Wordless Wednesday #69

Work Session Report - November 11, 2014

First of all, to all my fellow veterans and to those who are still on active duty in the Armed Forces, thank you for you services and sacrifices. You're the reason we get to enjoy hobbies like model railroading. 

An overall view of the Richmond area as it looked after today's work session.

Progress on the layout had kind of sputtered out a little - I was finding it hard to get motivated to put the mainline back together and finish the track in the Richmond area. 
Stic and I had arranged a work session for today a couple of weeks ago - and knowing Stic was coming over shamed me into finishing up the track. I managed to finish all the track on Sunday. 
Since I was still left with a bunch of pink styrofoam pieces in the workshop it seemed to make the most sense to spend today's work session cutting the gluing the styrofoam landforms in place. 
We made pretty good progress - next step is to carve the foam to shape - which will be as task I'll tackle in short sessions after work in the evenings. 
Appreciate Stic spending his day off over here helping with the layout.

Beauregard and Molly are in charge of keeping up morale…. and wrestling!

You can't use an electronic magazine for this! Bound volumes and magazine holders filled with MRs, RMCs, and the like make perfect weights to hold the foam in place as the glue dries! The mockup is a rough approximation of the Richmond creamery. 

Putting trolls in their place

Several times I've started typing, deleted, and re-started a post expressing my reaction to an email I received via the Model Rail Radio mailing list from Jim Gore earlier this week.
I can't begin to describe how angry this email made me - (posted as I received it):

Dear All,
First, I want to thank so many of you who have said nice things about my layout feature in Model Railroader. Never intended that to be one of my goals in model railroading – it just happened because a friend of a friend talked with Lou Sassi who needed some place to visit in Florida during the winter.
I have always believed that this hobby of ours is exactly that … a hobby. It is something that gives us individual satisfaction and a certain amount of contentment. Ultimately, there is only one person that has to be satisfied, the owner of the model railroad; the rest being “gravy”.
It seems that my fictionalized railroad, as a branch-line of the Chili Lines, has sparked outright hatred and animosity among a group of prototype modelers, presumably who are strict Chili Line adherents. If you know any of these persons, can you tell them to stop sending me nasty emails and phone calls. Good gravy … it’s a hobby !!!!
Jim

As I blogged in my post on Clinic Etiquette, most model railroaders - the overwhelming majority - are well adjusted people who appreciate good modeling and a good story. They also know to appreciate a layout - I still remember some sage words I first heard years ago "Learn something from every layout you see - every modeler has a story to tell, and it's worthwhile even if it's not the layout you'd build."
Sadly there area few  (thankfully only a few) "model railroaders" for whom the hobby is more about badgering others than any worthwhile efforts -
My friend Trevor Marshall has expressed it better than I could, so I'll simply provide a link to his excellent post -
http://themodelrailwayshow.com/cn1950s/?p=5428

As far as the Trolls go - I've decided I'm not going to tolerate them any more.

Wordless Wednesday #68

Lunch in Baltimore….

When all else fails, hold the directions with one hand...

and start pushing buttons with the other!

… Well, not exactly. 

Had a nice visit and lunch with Paul Dolkos over in Alexandria. The occasion was delivery of one of the new (at least to me) Easy DCC T5000E throttles. A mutual friend, Fred Scheer was ordering an Easy DCC system and several of us piggybacked on his order to get some of these new throttles. The visit to Paul's was to pick up the throttle, and was also an excuse to inspect progress on his HO Baltimore Harbor District. I also made a separate trade with Paul… more on that shortly. 
Paul has been making great progress on the layout. The theme couldn't be more different than Paul's former world class B&M White Mountain Division, but the execution and modeling are top-notch. Paul is, simply put, one of the most precise modelers I've ever encountered. Every model on the railroad is beautiful - there's no hastily hidden misaligned joints, patchy ballast or ground cover, or anything of the sort. He also has the neatest layout rooms I've ever seen. There isn't a single box, random pile of stuff, or household junk hidden on or under the layout. He doesn't have curtains below the fascia because, well, frankly, he doesn't need them. 
Paul's been a great friend for more than two decades and I appreciate any and every opportunity to visit with him - like most model railroaders I know he likes to talk about a wide variety of subjects, although modeling and photography are perhaps his two favorites. 

Here's a few snapshots I took of the layout - 

Bernie admiring the layout - that's the WM car float in the foreground. See Bernie's blog HERE for his take on our visit.

This fertilizer plant - also visible overall photo above, is a combination of scratch built components and Walthers kits. There will be an article on this section of the layout in an upcoming issue of Model Railroader. 

Wouldn't be Baltimore without swing bridges and oysters!

This was the first section of the layout Paul completed. 

There was a bit of a controversy (well, not really, it was in good fun) about whether Paul or Lance Mindheim started using photos of buildings with cutout windows and the like. Paul claims Lance first saw this on a background building on the B&M layout … we're not convinced. The issue remains unresolved. 

I mentioned Paul and I did a little additional horse trading before the other guests arrived. I had a couple of Walthers kits that he wants to use for his "Fells Point" inspired scene - and he still feels he had too many "New Englandy" cars on his roster - so we made a trade. A couple of Walthers kits for a nicely detailed, painted and weathered Accurail CN boxcar and a Westerfield New York Central car - both built by Tom Underwood for Paul. 
They're already in service on the Roxbury Sub…

Wordless Wednesday #67

Boxcar Percentages through White River Jct.

A few years back several members of the Central Vermont Railway Historical Society tabulated the total number of boxcars (and only boxcars) going through White River Jct, VT over a several day period in 1954. (The period and locale were chosen because there were relatively complete train lists for that period of time).
I thought this might help guide the creation of an accurate freight car fleet for the layout (by percentage of road name) so I was very interested in the results. After looking the resulting data I'm not convinced it's helpful for modeling purposes.
The sample total was 3,605 cars. There were about 60 or different reporting marks represented (basically, name a North American railroad of the time and it appeared at least once ...)
By far the most common roadname, with more than 50% of the total, was Canadian National. Since the CV was a subsidiary of the CN, that was not really all that much of a surprise. 
I prepared the somewhat useless pie chart above to have an image with the blog posting - I'm afraid there's little useful data to be gleaned from it - except that if you go with a statisical approach to a modeled fleet 3/4 or so of the fleet should be made up of boxcars from the 10 railroads listed.
The table below shows the breakdown by roadname of most of the remaining 55+ reporting marks.

Each accounted for far fewer cars - or for a total so small it was insignificant.
I noted the percentage of the total by roadname didn't come even remotely close to reflecting the national fleet, although the totals seem to reflect some regional "bias" (greater percentages of New England/Northeastern region road names, but not by much). I was especially shocked at how few NYC and PRR cars (based on the % of these roads rosters compared with the national fleet at the time) appeared in our sample data. Not sure what I learned from this exercise, except that out of a fleet of 100 boxcars fully half should be CN, with almost any other road name represented as long as you don't include too many of any one road name. The thing is, if one were to model a roster to these percentages and then compare the resulting trains to prototype photos, the result may be defendable as somewhat "authentic," but I don't think they'd look right!