A New Era: Trains Running on Layout

On January 5, 2011, at about 12:30 PM, this happened on my layout:

That's right. . . a train moved under its own power for the first time. That may not seem like much, but it's a big moment. In less than four months, with the help of three talented friends, I have gone from an empty room to an operating layout!

On Tuesday the 4th, George and Dan came up to teach me how to wire the layout for DCC (digital command control). Here they are hard at work:

Unfortunately, wiring involves awkwardly standing on tiptoes (Dan) or

crouching under the benchwork (George).

After discovering that I had used a defective turnout (switch) that was causing a short throughout the layout, we finally got trains moving by midday Wednesday the 5th. Troubleshooting a layout can be frustrating!

George checks wiring under the layout.

George also had a surprise-- a Wisconsin Central snowplow he had custom painted for me. When Walthers made these years ago, I didn't know I'd end up modeling the WC/CN. Back then I was living in Madison and had never even seen the Valley Line or visited Wausau. Now WC plows are hard to find, so George took an extra plow Nate had and painted it WC and added details not found on the original Walthers model. Here's a photo:

Today I've been making sure all my DCC engines work properly on the layout and I've begun to troubleshoot the trackwork. In order to do that, I built a small freight typical of locals one might see in Wausau and ran it through the various yard tracks and around the whole loop. A train traveling the entire loop covers approximately a mile in N scale. This train made 25 loops without a derailment. Here it passes by the yard office and enters the north end of the yard.

I'll be working on the layout over winter break and I hope to begin putting in the staging yard. I'll update more often, at least for the next few weeks. My thanks again to George, Dan, and Nate.

 

My Favorite Trains 3: New York Central Passenger

When I got into N scale in 1993-1994, I just had a few scattered cars and a single Atlas GP35 engine. Then in 1994 Kato came out with smoothside passenger sets with matching E8/E9s. I looked at the available roadnames and there was only one choice: New York Central.

The New York Central was one of the first railroads I remembered. It ran about a mile from my house, paralleling the Norfolk & Western. When I was extremely young (probably 3) my dad took me down to the tracks at Weber Road in Columbus, Ohio, and we watched the RDC that still ran from Cleveland to Cincinnati pass by.

This is likely a photo of that RDC, taken in Cleveland in 1970 and by then sporting a Penn Central logo.

I later learned that what I was witnessing was the last days of pre-Amtrak passenger service and that that little RDC stood in the shadows of a great passenger tradition of the NYC: the Twentieth Century Limited, the James Whitcomb Riley, and other storied named trains of the past. This Kato set has the typical "lightning stripe" passenger livery. You can see the lightning stripes on the nose of the lead locomotive:

Trains in this two-tone grey scheme plied the rails near where I grew up from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Those NYC rails I grew up near had a long history. The tracks were laid in 1851 to connect Columbus and Cleveland. In 1865 Abraham Lincoln's funeral train passed over them on his long final journey from Washington home to Springfield. They had later become part of the "Big Four" (Chicago, Cleveland, Cinncinnati & St. Louis) which later was merged into the New York Central. In 1968 NYC merged with the Pennsylvania Railroad to form Penn Central. Out of its bankruptcy Conrail emerged in 1976 and in 1999 Conrail was purchased by Norfolk Southern and CSX and split. This line became part of CSX and carries trains to this day.

This group watches trains at the next crossing north of Weber Road at a place called Cooke Road: http://www.crtraincrew.com/

Next time, the story of a modern-day passenger train on which I took a memorable trip in 2008.

My Favorite Trains 2: Halloween circa 1919

Model railroads can serve many functions. In my case, one car on the layout commemorates a piece of my family's history from nearly a century ago.

My maternal grandmother's brother, my great uncle, was named Guy Roberts. As a young man, his family-- including my grandmother, a baby at the time-- was living in Wapanucka, Oklahoma. One Halloween night when he was in his teens, my Uncle Guy and a friend decided to "trick" the town. They collected every outhouse in Wapanucka and loaded them onto a dilapidated flatcar that had been sitting in a nearby siding for months. In the morning, the town would awaken to find their privies gone. Once they found the outhouses on the flatcar, everyone would have a good laugh.

Or so my uncle and his friend had planned. Unfortunately, during the night a local freight stopped and picked up the flatcar and by morning it was long gone. When the young men's mischief was revealed, my uncle feared that they might be beaten by townsfolk who were none too pleased by their prank and the subsequent loss of the towns "necessaries." Yet in the end the boys escaped violence. According to my uncle, in the midst of the angry and growing crowd, someone began to laugh. When asked why, the man suggested that they consider the ridiculous sight of a flatcar loaded with outhouses headed south across Texas. Soon others began to laugh and the mood lightened. The boys agreed to replace the lost privies and the matter was closed.

I had my friend George paint up a variety of N scale outhouses and filled a flatcar. Here is the result:

I wish I knew more about the incident. Even the exact date of the event is unclear. My uncle was born in 1903,  and at the time this occurred he was no longer a boy who would have been spanked, but rather a teenager who might have been more severely roughed up by the crowd. My grandmother (I called her BaBa) was born in 1916 and was too young to remember it, and they moved away from Wapanucka in 1923. This seems to place the incident somewhere between 1918 (when Uncle Guy was 15) and 1922 (when my grandmother would have been 6 and probably old enough to be aware of this happening).

There's only one thing I can add and it amounts to pure speculation. Why had the flatcar been sitting in the siding for so long? Flatcars sitting empty on a siding don't earn revenue-- in fact, they actually cost the railroad money if the car belongs to another railroad, in which case the railroad the car was sitting on would owe the railroad that owned the car demurrage charges. History might offer a clue. US railroads responded very poorly to the demands of World War I and many nearly came to a standstill well into 1919. The situation was so bad that the federal government toyed with the idea of reorganizing the nation's railroad network into a more rational system in the so-called Plumb Plan. So maybe this event occurred in 1919 and showed that the railroad was finally starting to move again and get cars back into revenue service.

At that time, two railroads ran through Wapanucka, the Rock Island and the Kansas, Oklahoma, & Gulf (KO&G). I'm not sure which railroad was the one in the story. Because my great-grandmother later lived in Atoka, Oklahoma, on the mainline of the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas (MKT), I decided to use an MKT flatcar. I like to imagine that the Rock Island (or OK&G) was paying demurrage to the MKT for a flatcar hauling outhouses!

Both railroads through Wapanucka are gone today, as are Uncle Guy and BaBa. The town itself is just a shell of what it was when my grandmother was a child. BaBa and I visited there in 2006 when she turned 90. She lived with me in 2007-2008 until she passed away at the age of 92. Below are pictures from our 2006 trip:

 

Looking east down the old Rock Island mainline through Wapanucka. The KO&G ran parallel through town, so the flatcar stood near here over 90 years ago.

 

One of the few clues a railroad ever passed through Wapanucka. Sadly, there is even less left of the KO&G.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." --William Faulkner

In loving memory of BaBa and Uncle Guy.

My Favorite Trains 1: The RBB&B "Red" Circus Train

So as I promised in my last post, I will be providing updates for the next few weeks, even though I won't be able to get much work done on the layout. Instead, I'll be sharing photos of some of my favorite trains that will be running on the layout.

I'm going to start with one of the larger custom-built and painted projects I have ever had done, the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Red Circus Train. This train still carries the circus around the country today. In the mid 1990s, it visited Madison when I was in grad school there and I was hooked. I asked my friend George Nelson if he would consider helping me put together the train. He custom painted all the cars and also helped me find flatcar loads that approximated the actual train. He put a tremendous amount of effort into this project and it shows. I also bought the decals from Donald Manlick in Manitowoc.

Running along the back of the photo below are several of the passenger cars for the circus train. They are silver with red lettering and logos (hence the name-- there is also a "blue" train out there carrying a second version of the RBB&B circus). Most are coaches, although baggage cars are used to transport the elephants and horses.

The train also has a large number of flats with vehicles, wagons, and supplies. Here are some of them parked in front of the passenger cars:

The next-to-the-last flat on the left is the generator car, and on the far left is a converted auto carrier. Some animals, such as the tigers, travel in the enclosed area on the lower level. I sometimes worry about them, as they are at the end of the train and thus receive much of the jostling that results from slack going in and out of the couplers. There are strict rules about how the animals must be watered, fed, and exercised, but it still not ideal.

Finally, to give you some idea of the length of the circus train, I put the enitre train on the loop in the staging area. And my version contains fewer passenger cars and flats than the real train!

If you want to learn more about the real Red Train, this is a great site:

http://chicago.railfan.net/cgi/photos.pl/?page=RBBX_Red_Unit

To find out if the Red or Blue Train will be passing near you in the coming season, go to:

http://www.ringling.com/TourSchedule.aspx (only the red and blue shows travel by train).

Next week, a humorous tale about trick-or-treat, a family connection, and how it's modeled on my railroad. Until the next update. . .

Wausau Yard Is Finished!

Thanks to BLW and an amazingly fast USPS, the switches I needed to complete Wausau yard arrived Friday. Here are a couple of photos of the completed yard:

The north end of the top four tracks ended up with a weird S-curve in them, but it seemed to work best, and cars are running smoothly through the turnouts. In fact, I was surprised at how well cars go through the yard ladder, even at higher speeds than I would ever run a train.

The only trackwork left in this entire area is to extend Kelly siding through the wall. In the picture above, the siding at the far left with the three white cars on it represents Kraft Foods. George made me realize that there was really only one choice for what kind of cars would service Kraft. Here's a close-up of one of the cars:

They're called Cryo-Trans reefers and each one has the name of a city or place on its door. CRYX 1022, the car above is the "Columbia River." These have always interested me, and several friends and I have recorded the names we saw on CRYX for many years.

This is the end of a major phase of the layout and I'm going to have to take a break from tracklaying for a while. Midterms and other work projects are fast approaching and so you won't see a lot of new track updates in the next few weeks. Not to worry, though. I am going to update weekly with pictures of some of my favorite trains on my developing layout. For fun, I got out several trains and filled the yard with them today. Details on many of the trains you can see below will be coming in the next few weeks. Until the next update. . . 



Mainline Loop Completed!

The layout reached a landmark this morning when I pushed a WC boxcar around the complete loop. This loop is about 33 feet long, which translates to a mile in N scale (N Scale = 1/160; 33 ft x 160 = 5280 ft = 1 mile). I finished the trackwork Friday and tested it today. Here is a shot looking down the main (Wausau) yard and the staging yard:

Here's a better view of the staging yard. I need brighter lighting in the staging room-- it had only been used for storage, but now I'm thinking strongly of installing track lighting to spotlight the yard.

To complete the loop, I also had to figure out how to get around the near corner. This piece is removable, so I wanted to keep the trackwork simple. Once scenicked, this area will represent the bridge over the Eau Claire River just south of the real Wausau yard. By placing the track on the pink foam, I can later carve out the area under the track to make the Eau Claire River and its banks. Because of other considerations, the trackwork is a little unconventional, but cars roll well over it. Still, until I install fascia note that I've added a little cardboard "insurance"-- the sound of trains hitting the floor is not a happy one!

Here's a final view, showing the far end of the staging yard. The tracks go through the wall and reemerge on the north side of Wausau yard in the main room.

I've installed two rerailers on this track to keep trains safe. This will be the main route through the staging yard, with the staging or storage tracks closer to the wall. Each of those tracks will also have a rerailer, which will make it easier to set up trains on those tracks.

That's it for this update. My next project is to complete Wausau yard. I only need one switch to accomplish this and it's on its way (hurry up BLW-- I'm waiting!). I'll post something next weekend. Until then. . .

Mainline Completed through Wausau Yard

I had some time this evening, so I went to work connecting the two ends of the yard. As I mentioned in the earlier post today, I had to realign the "bypass" track so that it could hook into the switches at the north end. While I was at it, I moved the Kraft spur a bit south. Now that I see how much space I have on the north end behind the mainline, I am going to move Kraft south and model something to its north, perhaps a suggestion of East Hill. This is a fashionable neighborhood in Wausau where many of the lumber barons built their mansions a century ago.

Note that I've also added the programming track-- it is the track angling off at the far left. It is used on a DCC layout to program engines. Below is a closer view. The CN engine is on the programming track:

Below is a view of the mainline curving away from the north end of the yard and heading into the tunnel that leads to the staging yard. I put a Milwaukee Road centerbeam flat there because the "Valley Line" through Wausau was part of the Milwaukee Road for over a century before the Milwaukke Road's bankruptcy in the 1980s. It's also a shout-out to Nate, who helped build the benchwork!

Finally, I decided to have some fun to mark this small milestone. I added a couple of details from BLMA-- a yard office and a pair of porta-johns-- and a CN engine. CN's first Dash 9s were all numbered in the 2500s, so I had George Nelson number this one 2564. Can you guess why?

The next step is to connect up the remaining yard tracks and put in the Kraft spur. I also will need to figure exactly where the Kelly spur should go through the wall. Until the next update. . .