Alpine Module

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My visit to Alpine, Texas a few years ago left strong memories of what beautiful area it was.  The area in general in the high plains of west Texas at the northern tip of the Chihuahuan Desert that reaches up from northern Mexico.  Alpine is a green oasis and this water is a reason for its existence when the great transcontinental railroads were being laid out and built.  I recall that there was a bluff in the downtown area near the Amtrak depot and it is included on the module.

 In 1882 a section boss decided to name this town Osborne but soon the town’s name was changed to Murphyville.  In 1888, the citizens changed the name to Alpine.  Today, Alpine is home to Sul Ross State University and is a strong ranching community.  The train line passing through Alpine is the UP/AMTK going east-west and the Texas Pacifico Transportation (TPT)

 The module is nontraditional following the Z-Mod standard.  It is nontraditional in that it is and inside module designed to fit into my garage and join my Paisano Pass and Marathon modules.  The outside main radius is fourteen inches and the inside main radius is fifteen inches, just the opposite of outside corners.

 There is more involved in constructing the module frame for an inside corner than a rectangular module.   At first my mindset was to construct a “sort of” hexagonal frame but the physical techniques eluded me.  Finally I hit upon the idea of a thirty-six inch square frame with two corners in included.  This way of thinking about the construction was much easier because the two remaining corners were not the focal point of making the module frame true and square.

         Construction starts with a frame of 1x3 poplar wood with glue-blocks that form leg pockets and provide strength for the module.  The wood is glued and screwed together for strength.  The track sub-roadbed is ¾” plywood with cork as the roadbed.

 The fascia is primed, sanded, primed, sanded, painted brown, sanded and painted brown one last time.  The underside of the module pair is painted with tow coats of primer to minimize absorption of moisture when the humidity swings wildly in my garage.  This also helps to minimize shrinkage and expansion as well as to minimize potential for warping.

         The electrical is composed of three busses.  The red bus is for the outside main, the yellow buss is for the inside main and the green buss is for auxiliary DCC power.  DCC power is used on this module for the turnout and the buss permits distributing power to adjacent modules.  Connections to other modules use Molex 093 two circuit connectors.  The original approach used the Cinch-Jones connectors.  When upgrading, I used the old CJ connectors to make adaptors that could be used to connect to modules having CJ connectors instead of Molex.

I included a siding that might be thought of as the TPT line coming in from the north before heading west to Paisano Pass where it then takes a southerly direction to Presidio, Texas.  The original turnout for the siding was replaced with a Peter Wright (of England) turnout that is powered by a Tortoise switch and a DCC controller.

There are several house structures located here and there on the residential parts of the module.  The structures are from made from 80-pound paper stock.  The downtown part of the module has five multistory building structures made from card stock kits.  The depot is paper stock and was made during a quite time at the National Train Show in Ft. Lauderdale 2002…what fun!

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