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.