Around the Layout Podcast

 

A few weeks ago I had the wonderful experience of being interviewed by Ray Arnott for his excellent "Around the Layout" audio podcast. For the record, Around the Layout is one my favorite model railroading podcasts (followed very closely by Second Section and Crossing Gate) - so I was thrilled when Ray asked me to appear on his show! 

We talked about my early days in the hobby, some of my experiences in model railroading publishing and of course my adventures in layout building, culminating with my current layout. 

If you've got a little more than an hour to waste listening to my ramblings, you can find the podcast here:

Podcasts — Around The Layout Podcast

Or search for "Around the Layout" on your favorite podcast app. 

Farewell to yet another Waterbury landmark

Although the Waterbury Vermont station has been wonderfully restored the other buildings that once stood across the tracks haven't been so lucky. The first of these to disappear was the feed mill that was directly across the tracks from the station proper. Now, I understand from Bill Brigham and some of the other folks in Vermont that the former CV freight station is no more. The photo above was taken during a late winter safari with my friend Alan Irwin. Alan was a  dear friend - but he was a train chasing rail fan at heart and never really understood WHY I would stop and take pictures of buildings with nothing around them - especially in a dimly lit cold (and I mean cold) Sunday afternoon in early March. 

I'm glad I did. 

Here's a photo of the feed mill I took the same day. 

Of course, I plan to include these on the layout in the Waterbury scene, but at this point all that exists of the freight house is the footprint. (For the record, this is "full size" in HO scale):

Planning the Essex Junction Trainshed

I managed to mess up my back during the weekend so I have not been able to work on the layout – I simply can’t stand for very long or hunch over anything. Luckily, today it feels better than it did yesterday and far better than on Saturday.

Since I can’t really work on finishing up the track work in Waterbury, and daytime television isn’t worth anything I decided to round up some photos of the Essex Junction trainshed. I have a lot of information on Essex Junction, but it’s scattered in numerous binders, books, and file folders. It was time to put it together in one “Essex Junction” reference binder. Included with this post are a few pictures of the shed.

When it was built (sometime just before the Civil War) the shed looked like three tunnel portals, side by side. 

Over time as engines and cars got larger the shed portals were too small, so they were removed by the late 1880s and replaced by a wood gable ends that spanned all three tracks (when the B&L line was abandoned in the late 1930s, the third track – actually Track One – was removed leaving two tracks that ran through the shed. Here’s the way I’m going to model it (top photo is looking north, bottom photo is looking south):

This is going to be one of those signature projects on the layout – it has to be done “right” since it’s such a critical element of the scene.

You can see lots of details on Essex Junction in my article that appeared in Model Railroad Planning 1998. I also wrote another article on Essex Junction, this one including plans of the station and trainshed drawn by my good friend Laz Scangus, in the February 1993 Mainline Modeler.

I’ve built an N scale model of the trainshed before (it appears in the MRP 1998 article). But for this HO scale model I want to take it a step further and include the ceiling truss work as well as some interior lighting. Mostly, I want to be able to recreate some of the photos shown here, taken inside the shed.

There is also the practical aspect of coupling and uncoupling cars inside the trainshed. Do I make the entire roof removable (for operating sessions we’d take the roof off) or add an opening in the roof – similar to what Jack Burgess did with his model of the Yosemite Valley’s El Portal station?

Perhaps what I need to do is leave one side wall removable, perhaps held in place with magnets. That way, if I want to shoot a picture from inside the shed I can take that sidewall off and get the camera lens “inside” the building.

I plan to build the shed almost exclusively from styrene. Once I figure out how the roof trusses were constructed I’ll draw them up and we’ll see if they can be cut on Bernie Kempinski’s laser.