2024 Tombstones

Pre-made "skinny" stones being bulked with foam.

 

Inspector Vulture approves.

Shaped and coated with joint compound over paper mache'.

Painted black and dry-brushed white.

While I have several ideas for scratch-built monuments, this was another year to simply "bulk out" premade stones to give them more heft and believability.  It is a simple process of building up the back and base of the stone with additional foam then coating with paper mache' and stippling with drywall joint compound mixed with art paste.  Not shown is the small block of wood and vertical PVC pipe I insert in the base.  This adds weight and a way to install the stone in the lawn over a short length of rebar, to keep it from blowing over.  Next year I'll be back to creating never-before-seen spooky-silly additions to the Golden Cedars Garden of Rest Pet Cemetery.

Two Words - Train Master

A Trainmaster is a person in charge of the movement of trains in a division or subdivision of a railroad.  A Train Master is a diesel locomotive, designated H24-66, built by the Fairbanks-Morse company.  Two Words.  Train Master.

This story began decades ago, long before The Shifter.  Facing the big Five-Oh soon I decided to revisit some old projects.  This quickly rose to the top of the list.  Look for more posts about this pair of locomotives in the next few months.

 

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.

A Selley Baggage Car?

For those not in the know about vintage HO scale rolling stock, Selley was one of the early manufacturers offering a set of short passenger cars.  These were kits with metal parts including the roof, truck frames, end platforms, really everything except the wood block floor and some clear acetate for window glass.  Producing cast metal detail parts beginning in 1941, the company made a small number of freight car kits but a wide variety of freight car parts including doors, sills, underframes, etc.  The coach and combine made their debuts, respectively, in February and March of 1960.

I fell in love with the combine at a train show in Ohio, buying the kit and bringing it home back at the turn of the century (is it too soon to use that phrase?).  Eventually I found another, and two coaches to match. However, that's all Selley ever made.  While other manufacturers added baggage cars, observations, parlors, etc. in their range of passenger offerings, Selley only ever made the combine and coach, marketing the combine as a complete one-car train.

These are short cars*; 6 inches long, an attribute that enables them to handle tight curves without that ugly overhang, according to the manufacturer.  So when I stumbled across a vintage metal kit for a baggage car with a similar length I was intrigued.  Who had made this?  It didn't take long to discover it was New One, a manufacturer from Japan.  These kits were similar to Selley's, only the roof was wood and the parts such as the end steps and railings were more crudely stamped metal instead of lovely detailed castings.

The New One car, or rather, "re-kit"** I bought is a real basket case.  It was missing the roof and one of the end steps and railings but no matter; those were parts I didn't need.  At first sight I immediately began forming in my mind a cunning plan to combine, pardon the pun, one of my Selley combines with these sides to make a "Selley" baggage car.  The big question was whether or not they would fit together. 

The Selley construction was different from other manufacturers' methods.  Instead of offering sides and ends and roof as separate parts or casting the body as one piece, they cast part of the roof with the sides, leaving the top bit above the clerestory windows to be attached.  So in order to fit the baggage sides to the Selley "roof", the lower roof parts will need to be cut away from the old Selley combine sides and added to the New One sides.  Then the length (width) of the New One sides will need to be reduced by just about an eighth of an inch on each end.  A real kitbashing challenge!

My Selley kits are still unbuilt but from time to time I take them out, inhale that glorious vintage kit aroma, and admire all the gleaming metal parts.  I'll add the New One baggage parts to the same box as the Selley kits.  For now that's where they'll live, but someday they'll get their day on the workbench and after that, time on the high iron conveying passengers - and their baggage - to their destinations.  Of course I'll need to rebuild my New One ten-wheeler to pull the whole lot...

*While the Selley cars are short, they're not "Sierra" cars, a moniker often assigned incorrectly to any short combine/coach pair that vaguely resembles the cars used on the Angels branch of the Sierra RR.  Those cars were much shorter and sagged noticeably.  The MDC Overton cars are shorter than the Selley cars; the Binkley shorty cars shorter still.  The Ulrich one-piece cars, another combine/coach pair, are about the same as the MDC, maybe a little shorter.  There were other metal side cars; New One, already mentioned above, and Alexander alongside Mantua.  However, much longer than that and we're leaving "shorty" territory and getting into the 50' and larger range.

 **One of my YouTube videos is about re-kitting a Wabash box car.  Sometimes it is best to crack that old glue, clean off the parts and rebuild the car.  This baggage car is one of those cases, though I'm going to re-kit the car before kit-mingling the parts with the Selley combine.  Re-kitting is just the first step.

Caribou Southern

Hang on, this post is all over the place.  That is to say, the road is winding, with turns aplenty.  

Periodically I search eBay for a particular car; a card side refrigerator car that fits into a series of custom printed road names.  These often turn up in lots of old cars needing refurbishment, the sort of treasures you'd find buried in the junk box at a train show.  During one of these scans I stumbled across two cars that caught my fancy.  The first was indeed a reefer and appears to be hand painted:

It should go without saying, but I can't find anything about this car's origins either.

The second I almost didn't buy:

I had no connection to this car apart from my interest in collecting and preserving lost and forgotten private road names.  That is, until I began cataloguing John Allen's rolling stock.  While there has been plenty of interest in the private roads that appeared on the famous Gorre & Daphetid Railroad, no comprehensive list has been made of the plain ordinary rolling stock; the cars based on actual prototypes.  I set to this task when I was sick and couch-bound for a week.

During my research I dug back through the archives of the G&D discussion group.  There on a partial list of cars that appeared on the G&D was an entry for a gondola - a Caribou Southern gondola, number 55.  Hey...I know that name from somewhere.  About the same time a new set of slide images from the G&D was posted on the group and there it was, the CS gondola, on the RIP track near the Great Divide engine house.

From a photo by Jerry Drake.  Click here for the original.

Okay!  Now we're getting somewhere.  But let's take a step back...what about this Caribou Southern?  Whose road was it?  Where was it located?  How did John Allen come to have one on his railroad?  The Model Railroader archive has NO mention of it, though there's another fascinating Caribou-named model railroad with a car ferry that moved on a track in actual water.  Google turns up nothing.  It seemed to be a dead end.

Well, let's just say the road doesn't go much further but I can now answer two of those questions.  During a totally unrelated search as I rifled through my collection of model railroad passes I found this:

Yup.  There 'tis.  Ken Vere, Supt.  Vancouver, B.C.  And Google did turn up a little on Ken, with a mention in the Pacific Great Eastern newsletter from the 90s.  PGE?  Oh, you know, that Canadian road with the Caribou Head logo...

Tired Tropes or Tried and True?

Do you ever think about those tired hobby tropes?  You know the ones, "We've got to get kids interested in the hobby! (or it will wither and die)" or "A layout is never finished" (though if that were true custom layout builders might never get paid).  Recently I was perusing the 1941 Varney catalog, as one does*, and I came across this passage:

    "Did you ever stop to ask yourself why the small boy never had a chance to play with his electric trains on Christmas day?  I say it was because it took his "old man" just about that long to put it together, make it run, and get tired of it.  It is too easy."
    "At some risk of frightening a newcomer, I would like to say that, a MODEL RAILROAD is no pushover.  If it were, the children would have it, and it would fail to hold the adult interest."

SP drew it, never made it, but Varney did!

The bug will bite a kid from time to time and due to their disposition or an early start with some tools and paint they may turn into model builders sooner than later.  But I suspect they're the rare case, not the average person who may have a mild interest early on that lays dormant until much later when time and funds become available to pursue the hobby in earnest.  I'd say Varney was making a statement in direct contrast to those "toy train" manufacturers that so often depicted kids on the floor, grinning from ear to ear as their grinding metal beasts clanked around the Christmas tree and the family looked on, beaming with pride.

The passage in the catalog continues:

    "A model railroad has yet to be built and finished.  That is one of the nicest things about it.  It's never done.  Virtually every model railroader who starts a layout, tears it up and starts over again almost before he has the bugs out of his first loop of track.  There are thousands of model railroaders who have temporary 'layouts,' or systems which are in effect only test tracks for the equipment which is being modeled.  The real layout floats nebulously in his mind like a mirage in the desert, to be reached some day, somehow."

The first commemorative car offered by Varney in 1948.

Keep in mind these quotes are from a Varney catalog, a company that sells trains, not structures, scenery, track or anything else for your layout.**  They also extol the virtues of how well their equipment runs and complies with NMRA standards so of course it was in their interest to encourage modelers to build something on which to run these trains.  But I think the quote above is for those folks whose layout doesn't look like more than a test track on a table top.  Perhaps it is also aimed at the person who resists buying more equipment because they don't have room for it.  Keeping the dream of "some day, somehow" alive creates a convenient justification in the mind of the buyer.

I suppose I resemble that remark.  Currently I have a small model railroad by most standards.  But that doesn't stop me from buying more trains.  Some day, somehow I'll have that big space for long trains.***  But I'm also that weird kid that got bit early and never let college, girls, career, etc. get in the way of spending some time at a workbench with a model train or structure kit.  Maybe you are too.  These tropes exist for a reason and sometimes they're even true.

The other commemorative offering, Varney, 1948.

*This post was prompted by a recent purchase.  Varney is not a sponsor, (LOL), but I do appreciate their contributions to the hobby and think their early card-side equipment is really cool.

**Varney does recommend you build a layout, and they even offer the barest of suggestions on how to do it.  I did find it particularly interesting that while no track or transformer brands were mentioned, they did exclusively recommend Ideal structures!

***Back in the real world, I do have an actual plan to build a nice storage system that not only protects my investment in rolling stock but makes them easily available to put on and take off the railroad.  I have already shown in this post here that it is possible and even fun to simulate a larger railroad's operations on a small pike.