Back To Malabar

With the current drain resolved on my main layout and 80% o the rewiring complete, I've been able to get back to the extension into the storage room next to the layout. The first photos of the Box Street micro that's on the far wall date from May 2006, so this one's done good duty for more than 13 years. The 1 x 7 foot shelf addition that I put in last year has worked out very well, too, with the Unitrack controlled by DCC being very reliable. I use the NCE radio remote located in the main layout room to control via a radio cab from this room with no trouble.

But reviving my interest in the Copper River and Northwestern has given me a few more ideas. The industrial scenery on the Box Street micro, a sort of shorthand paper mill, now seems kinda boring:

So I think I'm gradually going to add and replace some of the building items to make the scene a little more like the Kennicott, AK terminal of the Copper River. This will probably change the traffic to older-era ore hauling as well.

A number of guys over the years have built the Box Street plan by the late Jack Trollope:

However, I believe all of them but me have replaced the sector plate on the right with an ordinary switch. I'm going to give in and do this as well, and when I do it, I'll get rid of the brick building wall whose purpose is to mask the sector plate:

I will also get rid of that bridge, which always struck me as sort of hokey; it was just there to cover the sector plate. Instead, I will move the Bachmann power pack, which powers the switch machines, and mount a building on a small shelf below the gound surface at the front of the layout. It will be a compressed version of the Kennicott power plant:

The track on the prototype ran in the bare area in front of the building. Kennecott Copper left the whole plant in place when they ceased operations in 1938, and the buildings have partly been preserved and restored by the National Park Service.

I've been testing a Bachmann 0-6-0T on the Malabar shelf:

My current thinking is to run the line to the Box Street micro section as a separate industrial operation that connects to the main layout in Malabar.