Refining scenery, Part 6

In the preceding post, Part 5 of this series, I showed the assembly and placement of the Tichy handcar shed near the backdrop in my layout town of Santa Rosalia. But since I wasn’t representing an actual handcar facility in that location, the kit parts that model a handcar track were surplus. I had a use for those parts in a completely different part of the layout. (Here is a link to that previous post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/01/refining-scenery-part-5.html .)

At the east-most end of my town of Ballard, right by the tunnel portal where the branch line emerges into Ballard, I have long had a small handcar-like shed, along with a phone booth and a tie pile.

I always have been a little disappointed that I didn’t take advantage of this location to include a pull-out for a handcar. Near a tunnel is a logical and quite common location, but I didn’t do that here because the shed is too close to the track. (I did include a handcar pull-out at the SP mainline tunnel entrance near Shumala; see a view of that area in the last photo of this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/10/my-walking-around-list.html ).

But it occurred to me that there is enough space behind the shed that it could be moved back a ways, allowing space for the Tichy handcar track. I measured that distance, and drew it on the ground. I then cut along my pencil line with a utility knife, to define the area to be removed. The ground rises somewhat to the right rear corner, as may be evident.

Next I removed the necessary material using my Gedore chisel, an excellent German tool I have shown before (see my post about it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/06/more-sags-in-track-to-fix.html ). This tool made quick work of this small removal.

Now I needed to prepare the Tichy speeder track to fit this space. It seemed to me that it had too few ties, compared to what I have seen in photos. Accordingly, I added two styrene scale 4 x 6-inch strips. These can be seen below, unpainted, in a photo of test-fitting everything to the revised site. 

Because the shed door is located so that the handcar rails line up with the track right at a switch, this may not seem to be a likely or convenient arrangement. It would make lifting a handcar off the track less easy. But speaking as a person who has helped manhandle speeders off the track onto set-outs on speeder trips, even the heavy motorized speeders can certainly be handled in such a situation.

I painted the ties dark brown and the rail a rusty reddish-brown, and when installed, added some ballast under and around them. The finished scene isn’t visibly all that different from the previous area, but it now has the handcar rails added.

This was another quite minor modification of a scenicked area, but a refinement I wanted to make. I am pleased to continue with these little upgrades here and there.

Tony Thompson