Very enjoyable Video Burr - I love your dry, witty commentary, it really adds a lot of character and fun!Thank you for posting this, greetings from Melbourne, Australia...
I like the operation, the history, and the bit of real life model railroading you include. But probably the thing I like best is the wide variety of appropriate and colorful motive power which your videos include and even feature on the layout!
I spent some time in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s and I remember the green and black BN locomotives, the TOFC trains (trailers on flat cars) and the rotating yellow beacons on the locomotive cabs (also on UP locos). Oh, those were the days...
Awesome! I love your vids and I have watched 50 of them! And I'm going for more! Thank you for all the time and effort you have put into this! Happy New Year
Glad you like them! It's been a lot of work, but I've also learned a lot from the people who've added comments, and it's given the layout even more of a purpose. Now I have to struggle to keep from fliming almost anything that takes place in the basement! Yesterday we had some people over running trains, and a couple of fun meets in Bayside yard, but sadly, nobody will ever get to see it! Such a shame! :)
Thanks for being an astute viewer who noticed the swaying. It also helps to have a low camera angle, and moving the train at slow speed. I noticed it too.
Very nicely done. I'm planning to build a 1970s BN/MILW themed layout of my own soon, and thanks to this video, I now feel inspired to create my own interpretation of the Pacific Zip. Speaking of MILW, I couldn't help but notice some nice orange and black motive power sitting around, would love to see a MILW op session in the future.
We will definitely have more MILW action in the future. Check out my “part 9” video if you haven’t seen it yet. Here’s the link: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-rz4aHXuyKbk.html
Enjoyed the video. I modeled the same time frame and railroad many years ago. Never got as far along as your layout. Sold all my HO a few years ago and got interested in doing the same timeframe in G scale. A lot more expensive for sure. I like all your video's. Jim in Illinois
Good suggestion - maybe I'll leave the train instructions as they are. I got carried away with the idea of turning the Zip to go back east as fast as possible, but that doesn't make sense. It was different cars going east so all the railroad had to do was schedule the departure a few hours later and there was plenty of time to do the "turn" to the intermodal facility. Thanks!
I don't know if Train 4 should have the box car on the front or the reaer. But having it on the rear does make sense -- it protects the caboose from the possibility of the TOFC loads shifting. Having said that, I was under the impression that it was generally not allowed to have a shiftable load next to either a locomotive or an occupied caboose.
Thanks - good thought. I don't know if the shiftable load issue applied in 1973, but I think having the boxcar on the rear was to expedite a switcher getting it off the train when it arrived at the terminal. The only reason we got it wrong on this video was I wasn't paying attention, being too busy filming....
@@muchfunwithtrains you are correct sir. The rules about shiftable loads wasn't in effect in 1973 and you are correct about the switcher being able to get expedited cars off the rear of the train faster.
We have the same issue with rules about tank cars. People turn themselves into pretzels trying to keep tank cars away from the engine and caboose, and then an old head says "we didn't have those rules back in 1973." :)
@ 15:30 or so you spoke of the celling tiles and how we are not supposed to notice them? I was just saying to my self how they looked like concrete as you brought them up. Looks good to me. :)
Several people have commented on how good they look, so I've stopped thinking of them as temporary stand-ins for the real thing. Thanks for affirming this! :)
Hopefully some day I will make it across the country to operate on your layout. It's these types of layouts that I love, lots of traffic, plenty to do. Probably why I designed my own future layout to have anywhere from 60 to 300 trains per operating session. Plenty to do.
How long is your operating session and how big is your layout going to be for you have time and space to run 300 trains? That's a train every minute for five hours, if everything runs on time. And it won't, because people make mistakes. So everyone will just be stressed and struggling to keep up.
You're both right. A layout this complicated takes 30 years to build, and the last time I tried operating all the trains it took 10 people working for about 20 hours over 3 days. But since Covid things have been more informal and casual, and it was a lot of fun just to run this Pacific Zip and Crew 6 with just two operators in the room plus me.
Enjoy the run of the train and the history of it. I did noticed the first TOFC car has a 1990+ TTX speed logo on it, so that one is an anachronism. Detritus. That's a term I remember as a geology major in college. I see you are using the ProtoThrottle. Something I hope to try out after I get my layout build further along.
Nice video I know that because of the merger with the Santa Fe the paint color's choicen on present day color's. But think that green and black with white numbering was better look. And really good to see The Milwaukee Road is represented the orange and black is all time favorite railroad color's, being my dad work on the signal maintaning crew. Favorite locomotive is the EMD SD 40-2's love the sound of notch 8 pulling the hill and GP-38's, on switching duty the whine they would make when throttled up from a stop to rolling in a hurry....... Comment made by Kenneth L Boren.....
Thanks Ken. I agree, the SD40-2 and GP38's are fun to listen to. Check out my video on the MILW run here, at ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-rz4aHXuyKbk.html
Curious: didn't the Everett tunnel help with East/West bound traffic? I grew up there, and remember seeing a lot of trains going through that tunnel instead of up and around Delta Peninsula.
Yes, it did. We have the option here, too, to avoid the peninsula with a direct connection (the highline) between Everett Jct. and Delta yard. But it's a little confusing to watch on video, because the east-west mainline also wraps around the peninsula, above Bayside yard.
Burr, this is another great video. Would love to make the trip out west some day and run this train! Was the placement of that SP&S Alco in consist on purpose or are you just having fun with a splash of color here?
Glad you liked it. I don't really know the answer to your question. It's possible that the ex-SP&S C636's would have been used on this train, at least between Spokane and Seattle, but not too likely. I don't have any evidence to prove it. So, yes, I put it in there for a more interesting consist and because I love to see Alcos in operation!
@@muchfunwithtrains Sounds good to me. I've always thought the SP&S C636s look really cool. But I like them better in green than their original paint. Sacrilege, I know. Maybe the unit was needed in Spokane and would be replaced with a boring green SD45 or SD40-2... In the end, rule #1 is in effect. Again, great video!
New question, With the zip power going back to the locomotive pen, why did they not grab the express car? They where going over there any way and this would have saved the yard crew some time. Or is this one of those union things? By that I mean on another RU-vid channel the operator was explaining. That when trains came into this one town, that the union rules said they could only make one cut and one couple. Thus garneting the local yard job work. I mean no one can play both sides of the fence like a "good" union. Don't get me wrong. Unions where great until they became self aware.
Great question! My understanding is that a special switch crew ("Crew 6") was dedicated to meeting this train the moment it arrived in Seattle, immediately taking the express boxcar(s) to the freight house and then running the rest of the train down to the intermodal terminal, while the road crew simply unhitched from the train when it arrived in Stacy St. yard and returned light to the Interbay Engine Terminal. I don't know the role union rules may have played in this, or whether it was an effort to provide the quickest possible service, in order to compete with long-haul truckers for this business. There are other complications that may have played a role. This was the time when the industry was converting from "circus" loading, where they drove the trailers on and off the flatcars along ramps between the cars, to "piggypackers", where they could lift the trailers on and off the flatcars from above. This would have possibly changed how much switching they needed to do of the cars to unload them highest priority first. I imagine in the early days Crew 6 might have done some switching of the cars, but that's just me making a guess. If anyone reading this knows more about it, please leave additional comments here! :) I've been learning a lot recently from articles in the Friends of the Burlington Northern magazine recently, see fobnr.org .
@@muchfunwithtrains, Ok This makes sense. I just bet that driving the trailers on the flats was a lot of fun. I bet things went eee ok when you could back down the cut with the semi. BUT what happens when you find a flat facing the wrong way? Or like with in my range of luck, I'd back the trailer right off the side of the flat car. Delaying a time sensitive train could have an effect on ones pay.
Hi this is Neil schwerdt in west valley city Utah. The question I have is where did you get the latter maker to write the white latter on the front of the layout.? From Neil
I use a "white charcoal pencil" with a 1/2" lettering stencil. You can usually find both at a store that carries art and drafting supplies. Although now that "everybody" uses computers for drawing, the manual drafting supplies are getting scarcer in stores.
I forgot the story on that. The "Zip" only ran for a couple of years in the early '70's, and I'm pretty sure they had lost the mail contract by then, so the express boxcars would have been for other kinds of "parcel post" type shipments. This was the era before UPS and FedEx took all the business. But the truth is I'm not sure.
Those little guys are "DCC flagmen" that get their power from sitting on the track and bridging the rails. Seth Neumann sells kits for them on his website www.modelrailroadcontrolsystems.com/dcc-flag-man-track-power-tester-4-pack/ although they come with red LED's. If you ask him, he'll give you some blue LED's which then work great for "blue flags". On the spot where you saw one on my layout, it's a blue light protecting workmen in a large lumber mill there near Delta Yard. Although you can make a perfectly good blue flag with a tiny square of blue masking tape and a pin. The LED really gets people's attention, though, and of course is better for nighttime operations, which is why the real railroads used blue lights as well as flags.
It's true, but it's taking us a while to renumber all my locos to the correct BN numbers for 1973. Eventually we'll get it all straightened out. Another related issue is when each (pre-merger) loco was repainted BN green. I have some data on that, and some photos on RRpicturearchives.net to back it up, but that, too will take a while to get straightened out. For example, I have two models of F-unit #752, one in the original NP paint and one in BN green. Which one to run? Anyway, thanks for your comment...
If you hadn't blabbed about the ceiling tiles, I would have thought that they were rough concrete pillars. Try to work them into the base and leave them there. I use ceiling tile a lot when I can get broken tiles from a "big box" store. Only if I can get them at a good price...I'm cheep!!!!! Don't really like the narration and if you didn't blab about the small mistakes, we wouldn't know they existed. You do know that you can go back, re-video the scene, and edit out the first mistake???
Thanks for your comments! I agree that the temporary "stand in" concrete pillars look good enough to keep forever. Why not? And yes, I know how to make better videos, I just don't have time. And sometimes the mistakes are as interesting as the thing done right, so I leave them in. But I apologize for when they're annoying or distracting...
