May 11th I began preparing the helix for the new loop by removing the existing 1/2" plywood section splices and replacing them with metal splice plates placed on either side of the track. This gave me nearly a full half inch more clearance to reduce the grade in the helix.
Here's one of the new splices from above:
And here from below.
This took a week or so to do, as I had several splices to replace. I had to use a wood chisel to remove the old splices, because they were glued to the underside of the subroadbed sections.
On May 19th I had a limited operating session to test out harvest season operations on the layout, when the sugar beets would be shipping to Holly Sugar.
Here's Dave over by Casper:
And here's Alex (left) and Steve running the Cody branch (for the first time) and the Thermopolis local, respectively.
Then it was back to helix reconstruction. By the 29th of May I had the new loop installed. I had to install and remove it several times in order to mark holes for the threaded rod supports.
Here's an overall view of the entire helix with the new loop on top.
On June 8th all the cork roadbed was added to the helix. It was ready for track.
Adding the track was pretty easy. On the 10th I connected the new loop to the track under Basin, and trackwork was complete.
I ran a Consolidation with my drover's caboose (the tallest loco and rolling stock I have) up the helix. As you can see, the clearance is pretty tight. I had to make some adjustments on the way up because the whistle on the loco got caught on the underside of the layer above.
At the lower deck entrance to the helix, the smokejack of the drover's caboose cleared the for loop subroadbed by maybe 1/64th of an inch. Too close!
After several days' work I had the helix all but final-adjusted. In a few weeks I'll go back and make final tweaks, but the entrances to the helix at both the top and bottom are set now. On the 13th I was able to regrade the rest of the run from the top of the helix to the swing gate. Here's the regraded line under Basin:
And here's an edge-on view of the regraded curve near the top. The subroadbed in the foreground used to be on the same grade as the bit in the background, so you can see how the grade was reduced.
On June 14th I took the day and traveled to the Cheyenne train show. I picked up a Bachmann Berkshire (2-8-4) locomotive, thinking I could use it for CNW trains arriving in Casper from the east (which train I haven't even set up yet). To my chagrin, when I got home I found it's just a bit too long for my 90' turntable in Casper! I guess that loco will go on ebay.
On the 17th I started doing some early set up for my upcoming June 23rd operating session. Here I'm taking a through train past Powder River on its way to staging.
While doing layout setup I noticed one of BLI Mikados jumping rather severely at the frogs of some turnouts. An initial wheel gauge check looked okay, but when I checked at several points around the circumference I found a very disturbing thing - the gauge was fine at one point but was too tight halfway around! I had to disassemble the front driver to check closer.
Sure enough, the axial runout (the perpendicularity of the wheel disc to the axle) was off! Here it's okay:
And here it's way too tight!
I dug out my parts loco, and found the same problem on it! I was able to correct it to a degree by using my NWSL Puller to adjust the wheel gauge a little bit (basically split the difference between the widest and narrowest points in wheel gauge, which at least mitigated the issue a bit. But now I'm wondering if all those BLI Mikados have the same problem.
The only other thing I did for most of May and June (outside the operating session on June 23rd) was add a couple boxcars to the rolling stock fleet.
Right after I last updated this website, I started extending scenery from Powder River to Shobon. The last scenery I did here was about a year ago, when I finished ballasting and weathering the Powder River siding.
I taped over the mainline from the end of finished scenery all the way around to the south end of the Wind River Canyon. On April 8th I laid down the tile grout soil in the area:
A close-up at the Shobon switch.
By the 12th I was adding new static grass from Powder River westward.
Also on the 12th I assembled set of four "blue flagmen" I bought online.
On the 14th Dave came down from Basin to help me with the scenery work. Here he's adding diluted Mod Podge to some fresh ground foam bushes.
By early on the 18th the area looked like this:
By late on the 18th I had the initial sagebrush and bushes and such throughout the entire area.
I was going to leave it like that, but I sent this photo to Dave and a couple other friends for comment. The response was basically "not enough scrub brush and such," so I decided to take a trip the next day along the line and look closely at the real thing.
I drove out to Arminto, Wyoming, about 35 miles west of Casper, and took backroads to Lysite, about 30 Miles from the Wind River Canyon.
I already had a bunch of photos from along the main highway west of Casper, which is what I based my scenery on. But even though the drive on the 19th only took me ten to fifteen miles north of the highway, the vegetation was very different than it was along most of the highway.
Here's a shot looking east from Arminto:
About fifteen miles west of Arminto, on the way to Lost Cabin, the view along the road looked like this:
A few miles farther along:
The line looking east from Lysite:
That is a BIG pile of pulled-up spikes sitting trackside!
I realized what Dave meant about the lack of scrub brush and sagebrush. When I got back home I began adding more to the area on the layout. By April 28th the area from Powder River to Shobon looked like this:
Here we're looking west from Powder River:
With the basic scenery now finished, I started ballasting the mainline again from where I'd left off just east of the Powder River switch in late November, 2024.
By May 2nd I was working my way past Powder River.
Here's a view of the ballasted mainline in the curve west of Powder River:
On May 8th I finished the ballasting for now, reaching just past Shobon. This shot shows one of the last lengths of ballast before I stopped:
On the 9th I finally started working on the additional layer for the helix.
And by noon today the new loop looked like this:
This won't be installed until probably sometime in June at the earliest.
I added a couple more cars to the layout - two composite gondolas that will serve as beet gons. I have four more yet to be weathered.
I finished up the mechanism on the P-2 and reassembled it shortly after my last website update. I tested it with an MRC DC power pack and it seems to run fine now.
The only other thing I did to the P-2 was clean up the inside of the smokebox so the speaker would fit better, in late February. Beyond that I've done nothing since February. I might get back to the loco in April.
In the middle of February I added a temporary tail track to the marshalling yard at Cody so the yard could actually be used. When the last section of Cody is built and installed this will go away. While I was working in the area I finished wiring all the tracks in the area. Here's that tail track:
Then I did some things around the layout to enhance operation sessions. One big thing was to install five intercom stations around the layout. This is an interim step towards a dedicated phone system. Here's the intercom at Riverton:
This is the dispatcher's desk with the new intercom there. There are a total of six stations - five on the layout and the one in the dispatcher's office.
To go along with the intercoms I added small clipboards with blank train orders near the intercoms. Having the operators write their own train orders which the dispatcher dictates over the intercoms, it will eliminate the traffic jam near the dispatcher's desk and reduce the dispatcher's paperwork. This clipboard is attache4d to the edge of the staging yard right underneath Riverton and Powder River:
This is the clipboard at Douglas, right under the intercom installed on the fascia at Hudson:
The next thing I did was add holders for uncoupling skewers on each throttle pocket, to stop people from just laying the tools on the layout (it was only partially successful).
The last couple weeks of February, in between all the other stuff, I built five new tank cars, including one insulated tank car for use at Husky, which shipped mainly asphalt. Here's one of the new standard tank cars:
This is the insulated car. I only have two insulated cars but I need 25 or 30, so now I have something to look for at train shows for a while.
The two stub-end yard tracks at Greybull are near the edge of the benchwork, so I installed fencing to prevent an errant elbow from knocking cars to the floor.
Since I was installing fencing anyway, I took a couple days after posting the March layout update to install fencing for most of the hidden track that didn't yet have any. I stopped when I ran out of styrene, with about six feet of track left to go. Here's the fencing installed on the line to east staging. Powell is to the right.
I spent several days the second week of March installing the Vocation tracks. The mainline was in, but the siding and industry spur weren't done yet. In this shot the siding is about halfway installed.
On March 11th I had the siding complete, including the turnout for the industry spur, but the ties and ground throw for that switch, plus the siding itself, weren't complete yet.
The next day the siding was in, but the turnout work was still to come. That was done on the 13th. Here's the trackage on the 12th:
I didn't have any throttle ports installed at Cody yet, so whoever would run the Cody local would have to use a wireless throttle. Just before the March 24th session I installed ports at Cody, but I didn't get a chance to wire them up. Here's the port at Husky Refinery:
I spent the next twelve days getting the layout ready for the March 24th operating session - cleaning the room and the layout, generating train manifests and all that stuff.
When the day arrived, Kevin agreed to be the dispatcher. Here he's hard at work in the middle of the session:
Rich seemed to be enjoying himself running Greybull yard:
Alex ran the Cody local. Here he's switching Vocation on the way back to Greybull:
Mike ran the CNW local. Here he switching cars at Hudson.
Steve ran both of the through freights across the entire layout. Here he's bringing train 78, the eastbound one, into Casper.
I planned to scratchbuild a model of the Burlington Inn in Cody at some point in the future, probably years from now. But a member of the Casper model railroad club recently got a laser cutter and offered to try to make a model for me. I sent him all the pictures of the Inn I could find, and he dropped this model off the day of the operating session. This is great - now I don't have to build one myself! This will be placed next to the tracks at the end of Cody when I get that last section built.
On April 4th I finally got those Cody throttle ports wired into the system.
While the freight car shortage on the layout is getting a bit better, every time I open a new section of the layout it gets worse again. Just the two sections of Cody that I recent brought into service will require 40 or 50 more cars at least, mostly for the Husky refinery. The remainder of Cody will require another ten or so cars, and Lander on the CNW is yet to be built. It will demand another fifteen to twenty cars to function properly.
My good friend Dave decided to help out. He gave me this box of cars - eight boxcars and one tank car. All I need to do is add Kandee couples and wheels to most of them, then weather them and put them on the layout.
In the first three months of 2026 I've added 14 new cars to the layout, and more are in process. Three of the cars Dave me have already been added, including these two boxcars:
This is the second - and last - insulated tank car I have. I've reidentified a few of the standard tank cars I've got as asphalt cars for now, but that subtracts from the total available for the Standard Oil refinery in Casper and the Empire State Oil refinery in Thermopolis.
