Building the State Belt Railway

So much has been done in the last several months. From bare benchwork to an operating switching district, this portion of the layout has been the focus of my modeling time for a while now, and it’s coming to a good place.

A street grid has been laid out. The front edge of the benchwork along the aisle is The Embarcadero, and the streets running away from the camera are Drumm and Front, ranging from Pacific to Greenwich. All more or less just to the east of and below Telegraph Hill.

This panoramic shot shows all of the ties laid down, now that I’ve got that underlying painted street grid. Switch templates are glued down to the homasote, then ties glued atop that template, and then long strips of ties connecting them all. These long tracks extending several blocks back are definitely the longest stretches of “straight track” on the whole railroad.

Note the building mockups in place for much of this. I built these to get a feel for sight lines, and how far people can reach around or between them (not very!). Simple cardboard rectangles with a roof glued on top – nothing fancy, but differing height and vaguely differing roof lines. I could make several of these a night, and without a doubt that was time well spent. Further south, towards Market St, these buildings get pretty tall (it is downtown, after all) and provide a nice separation between this Produce District and the “South of Market” area (that is yet to be built).

Many, many switches were built. It’s around 23, with several being crossovers. One or two a night for a couple of weeks, and then time to prepare them for installation. Proper cleaning, and then soldering drop leads. Every frog gets a wire, then a minimum of two wires (one for each “primary” rail, and on crossovers even more). “Bay Side is BLUE” is the mnemonic (track power bus wires are blue and white).

Then it’s time to lay all of the rail. Starting at the tracks along the aisle, I finished up the curves from the other portion of the layout, and then did each of the three “main” lines. Once those were all complete, down to Market St, it was time to extend the spurs inland. Many spikes were inserted (more than a few making the ultimate sacrifice — I’ve done a lot of hand laid track by now, and I don’t think I’d call myself good at it yet). Lots of gauge checking.

Then it’s time to install switch machines. Lots of them. This is why I lowered the L-girder: to make short order of this for those turnouts that are right above the girder (and that’s several of them). Alas, I appear to have not taken any pictures of the spaces with the Tortoises before the wiring began.

Once those were installed, it was time to put up the fascia. 1/4″ MDF, 12″ high and then cut to length. Holes drilled for the switch controls and “main” tracks indicated with tape. In other portions of the railroad, all of the other switches for spurs were able to have the same tape treatment, but that didn’t work on this section due to the sheer amount (and length) of those tracks heading away from the mains. This led me to just label each button and hope that crews can figure it out. Every switch control is straight out from the points of the associated switch. There are three groups of tracks here (Drumm St. Industries, Drumm St Yard and the Produce Yard). Each label has the grouping name (e.g., Produce Yard), and then some indication for what each of Normal and Reverse would be (e.g., Track 3 or Lead).

Oh, and all of the streets that cross the mains get street signs, using a very nice replica font for this (Fog City Gothic). Since town names don’t really do anyone any good (it’s all San Francisco), I had to find something with finer granularity to help locate things.

Then many evenings under the layout putting it all into operating shape as far as the electrons go. Power to each Tortoise control board, wires to the pushbuttons that are the operator control for each switch (latching on-off pushbuttons with built in LEDs), frog wires to the same control board which uses the Tortoise contacts to properly switch between blue & white track power feeds, and then additional track power drops.

I am a big fan of the suitcase connectors (3M 905 for 14ga to 20ga connections, and Corning UB2A for connecting the 24ga drops to a 20ga local bus extension). And please do get the correct crimping tool, especially for the UB2A. I’ve done many of them using a regular channel lock pliers, and they’re *SO* much easier to do with the right tool.

I could then move the quick-n-dirty staging tracks to south of Market, representing the SP King Street interchange and the various State Belt industries that will be in this area. Right now, it’s just two tracks (commercial turnouts & flex track, since it gets moved from time to time).

It was time then to dig out some more freight cars from storage (many of these had not seen the light of day since 2012 and the dismantling of the St. Paul Bridge & Terminal). Quick checks of wheel gauge and coupler height were performed (with only a couple of fixes needed). The road name mix is a bit off of what I would expect to see, but that can be remedied over time (for example, there are more NP reefers in my fleet than I would expect to see in SF).

Then it was time for a break-in run of the new Produce District. On January 20, 2025, an illustrious (notorious?) crew came and ran for a couple of hours, moving some cars around per their B-7 instructions. A couple of small issues were identified, but no major concerns were found and I think they had a good time.

Tracklaying to me feels like a military campaign — an awful lot of stuff has to be planned out so that it all comes together in the end. There’s no single session to get it done in — it can be weeks (even months) before a significant portion of the new track work is done and ready to operate.

The next section to work on will be the Produce District. This is still in the northern portion of the railroad (where the dividing line is the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street). Much of this is the section shown in this fantastic picture. This is just around the corner on my layout (I know, I really should come up with a drawing/diagram of how all of this fits into the basement), and is to be operated from an aisle opposite the aisle for the existing area (North Point & Pier 29). This means that there’s much more room on the benchwork for the industries, warehouse, and tracks inland from The Embarcadero, and no room for the piers.

So what makes this a campaign?

Well, given the lack of AC in the basement, I don’t like to lay track in the summer (or even until after the mid-fall change to much dryer air). But that doesn’t mean that I can’t do anything.

First, I knew that the long L-girder along the wall side of the peninsula where the next district will be was right above where the main tracks will be, the ones running alongside The Embarcadero. There was insufficient room for the Tortoise switch machines that I like to use. And even switching to some lower profile switch motor would have been difficult given the lack of clearance to move around in.

I didn’t have enough support readily at hand to hold up the entire side of the layout (about 26′ long) to lower the existing girder. So I made a new girder, installed it below the existing piece, and then built up new risers to support each of the cross members, and then removed the original girder. I’ve known for years that I needed to do this, and it always felt like a major undertaking. Yet, from start to finish was no more than a week’s worth of evenings.

Here’s the new girder in place (the old one is on the floor). Now there’s much more room to install the switch machines. The end-most couple of feet of the old girder remained, for clearance of a bookshelf at the very end and because that last bit won’t need the turnouts right up front, as this is where the King Street SP interchange tracks will be.

Then came time to tackle the cabling mess. I’ve been accumulating all sorts of layout electronics over the years, and they’ve been on top of the benchwork for easy access. So the various cables all dangled over the edge of the layout. There are three DCC command stations in there (Digitrax DCS100, Pi-Sprog, and DCC-EX), two Raspberry Pi’s for various things, mostly JMRI interfaces to said command stations, main and programming track connectors (all using the Anderson PowerPole interfaces made popular by the FreeMo folks).

So I built a shelf under the layout (it was easily accessible now because I had to move things around to add all of the new cross-member risers from the new L-girder) and put all of the electronics bits underneath. In all of the re-arrangement I switched my primary control system to the DCC-EX based command station. Programming is done with the Pi-Sprog. The Digitrax system is kept around for backup purposes and for testing & comparison purposes. I can switch the State Belt between any of these three systems in about 5 minutes, half of which will be restarting JMRI with the proper interface selected.

With a hole drilled through the sub-roadbed for the programming track connection, all of the cabling is now below grade and the railroad now looks much cleaner. That last cable hanging down is just because I haven’t cleaned up that section of the benchwork yet. But look at all of the crap on the benchwork. Okay, that’s got to go now too. Time to pick things up. Alas, no picture exists of clean benchwork.

Next, I’ve been laying out a street grid, and building some (semi) temporary¹ building mockups to represent some notion of what the urban infrastructure here looks like, at least in the things that concern the operations. What will the view lines be across the tracks to the buildings beyond? What level of compression still manages to look right? How reachable will things be?

So this picture represents a vague idea of what the new section will look like. Several team tracks in the middle, spanning multiple blocks each. “Traditional” street trackage alongside the adjoining row of buildings, and some more spurs heading inland on the right hand side (and off the edge of the photo).

So what else do I need to do before I can get started?

Check with the Quartermaster, since every campaign will succeed or fail on the logistics. Whoops, my coffee can of ties is nearly empty. Whoops, my stash of rail is low. Gotta replenish those before I can start in earnest.

And I haven’t even touched a bit of track yet.

More to come soon.

1. The U of Minnesota built a bunch of “Temporary” buildings in the influx of students just after World War 2. The last one was finally taken down a couple of years AFTER I started in the mid 1980’s. “Temporary North of Appleby”: you will not be missed. ↩︎

Back in 2017, after the last Minn-Rail op session of the weekend, I took time away from the layout in order to design & build a proper Wi-Fi throttle. That project lasted until earlier this year.

I’ve since returned to working on the railroad itself. Starting with a general cleanup (as flat surfaces tend to accumulate stuff), and then I embarked on a track laying campaign.

Laying track over the summertime here in my basement isn’t a good idea — it’s not terribly well humidity controlled, and I get some significant expansion/contraction cycles. The inner track really buckled badly – I get that prototypes sometimes have bad track, but this was ridiculous. So that had to be pulled up and replaced.

Next I started working on the pier tracks, which really are the entire reason the railroad exists. Simple logistics dictate that I can’t have as many as I’d like, nor can they hold as many cars as I’d like, but I can fit in 9 pier tracks, each holding two car spots. I think that’s enough to get a good feel for what their operational interest is.

This entailed finally building the 3rd track along the Embarcadero, and setting up all of the switches to cross the street and then head into a pier bulkhead. Those bulkheads are THE defining visual characteristic of the San Francisco waterfront. All of the piers north of the Ferry Building shared a common appearance, although some have been modified and modernized over the years.

This was the result of a couple of hours searching for a good picture of a pier bulkhead, figuring out the proper scale, and then printing out a copy. I’m pretty happy with the general sizing & appearance, and now I need to edit in the proper pier numbers (21 through 33) and build up a more complete structure instead just the simple building front.

The rightmost (rearmost) track is the one that’s mostly new. There’s now an additional runaround track for the North job. At the far end of this picture is the set of curved tracks pictured above, now much less wonky and having stayed that way through several seasonal changes. Those two tracks head over to Pier 43, where the car floats from the Santa Fe and Western Pacific dock. The ATSF float also services the Northwestern Pacific float dock in Tiburon.

The three mainline tracks in the foreground of this photo will curve around towards the left, and head to the South end of the railroad, terminating at a set of tracks at King Street, where the Southern Pacific leaves us a bunch of cars, and we can drop our interchange cars for the SP as well.

I’ll update soon with some pictures after the construction was completed.

I’ve not been doing much on my own railroad for a while, as I spent a number of weekend work sessions helping to build the benchwork for a layout for a young gentleman (to support the Wishes and More Foundation). That benchwork has been finished, so I’ve been back to my own railroad.

The next section to be built is the area up near Fisherman’s Wharf. This includes Pier 43 (the car float connection to the AT&SF, WP and NWP), North Yard, and a small handful of industry locations (Standard Oil, Del Monte, Cincotta Bros), and the connecting track to Fort Mason.

Towards the top of the picture, one track (#2) currently rounds the corner and will shortly connect to the tracks already in operation. #1 track will soon parallel #2. On the right side are the four tracks of North Yard, varying wildly in size. Track capacities are 7 cars, 6, 4 and 3 cars. Such is what fits into the city block grid.

On the left side of this picture will be Pier 43 (the car float) and Pier 43 ½ (additional tracks to support swapping blocks of cars on and off the float).

In this area, new construction consists of a single left-hand crossover, 4 left hand switches, and the longest single piece of straight track that exists on the railroad (about 4 feet).   Add in some other yard tracks of short lengths.