Wordless Wednesday #185

CV SW1200s, Essex Jct. Vt., 1969 - Ian Stronach photo

Essex Junction Backdrop update

Bernie came by for a short, but productive session on Sunday. His main tasker was to complete the Main Street backdrop scene in Essex Junction.  As you might recall, back in January, he came over and started to do a computer drawing of the buildings along one side of Main Street (essentially south east of the trainshed). Before he left that day we printed out a size test version of to make sure the scale and perspective would work and he finished up the drawing at home.

Yesterday he showed up with the final drawing and his bucket of backdrop paints and an assortment of brushes. He dove right into painting the background foliage and distant treeline. We’re keeping the horizon line fairly low in this section of the layout since it represents a relatively flat town.

Instead of cutting out the buildings entirely, he actually painted the sidewalks, and some bushes and grass texture onto the paper.  This proved pretty effective.

Then he cut out the printed sky from the upper portion of the printed buildings, sprayed the back of the paper with photo adhesive, and placed it on the backdrop. 

After blending the road coloration, and adding some leafless “foreground” trees, I think the finished section of backdrop looks pretty good (the 3-d structures shown here are strictly stand ins!)  Next step is on me to finish the three-dimensional scenery in the foreground, and add the “real” structures to both sides of the street to not only get the right look but to hide the edges of the backdrop section, and add the foreground foliage.

That has to wait until I finish the tracklaying/wiring in this area. While Bernie was working on his art project (and after he took off), I managed to get the track complete from north staging to the trainshed.  Over the last couple of weeks I’ve handlaid a half dozen or so turnouts in Essex Junction, so it should be a simple matter to “connect the dots” with the rest of the track. 

Inauguration – uh, make that “Backdrop” Day Review

I’ve been relatively successful at painting mountain scape backdrops.  The “townscape” backdrops present a far more difficult challenge.
Of course, the obvious solution would be a photographic mural behind the entire railroad.  There are two problems with this approach.  If I was modeling “today” it would be relatively simple matter to go to Vermont and take photos as needed. But I’m not modeling today – and while things change slowly in New England, they do indeed change, meaning contemporary photos are filled with structures, signs, vehicles, road markings, and a myriad of other details considerably different now than they were then. Secondly, while a full photographic backdrop (think wallpaper) may well look more realistic, I have a large layout – and the cost of such a backdrop would be prohibitive. The last quote I got to print one from my own artwork came close to what we spent on a 10-day vacation to London. Christine is very, very supportive of the hobby – but somehow I think her response would be “figure out another way to get from here to there.” Frankly, I wouldn’t blame her.
I suppose I could use photographs in the town and paint the open country backdrops. But that would look inconsistent to my eyes. Then there’s the question of blending – it would look weird to my eye to have photographs behind the towns, but painted mountainsides everywhere else. I first tried cutting the buildings out of photos, removing the inappropriate elements in Photoshop before pasting the buildings and streets to the wall.  I soon found the lighting on the photos I used from Google maps washed out several elements – primarily the church steeple. Also the trees in the photo had already dropped their leaves – a plus since I plan to model Essex as leafless, but cutting around the tops of trees created a very obvious seam between the painted wall “sky” and photograph treeline.

Prototype scene. Note how overexposed the church steeple is in this image.

Bernie Kempinski had run into a similar situation when he did a module depicting Alexandria, Va., in the pre-Civil War years for a local museum. Obviously there were no color photos. His solution was to draw the structures in Adobe Illustrator, colorize them, cut them out and paint the rest of the backdrop. Although it isn’t as “realistic” as a photograph, it is remarkably effective. So he volunteered to head away from DC on Inauguration Day to help me with the Essex Junction backdrops using the same basic approach.
He started by adjusting the angle of the main elements – the store, church, and house – to match the angle where the road meets the wall on my layout.  Then he traced over the photo in Illustrator to create the basic outline of the buildings. Once they were in place we dug out some vintage photos of this street in Essex to fill in the details that have changed over the years such as the arrangement of windows, doors, and various roof materials.

This photo shows an early “sketch” (the structures are not complete) temporarily tacked to the wall.

Before he left for the day he had added some details to the buildings and "tweaked" a few minor details. He then sketched a version with a road and some trees (plan is to actually paint the trees on the final version). These quick sketch trees are meant to help compose the scene:

I think a couple of things will work in my favor here. First of all, the left side of the backdrop shown here will be masked with a 3D “half model” of the old store that was just south of the trainshed (represented by a temporary red mockup in the photos), meaning we only have to really hide one joint. The other thing working in our favor is the scale of the elements, which isn’t really obvious in the close up pictures. The tip of the church steeple is about 6” above the layout surface and the benchwork is about 32” deep.

The Illustrator "sketched" buildings aren't as realistic as photographs, but they don't have to be. This is how the backdrop image looks from the aisle. 

Once all the 3D scenery and buildings are installed I think the result will be quite appealing. As Bernie and I discussed if it doesn’t work it’ll take about 10 seconds to erase it with some paint and start over.

Wordless Wednesday #145

Wordless Wednesday #144

J. McFarland photo, Essex Junction, Vt. 

Inspiration and a clear path

While my approach to building, and rebuilding, my layout has given me a reputation of taking the “Ready, Fire, Aim!” approach, that’s not really accurate. 

Think things through before taking action, lest you find

yourself in an untenable situation.

I tend to approach designing layouts by defining a particular location in the basement where a specific scene will go, and then design and build that scene before moving to the next.  There is an inherent risk here – you can quickly end up with a finished layout where all the various segments don’t necessarily function together as a cohesive whole either operationally or visually.
The subject of much discussion on this blog, and in private emails with some of my friends, has centered on the section of the railroad where the White River Jct. yard had been located.  Although I’d made some modifications to the area it really wasn’t working (I won’t dwell on those issues here, as “whys” have been discussed ad nauseam in previous posts).
Prior to the inclusion of White River, the original plan layout design called for some form of Essex Junction, Vermont, certainly a CV signature scene, in this area. I ended building a version of Essex at the other end of the modeled railroad (Essex Junction v1.0?). This was subsequently removed when the neck of the peninsula was rearranged earlier this year). Through most of the summer and fall, while things have progressed well on the other end of the layout, I couldn’t really get the plan for Essex Jct. v2.0 to “gel.”  The solution, I thought, was to forego Essex and all its appeal entirely and instead include a “yard” (you know, since model railroads apparently have to include a “yard” if for no other reason to give the yardmaster something to do).
I worked diligently on designing this new yard over the course of several weeks starting back in the early spring.  Luckily, I realized what a mistake it was before committing to actually building the thing.  Prototype yards, even small ones, are massive.  Model railroad yards tend to be fairly imperfect depictions of the prototype - 90% of the time we basically fill a shelf with parallel tracks.  I was in real danger of simply repeating the issues I had with the White River yard in slightly modified form.  Unlike the other sections of the railroad, this would have forever looked like nothing more than a shelf full of parallel tracks at best, or at worst some sort of out-of-place appendage to the rest of the railroad.  It would do nothing to complete the picture.
So there this section of the layout sat, a sea of bare homasote awaiting some inspiration.
That inspiration arrived a few months ago in the form of some layout photos from Neil Schofield, showing his scene at Orleans, Vt. You can see one of them (taken by Neil and used with his kind permission) below.

Orleans, Vt., in HO scale as modeled by Neil Schofield.  N. Schofield photo, used with permission.

What inspiration could I draw for my transition era CV from a scene showing a street running in front of a couple of stores and clearly set in a different era?  Turns out, plenty of inspiration. Although there’s no denying the wonderful job Neil is doing creating his vision of upstate Vermont in the 1980s, what I found most inspiring was the sense of place they evoked and the way the prototype is driving the modeled railroad. 

A Google street view of the scene Neil has modeled.

This sent me back to the layout to determine if perhaps I gave up on Essex Junction too quickly, dismissing it as “too hard” to fit in my space.  I’ll likely do another blog post with more details on Essex Junction v2.0, but essentially the scene has two “sections” – the trainshed/station area, and a couple of blocks away a wye with several industries inside it and alongside it.  I know there’s an effective way to model the “wye” – simply leave off one leg of the thing.  After all, that’s exactly what I did with Essex when it was located on the other side of the basement.



Kurt Thompson works the Essex Junction switcher job in Essex Jct. v1.0. A workable track arrangement that captured the look of the prototype, it lacked room for the structures themselves so wouldn’t ever visually capture the look of the prototype.

The crews that operated "Essex 1.0" found it was an enjoyable job with the right blend of action and down time.  If I duplicated the basic approach to a "two-legged wye" in the new location for Essex I found I could include many of the buildings that had to be left out of Essex 1.0.

That's perhaps the biggest inspiration I got from Neil's photos. His railroad is firmly in context with the other elements that make the scene recognizable. I suppose he could have included a spur and yet another place for his crews to switch, but the resulting scene would have looked model railroad and not created the same sense of place.

Thanks Neil. I feel like I've gotten over a bad head cold!

Wordless Wednesday #48

A Two-Legged Wye?

Not sure if it's akin to a three-legged dog. The riddle: "When is a wye not  a wye?" The answer: "When you only model two legs of it."
Adding a wye to a model railroad is usually a source of frustration and trauma. Sure, a small wye - one that has nothing in the center, can be a fairly straightforward addition to a track plan. But what about those  times where the wye has "stuff" - buildings, sidings, and the like - inside?
The wye at Essex Junction was unusual since there was a cut off track (I’m not sure what it was called) that ran between two legs of the wye.  Along this cut off track were several industries.  Since I didn’t have the depth for the “outer legs” of the wye, I decided to focus my efforts on this cut off track.  In essence, I'm modeling two of the three legs of the wye and not connecting them together. (On the prototype, the "missing" leg formed the branch line to Burlington, about 8 miles west of Essex Junction.
Losing the wye is not a problem for me - and trying to include the complete wye was causing all types of track planning issues.
Besides, I’m more interested in the industrial switching possibilities than in modeling the several blocks of commercial and residential buildings that would be required if I wanted to model the complete wye.
In a previous post, I mentioned how I’d switched the position of the trainshed and wye.  I also found I had to flip the orientation of the wye itself – a mirror image of the wye.  Luckily these changes are almost “transparent to the user” – you have to be pretty familiar with Essex Junction to pick up on the differences between my now-developing layout scene and the actual prototype.  The main goal, in my mind, is to capture the overall look of the scene.

This old time photo of the wye area (I’m not sure when it was taken, but based on the locomotive I’d say this pre-dates 1920) shows a couple of key buildings that I wanted to include on the layout. The opening photo shows the area just to the right of the picture about. One of the neatest industries in Essex Junction was the Vermont Maple Sugar Co. (a signature industry for rural Vermont - sometimes you have to almost hit people over the head for them to get what you’re modeling – the sign is a step towards that goal) and the Baxter Brothers cannery.
I know both of those buildings were still there in the 1950s (they’re still there today), and I can get photos and enough information to model them.  The other industries that were on that connector track inside the wye are a little more problematic.  I hadn’t turned up any photos showing those buildings until I came across the UVM website that included aerial photos of Essex Junction in the 1930s. I do have footprints of the buildings from both the railroad drawings of Essex Junction and Sanborn Maps.  I also managed to locate the buildings, as they appear today, in Bing Maps overhead views of Essex Junction.
I’ve adjusted the position of some of the buildings to better fit the layout space, but I have already built mockups of the Vermont Maple building, the Baxter Brothers cannery, and several of the other industries have been mocked up by taping pieces of various kits together.

Historic Photos of Vermont

I ran across a tremendous resource at the University of Vermont web site. A collection of historic photo graphs of Vermont, many of which show scenes familiar to railroad modelers of the state. I found two of them of particular interest:

The first was this view of Essex Junction that shows the industries located in the around the wye - this shot dates from 1930 (the dates on some of the captions have been questioned, but the presence of the Burlington & Lamoille RR trackage in the middle of the wye makes me believe the 1939 date.

Another neat find was this photo showing a close up of the Demeritt Company in Waterbury.

Graffiti: Model It or Not?

Back in the 1957 Bob Decker went the entire length of the Northern Division taking pictures of every CV building and facility he could – whether or not there was a train in the picture. 
I didn’t notice something interesting about this shot of the Essex Junction, Vt. water tank until I scanned the slide and looked at it on the big screen. Although whether or not to model graffiti is a question faced by modern era modelers, I didn’t think it was an issue for me – after all, I’m modeling the steam era in northern Vermont – hardly the kind of place and time I expected to see any graffiti, even something as innocuous as this particular example on the base of the water tank.  
And this says “Class of ‘50” – and I know Bob Decker took this photo in 1957, so this graffiti was around for a while. So, the question is, whether to include it on the model of the Essex Junction water tank or not. 

Planning Essex Junction

I have been spending an hour or so a night for the last couple of weeks planning, and re-planning, the Essex Junction scene. 
I’m happy to report these efforts are starting to pay off. 
This scene and I go way back. The first layout I started building as an adult (when I determined the CV in the steam era was right for me) featured the Essex Junction scene. That one never got past the benchwork stage.  The second time I modeled it was in N scale on a small layout I built in a rented townhome when I was on the MR staff. That scene led to an article on Essex Junction that appeared in Model Railroad Planning. 
It's finally time to do this scene again - this go 'round will be HO scale. 
Essex Junction is, in reality, two different “scenes.”  The first, and most recognizable, is the area around the trainshed itself.  Here’s a familiar view of the trainshed. 

 The second, much less familiar scene was area around the wye, just a couple of blocks south of the trainshed.  It was rarely, if ever photographed – at least in its entirety.  One photo showing the wye is this very early image: 
Using CV engineering department drawings and Sanborn Maps this map shows the track and most of the industries in, and around, Essex Junction in the early 1950s. 

On the layout, I’m taking the approach of making whatever compromises I need to make to have the trainshed look as much like the pictures as possible, even if it means I have to “tweak” the wye scene slightly.  Perhaps the biggest compromise I made was to flip the location of the wye and trainshed, relative to the other modeled towns on the layout.  Coming north from Waterbury (on the layout, around the bend on the peninsula) a train should go through the wye and then past the shed on its way north to St. Albans.  On my layout the train will go through the shed and then the wye.  If I maintained the prototype elements in their correct orientation, the track would curve in the “wrong” direction relative to the most commonly photographed view of the scene.  I felt it was important to capture this angle for the trainshed scene to look right, even if it meant flipping the relative location of the shed and wye.  Besides, when I mocked up the scene with the elements in the “right” place there was little room for the wye trackage. The shape of the basement dictated the placement I’m using. 
Due to the configuration of the layout and the basement, I can also add a live third leg of the wye to serve as a live interchange track representing the Burlington branch.  This same track will also permit me to reverse trains between sessions by backing them over from the north end staging yard. 
I suppose there are some who would be bothered to no end by the compromises I’ve made on this scene.  I think the finished scene will look like Essex Junction, even if the individual elements are not arranged exactly like the prototype. 

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.

Lay of the Lost Traveler

Essex Junction is the location where a short branch to Burlington connects to the Central Vermont’s mainline. Until the late 1930s, that branch didn’t end at the CV main, it actually crossed itt as the Burlington & Lamoille branch of the CV (named after the original B&L RR).

As one of the key scenes on my layout I've done a lot of research on Essex Junction over the years. One of the most interesting things to turn up in my research is the following poem. (I'm not particularly into poetry . . . oh heck, I can't stand it and never read it after I finished school and didn't have to . . .) But the following goes to show just how classy this blog is - not just poetry but 19th century poetry no less.

A number of railroad towns have been immortalized in poetry and song over the years, and Essex Junction is no exception. The poem, “Lay of the Lost Traveler” is said to have been inspired when the author, the Honorable Edward J. Phelps, left Burlington on the so-called “shuttle train” for Boston via Essex Junction.  He stepped off this train in Essex and waited for the arrival of the mainline train. The usual shifting of trains took place and Mr. Phelps, without inquiring, got on board the train he anticipated would take him to Boston. In fact, he had reboarded the “shuttle” train which promptly deposited Mr. Phelps back in Burlington, his starting point. There, on his arrival, he penned the following:

The Lay of the Lost Traveler

With saddened eye and battered hat

And eye that told of black despair,

On wooden bench the traveler sat,

Cursing the fate that brought him there.

“Nine hours,” he cried, “we’ve lingered here

With thought intent on distant homes,

Waiting for that delusive train

That, always coming, never comes,

Till weary, worn

Distressed, forlorn

And paralyzed in every function!

I hope in hell

His soul my dwell

Who first invented Essex Junction!

“Here Boston waits for Ogdensburg

And Ogdensburg for Montreal,

And late New York tarrieth

And Saratoga hindereth all!

From far Atlantic’ wave-swept bays

To Mississippi’s turbid tide

All accidents, mishaps, delays,

Are gathered here and multiplied!

Oh, fellow man avoid this spot

As you would plague or Peter Funk shun!

And I hope in hell

His soul may dwell

Who first invented Essex Junction!

“And long and late conductors tell

Of trains delayed or late or slow,

Till the e’en the very engine’s bell

Takes up the cry, 'No go! No go!'

Oh! Let me from this hole depart,

By any route so’t be a lone one,”

He cried, with madness in his heart,

And jumped aboard a train – the wrong one.

And as he vanished in the smoke

He shouted with redoubled unction,

“I hope in hell

His soul may dwell

Who first invented Essex Junction!”