Beaver Lode Railway.

Beaver Lode Railway is an outdoor G-scale setup. It will model both Union Pacific 1940s/1950s as well as Southern Pacific Daylight 98-99. It currently consists of a 40' depot area (Cheyenne), a 100' trestle (mainline, arrival/departure, drill tracks), and a turn around at the far end.

Future additions include a 125' mainline run from the far turn around to a junction (Green River) which will proceed further north to Ogden, and turn left across a bridge to another junction. Turning North goes to Portland/Seattle, while South heads towards Emeryville/San Fransisco/Los Angeles. Most of the above points (at least for the foreseeable future) will be "signposts", ie. no actual turnouts/track/buildings.

San Francisco will be approx. 250' down line, placing it directly parallel to, and visible from, Cheyenne. It will have a full depot (3rd & Townsend), yard, etc. I hope to model some of SF itself, building a working cablecar/streetcar on the hillside that connects to 3rd & Townsend. The mainline will (eventually) head South another 125' to LA.

Obviously a layout of this size could not use live track. Instead I opted for a "Dead Rail" system. I built all the supporting hardware more or less from scratch. JMRI is used for the interface, with OpenLCB control of switches, signals, etc. Decided on WiFi for the signal transport as bluetooth doesn't have the necessary range, and CAN bus would be impractical at these distances.

Conversion of MTH DCS to DeadRail.
Design of the turnouts/signal masts/etc.

As complete WiFi coverage is necessary to control the locos I also use WiFi to control the turnouts/signals/etc via LCC (layout command/control). Specifically I use OpenLCB/OpenMRN thru JMRI. To avoid needing a WiFi connection to each piece of hardware the design consists of an Arduino style mcu with control hardware attached via SPI/I2C. Each mcu can handle up to 6 SPI/I2C buses. The network connection can be either Ethernet or WiFi. Further info to be found in the links below.



Information on the Beaver Code LLC OpenMRN gateway can be found here.



Information on Beaver Code LLC hardware can be found here.



Links to various forums dealing with this project.



Pictures in various categories.