Soundrail: Day One

Oyster Bay is a busy place on Chuck Rickett's Sherwood, Shelton & Sarazen Railway in On30
Soundrail takes place every two years in the Pudget Sound area around Seattle. This year, over 80 registered participants operated on 25 participating layouts over the course of 3 days. Each participant gets assigned one or two layouts per day, carpools from the event hotel in Bellevue to the layout(s), and operates. The evenings are filled with layout tours as well as the banquet. Layout locations this year stretched from Whitbey Island in the north to Olympia in the south. This was my first time coming to Soundrail. I was very impressed by how well the event was organized and run. Kudos to the organizing team for a job really well done.

My assignment today was Chuck Rickett's Sherwood, Shelton & Sarazen Railway. What a treat! I got the Yard Foreman position in Oyster Bay. From Oyster Bay cars are send by barge to South Seattle, there is local switching, and of course incoming and outgoing trains to and from Sarazen at the other end of the railroad.

Switching Lostan Foundry
The railroad runs well. The operating scheme with TT&TO keeps engineers and yard foremen on their toes, but leaves plenty of breathing room to enjoy the superb modeling and chat with other operators. We broke for lunch and continued running trains well into the afternoon. Chuck is a great host, and made sure that everybody had a good time and was taken care of.

Down  by the water
The port
Out in the woods

The sawmill in Sherwood has lots of neat details. The open roof makes it easy to see them all.



Chuck also has animated water tower effects.


After the conclusion of the operations session, my car pool group visited a few more layouts that were open for tours this evening. Below are a few photos to illustrate the wide variety of layouts we got to enjoy.

First up was Scott Buckley's Tehama Valley Railroad. The scenicked areas on this under-construction layout nicely capture the look and feel of the Sacramento Valley. I'm very much looking forward to see how this work progresses.


Greg Wright's Consolidated Republic Mining Company was a feast for the eyes with lots and lots of scenery details telling stories, visual effects, and a very unique railroad.


Jim Younkins' Mud Bay and Southern is an impressive N-scale layout in multiple basement rooms and the garage of Jim's house.

The Simpson sawmill, one of the many industries on the Mud Bay & Southern.
Scenicked staging yard.
Bill Sornsin's under-construction Great Northern Cascade Division layout provided for an excellent end of the day.


What a day. So much to do. So much to see. So much fun. ... and there were still two more days ahead of us. Thank you Chuck, Scott, Greg, Jim, and Bill for opening your homes and sharing your railroads with us.

Soundrail 2018 posts: [Warmup] -- [Day One] -- [Day Two] -- [Day Three] -- [The Return]

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