Freight Depot

While gathering all the pieces I need to rebuild a computer for the train room, I also made progress on other work items on my list.

The freight shed for Emsingen is almost done.

Gueterschuppen (office side)

Gueterschuppen (street side)

Visually, I like the office side of the freight shed a lot better than the rear side. Since the track serving the freight shed is to the right of the station building, I'll likely arrange the shed so that the office faces the the station. The drawback with that arrangement is that there's only the short covered loading ramp facing the track. And the office is in the way of loading doors, too. Oh well, when there's ground to put the shed on I'll try out what works best and go from there. I need to add the lights for the loading ramps, as well as a little lamp above the office door, and I'm still toying with the idea to add actual office furniture inside, but only if it'll be visible from the Emsingen operating pit, so that will have to wait a while until I make up my mind. The shed is painted and lightly weathered. I especially like the effect of the corrugated roof.

Hochwaldtunnel with bark "rocks"

Years ago I read about a method to make "rock walls" from tree bark. Pascal and I tried that out yesterday, and while the color of the rocks came out a bit too dark, the result is definitely workable. 

Hence the "Hochwald project" was born:

Before going back to work on Jan 3rd, the plan is to finish the rock cuts around the Hochwald tunnel entrance, the tunnel portal, as well as the trees and deco in the Hochwald corner of the layout. 

The semaphore in the photo is the north entrance signal to Talheim, but won't stay here. Instead I'll allow switching moves all the way to the tunnel portal and add a "Halt fuer Rangierfahrten" sign to the tunnel portal. This matches the detection sections I already set up, and makes explaining the Talheim switching limits a lot simpler. Even though, after I added Kopper furniture and related switches in Talheim, most operators don't use this section of track for their switching moves anymore at all.

The Talheim entrance signal will be imagined to be on the "other side" of Hochwaldtunnel and be represented on a signaling board mounted to the back wall, whose LEDs will be controlled by the SIC24D that drives the Emsingen panel. That signaling board will eventually also display track occupancy of the long tunnel track between Emsingen and Talheim.

The semaphore will become the south entrance signal of Emsingen.