Full Circle

This is blog post number 200.  Rather than write a big blog recap or make some major announcement, I decided to spin a yarn about a mystery solved.  Let's start with this image:

I snipped this sliver from one of John Allen's photos of a scene at Port on his Gorre and Daphetid railroad, taken in 1971.  Yup.  That's all you get.  Running the image through Google image search gives you all manner of fun things, none of which help in this situation.  All I could make out was some text along the bottom beneath that colored logo, "Bay RR".  However, I could tell the steps are molded on, the side appears to be simulated wood and the roof walk tells me its a box car.  That's it.  Maybe another image might help:

This full-side view is from a John Allen photo of a train on the high bridge over Squawbottom, 1972.  Now the overall shape of that herald is clearer and some general text is emerging on the left side.  Perhaps a road name up high and a slogan below?  The images above are all I could find of this particular car and offered no definitive answers to what the full road name was.  That is, until I was searching for other surviving relatives of a totally different car:

More is known about the Virginia Midland, though not much more.  Still, I was trolling eBay, as one does when on the hunt for vintage models, when I found a listing for a Virginia Midland hopper.  I was not entirely sure it was the same VM as the box car on the G&D, but I figured if the seller has one private road name car, there may be more.  And I was right.  Check this out:

Look familiar?  This is a picture from the eBay listing and the photo quality is not the best, but it was certainly good enough to make out the relevant text!  Until this point I had no hope of ever identifying that mystery car I had been calling the "X Bay RR".  Now I knew it was the Seaford and Oyster Bay RR, "Trail to the Sunrise"! I was ecstatic. 

Fine.  Mystery solved, right?  Not so fast.  Whose railroad was this?  How did one of their boxcars come to be on the G&D?  That's hallowed ground on which not just any car trod, er, rolled.  How was it hitched into a train alongside such famous lines as the Alturas and Lone Pine or the Texas and Rio Grande Western?  Perhaps the internet, that great oracle of our age, could tell me more.

After a string of fruitless searches I found the goods but it wasn't a direct route.  However New York State Route 135 appears to be.  This road is commonly known as the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway.  We're getting warmer.  Model Railroader database?  Nothing, except that Seaford is mentioned in connection with the NorthEastern Region of the NMRA.  Hmmm.

Adding NMRA and NER to the search term "Seaford and Oyster Bay" brings me to "The Coupler", the publication of the NER, specifically the Summer 1981 issue.  There on page three is a fine article about newly minted Master Model Railroader #85, Frank Murray.  Click here for a link to the full issue, however this snip answers most of the pertinent questions:

That last line brings it full circle.  There it is.  "Trail to the Sunrise"?  A nod to the Sunrise Trail Division of the NorthEastern Region of the NMRA.  "A number of years ago" was probably at least 10, since the earliest image I could find of an SOB car was from 1971 and Frank completed his MMR certification in 1981.  

Only a few details remain and they're perhaps less important.  Did Frank mail his car to John or bring it with him on the "vacation"?  Oh, and there's a bonus G&D connection; in the same article are names of other modelers in the Sunrise Trail Division who had achieved MMR.  One in particular stood out: Waty House (#5).  Did Watson House have anything to do with securing an invitation to the G&D for Frank?  John considered House enough of a friend to name a major structure on the G&D after him.

The world may never know any more than what's been discovered and shared here, and that's okay.  And the car I found on eBay?  Why I bid on it of course!  And won, along with another private road name car, a reefer lettered for the "Busted and Maimed", Route of the Busted Pine.  No, I don't have any clue to its origins.  Yet.

Thanks to all who regularly read this blog, and any who stop by occasionally or stumble across it.  However you find it, if you would consider following along I'd appreciate it and as always, leave any comments or questions down below.  There will be more to come.
 

Patience, Risk, Reward

 

Work on the "Putnam", the 2-8-0 kitbash I had begun a couple years back and recently resumed, had stalled.  The nature of this hobby and the flow of my daily life during the summer had conspired again to remove me from the workbench and shift my focus elsewhere.  But truthfully I wasn't in the mood to do wiring, or really anything, on this engine.  

That's okay.  This isn't a race to some finish line, though I find competitions challenging and deadlines helpful now and again.  This is a hobby that can breed patience if a person sticks with it.  I may groan a little about projects that have been on-again-off-again for years but at the end of the day I don't mind.  As long as I'm engaged regularly with model trains in a hands-on way, I'm content.

Getting back to work on the engine meant tackling a risky wiring job.  I needed to splice in a micro-connector in order to install the headlight and separate the boiler from the chassis.  I've installed DCC decoders before and have done similar work with tiny wires, but this case was particularly risky.  I needed to strip and solder the wires and I only had so much wire to work with.  Thankfully the procedure went as well as I could have hoped, with no hitches or hangups.

The reward was not only a successfully wired connector but a return to the workbench, to a stalled project.  I once asked a fellow modeler how he managed to create such exquisitely detailed steam locomotives.  He replied, by sitting down at the bench and doing something - drilling the next hole, adding the next part, step by step until it is done.  Even if all you do that day is install the smallest rivet, count it as a victory and do it again the next day.  Eventually you'll have a completed model.

I would add one thing to this advice, a step that's crucial for me in overcoming inertia and restarting the modeling momentum.  The locomotive on the bench wasn't sitting idle alone.  All the parts to do the next step were out and ready.  The soldering iron, solder, flux, extra hands with magnifier, micro-connector, wire stripper, side cutters and heat-shrink tubing were all there too.  Setting out all these parts was a vital step, a necessary prologue.