While I haven't made a ton of physical progress on the layout since my last update, I've been working on the planning side of things a lot lately. That includes everything from the track plan to locomotive paint scheme ideas. I love planning and designing stuff like this so I am having a ton of fun with this whole proto-freelance thing.
GLN Logo Changes
For whatever reason, I can never leave things like this alone. I haven't even really used the GLN logo for anything just yet and I've already made some changes to it. In my last post I detailed the symbolism contained within it and how the negative space of the two arched lines represented the two main lines. Well, after messing around a bit with the logo design in Inkscape I've decided to simplify it and eliminate the whole negative space idea. Now there are just two arched lines with a thickness similar to the perimeter pentagon. I think this gives the logo a cleaner look overall.
GLN Logo Changes
For whatever reason, I can never leave things like this alone. I haven't even really used the GLN logo for anything just yet and I've already made some changes to it. In my last post I detailed the symbolism contained within it and how the negative space of the two arched lines represented the two main lines. Well, after messing around a bit with the logo design in Inkscape I've decided to simplify it and eliminate the whole negative space idea. Now there are just two arched lines with a thickness similar to the perimeter pentagon. I think this gives the logo a cleaner look overall.
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| The revised GLN logo shown in blue and in white. |
Track Plan Changes
I've also significantly changed the track plan once again. I've abandoned the idea of having the large wye in the one corner. That means I no longer have the ability to turn a train around, but that's ok with me. I plan on having two locomotives to work this layout, so I will just have one facing each direction.
This update was also about simplifying the entire layout. I have a smaller yard in this case and it is directly connected to the paper mill, so that will make moving cars around a bit easier me. The town area is also a bit simper with fewer roads and more open spaces. I don't want to take on more than I should and this feels about right.
I've also significantly changed the track plan once again. I've abandoned the idea of having the large wye in the one corner. That means I no longer have the ability to turn a train around, but that's ok with me. I plan on having two locomotives to work this layout, so I will just have one facing each direction.
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| Revised track plan as of November 21, 2017. |
Planning Downtown Hawkins, MI
Outside of designing the logo and locomotive paint schemes, I think I will have the most fun with planning and building the Hawkins town scene. I've laid it out so there will be a single main street running parallel to the track. This means I only need to build up the one row of buildings and that is probably a good thing for someone like me without a ton of experience building kits. Now I just need to pick one to get started with.
Planning a Paper Mill
As I am searching for structures to use on the layout, the one thing that has not changed is the plan to go with a paper mill as the primary industry on the layout. I tossed around some other ideas, but keep coming back to this so I am going to stick with it for now. I feel like this is something that will fit nicely with my 1990's northern Michigan theme. The plan for this layout is a standalone paper mill. This means the mill will receive it's pulp from outside sources by rail or truck. I feel like I do not have the room to make this an integrated mill and I do not want to over complicate things.
Right now I am leaning towards using the Superior Paper Mill kit from Walthers. I really like the Cornerstone kits from them and this one seems like it would work well in the space I have available.
For this paper mill, I wanted to come up with my own name and logo for a Michigan based paper company. While it's not the most original or unique name, I went with "Michigan Paper" for the company that will be represented in the fictional Hawkins, Michigan. Part of the reason I chose this name was the aesthetics of it. When arranged in a certain way, I was able to come up with a neat logo that turns the "A" from both words into part of a tree. The horizontal lines were just filler to avoid empty space in the corners, but they could represent finished sheets of paper.
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| An example of what the Walthers paper mill kit could look like. |
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| My first attempt at a logo for the fictional Michigan Paper company. |
Now that I have the new track plan kind of nailed down, I've started laying down some cork so I can give it a good test run. If I am happy with it at that point I will try to work on getting the main line glued down and wired up for my DCC system. That should be a fun little project as I've never wired a layout like this before.
Now that it's becoming winter around here, I've been finding myself a lot more motivated to get things done on the layout. I would really like to get the track down so I can get the fun part of building up the town of Hawkins.
