Origin of the Quay Sawmill

This story starts approximately 6 months ago, when an elderly gentleman reached out to the LENS group for some help with his layout. George had started a bedroom layout years before, but had abandoned any work during the two years of Covid exposure. He was afraid that some of his layout building and modeling skills had lapsed during that period and was looking for some folks who could get him started again and offer ideas for the layout.

The layout was a steam based theme, set roughly in the forested areas of Quebec and Ontario. His major business would be a saw mill, which was already built years before. While he had accumulated many kits for building his fictional town, that sat waiting in their boxes. Part of the layout had DCC installed, and other parts of the benchwork were started and initial wiring. The last wall was framed in, but no real top or topography yet installed. The first task at hand was to review the wiring and get a train running through at least part of the tracked area. Our first work session involved quite a bit of cleaning and clearing. Our 2nd session was spent tracing the wiring, getting Tortoise switches back in order, and a little bit of mountain building.

Unfortunately the story takes a sad turn, for after the holidays we had planned another work session but George was not feeling well. After several weeks, he entered hospice care and unfortunately never get home to see his layout again. As no one in the family was interested in model railroading, I worked with the family to tear it down and clear out the room. The family wanted to see the layout live on, even if it was to be scattered to the winds. So my good friend and recent retiree Frank and I took several weekends to clean everything up. I'm happy to say that the layout frame, spare track, scenery materials and other items went to help Frank with his new layout that he has been designing. He plans to model the Big 4 over at the Berea Tower.  Other materials were split between members of the LENS group for their own modules or home layouts. I was fortunate enough to be able to save the saw mill and lots of trees for my own Ontario themed layout.

The new sawmill on the layout will become Quay Sawmill in honor of George. While I haven't quite figured out the trackplan or how all of the buildings will fit, I have the workings of a plan and have been experimenting. It will be fit into a 6-foot module, which I had previously built to a park and baseball field, as well as Commonwealth Plywood. For now, the Comm Plywood buildings have been boxed for storage. I may need to add about 24-30 inches onto this module, in order to fit a small log pond. I also plan to modernize the operations to fit into the 70's, which means the tracks for pushing loaded log buggies will disappear. However, the general theme of the operation will sat the same.  So stay tuned as the progress of the sawmill is documented.

Original BTC Sawmill