the terrain behind the dock with 1" foam - and again behind the smelter and track. Since this is an end module for a round the room bookshelf "empire," I figured the corner radius needed to be beefy. (I use the term empire very loosely, as the entire layout will only 30 feet in length - most of it single track on 12" to 16" deep modules! I couldn't resist dragging out the waterline hull of the freighter kit I purchased to tie up at the dock to be loaded with copper, and put it on deck to give some sense of size. 

Back to the drawing board - After mulling things over while trying to get to sleep last night, it dawned on me that I should have radiused the other front corner on the module (shown in the circle.) I had planned on continuing the dock and water for a short distance onto the adjoining module when I get to it, but realized that it would not create the best situation to try to get a smooth water surface across two modules. So this evening, I head back out to the shop to reconfigure that corner. The oscillating multi-tool should render the task fairly simple.

Making the cut

With virtually everything crossed off the winter prep list around the homestead, I finally got some time to spend actually building something for my new railroad empire, and started cutting the lumber needed to build the module that would house my interpretation of the copper smelter.

It has been a long time

My wife and I were cleaning out our storage barn, and I discovered a couple of unbuilt HOn3 rolling stock kits in our storage barn that I had kept from my last involvement in the hobby 35 years ago. They give an idea of how much the price of this hobby has increased in the interim - that Florence and Cripple Creek box car now sells for $23.75!

A plan is born

As a kid in England, and again about 35 years ago, I had messed around with model trains, and it dawned on me that building a small layout might be a fun thing to rediscover. So over the past year, I have been mulling the possibilities of building a line based on the operations of the Quincy and Torch Lake railroad which served the Quincy smelter. Something to do in my retirement! After a year of armchair consideration, I decided that that the best way to proceed would be to construct modules which could eventually build around three walls of my home office. Because of my long standing infatuation with the Quincy smelter, it was a natural for the first module, and after a lot of trial and error, I created this plan.

Inspiration

I made my first trip into Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula around 1975. I was immediately struck by the incredibly rich history of the area. While today, many of the remnants of the copper boom remain and are finally being preserved as part of the Keweenaw National Park,there was much more to be seen in the 1970's that has since been demolished. One place that really struck my fancy was the Quincy Smelter, which is located in Ripley on the north ban of the Portage Ship Canal.

The smelter as it appeared from Houghton, across the Portage River

The smelter in the first decade of the twentieth century