PCCM 54 LF&NW Mail and Express Part 3 Conclusion

This turns out to be my first test of a mail and express train running from Manhattan Transfer to Zenith. I learned quite a bit from it. With the train made up, I added the loco, CB&Q E7 9916A.

As the train pulls out of Manhattan Transfer, I'll identify some of the cars in it. Below is a Walthers ex-Train Miniature X29 that they issued as a set of three painted for Railway Express about 2000.

Below is an Athearn RTR car that used the bluebox tooling, painted as a Texas and Pacific mail storage car.

Below is a Walthers express reefer that came with grabs that had to be user installed. I added these.

In the 1990s, Roundhouse issued a number of baggage-express schemes on its old boxcar tooling. Here's a CB&Q from the World War II period.

Here's an Athearn SE Rock Island car that came in a set of three with variations in the paint on each car.

A Walthers PRR B60 in the 1960s scheme.

Another Roundhouse car. This scheme was done as an Illinois Central Technical Society special run.

An Atlas Burlington heavyweight coach. I ran this one without the tweaks I normally do, and it showed -- the Accumate couplers need replacement with Kadees, and truck screw play needs to be tuned.

The train moves onto the drawbridge over the aisle between West Egg and Bay City.

Here it is running through Woollett.

Leaving Tunnel 1:

At Zenith:

CB&Q 9916A uncouples from the train and will turn on the reverse loop for the return to Manhattan Transfer.

This was the first real run over the layout for most of the cars in the train, and the first run for the Bachmann E7 with a train. Sound equipped, it screamed in Run 8 with 13 cars on a 1.5% grade, not bad. However, all sound equipped locos require very clean track, and the loco had some problems with this. It's probably better to run two units on most trains to avoid current problems with dirty spots.

PCCM 54 LF&NW Mail and Express Part 2

Building the train is a major project. It took me about an hour. Working a switchlist isn't for everyone. I had a few friends over some years ago who considered themselves "serious" model railroaders, but none of them had the focus or patience to run a switchlist with more than a few moves. It was an educational event for all of us. Those guys never came back!

I keep learning new things as I feel my way through some of the more specialized operating features on the layout. One big thing is that the Bachmann S-2 that I used to set out the RPO and coach was too light to pull the long station tracks and switch out the baggage-express cars. An Atlas FM H16-44 did the job, although its early factory decoder was noisy.

This is a PRR box-express car that I kitbashed from two Athearn cars.

Somehow without meaning to, and without knowing what I did, I selected the black-and-white option on my camera. Now I'll have to look up how to fix this. But the photos are interesting.

I'll finish up in my next post.

PCCM 54 LF&NW Mail and Express Part 1

I was interested in mail and express operations from the time I started seriously railfanning about age 13, at the time of the Erie Lackawanna merger. My family lived in Chatham, NJ at the time, on the DL&W passenger main through northern New Jersey and there was a lot of mail and express traffic. Later, we moved to the Washington, DC area, and there was a lot of this traffic still in the mid-1960s on all the roads that ran into Washington.

One of my fun moments from those days was when the Seaboard Air Line bought SDP35s to power its mail trains, and these locos ran through to Washington. I was able to ride in a coach right behind one on such a train down to Petersburg, VA and got to see the square end of the long hood through the front door of the coach on the whole ride.

I designed my layout to run mail and express trains, but it's only since I began converting to DCC that I've gotten a level of flexibility that lets me begin to exploit the operational possibilities it gives me in integrating the layout itself, JMRI Operations, and DCC to get full use out of it.

This post will begin with a review of what I want to accomplish with one mail and express train. The Manhattan Transfer stub end station is set up in part for mail and express. The passenger platforms can all load mail and express.

The baggage wagons are from Bar Mills. The platform mule is from Funaro & Camarlengo. I want to locate baggage and mail sacks to load in the baggage wagons. If anyone knows where I can get some, I'll be happy to know about it!

Here's another platform mule:

The redcap figure is from an old Preiser set that was available through AHM. These were unpainted. I painted this guy to match the redcap outfit that Cary Grant wore when Eva Marie Saint sneaked him off the 20th Century Limited at La Salle Street in North By Northwest.

I have a long way to go to match George Sellios's platform and station detail, but this is what I'm working toward -- I found these on the web.

You can see a certain amount of Sellios influence here. The Railway Express building also loads express reefers and baggage/express cars:

Here is the JMRI switchlist for the mail and express train I'm going to run for this session.

This will be a Burlington train. I just now discovered that an E7 will just barely fit on an Atlas turntable:

This means that passenger trains with a single E unit can turn their loco in Manhattan Transfer.

Not shown on the switchlist are the regular Burlington stainless steel RPO and heavyweight coach. The RPO is Walthers Mainline, the coach is Atlas.

To be continued.

The MZNZN Transfer

My layout has two main yards, Zenith and Manhattan Transfer. There are locals that run out of both yards, but up to now, I'd never set up transfers to shuttle cars between the two. This limited variety, because I was getting tired of seeing the same cars in the same places, shuttling back and forth to the same industries. In fact, the project of setting up transfers was simply something I'd procrastinated. But it was actually a quick job to set up a transfer run in JMRI Operations.

MZNZN is the name I gave this job. It's named according to UP standards. "M" is a manifest. "ZN", Zenith, is the origin point, and "ZN" is also the end point. Crews and fans will inevitably call it the zinzin.

This is actually a turn to Manhattan Transfer, the other big yard. The job picks up cars on Track 1 in Zenith, runs to Manhattan Transfer, yards those cars, and picks up others to bring back to Zenith.

Here's the switchlist that resulted (click on the image for a larger view). Among the things JMRI does is give preference to cars that have built up the least number of moves in past sessions.

The cars that ran in this switchlist weren't necessarily my newest, but they were the ones that had been added to the JMRI data base most recently.

Two units are assigned to the job, because it starts in Zenith. Two units are about the minimum that can handle a train out of there, because the line to the west is on a curving 2% grade, and within the yard, there are long cuts that need to be switched.

The power is two Canadian National units on a shakedown after decoder installation. 2900 is CN's only Train Master, an Atlas model. 1701 is a Bachmann GP9 pretending to be a GP7. The discrepancies are invisible at normal viewing distance.

The Buffalo & Susquehanna hopper is an Accurail. It's from a pre-World War I prototype, but I like the era, and I don't let print hobby mag editors tell me what I can and can't do. I got the Borden's milk car recently because I saw it running on a Franklin & South Manchester video, and I liked how George Sellios runs it in ordinary freights.

As I said in my last post, I pulled the Athearn metal DT&I boxcar out of the purgatory box a couple weeks ago, so JMRI grabbed it for this run right away. MTTX 98104 is a swap met find that I added an Adair Shops steel load to.

The Western Pacific box isn't on the switchlist, but I added it because it has a track cleaning slider. The CN transfer caboose is from True Line Trains.

MZNZN climbs out of Zenith and over the yard tracks.

The power passes Rattlesnake Rocks.

This is a first try at a shot across the room of the train climbing to East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel. I need to finish up the scenery here.

Here it's crossing the aisle between Bay City and West Egg over a drawbridge.

And entering Manhattan Transfer:

Another shot of the 1953-vintage Athearn metal DT&I box, one of my new favorites:

A single unit is enough to do the switching in Manhattan transfer, which is level with shorter yard tracks. PC 5628 is at work here.

ACFX 60003 is an old model but a recent addition to the JMRI data base. It's an Ambroid kit that I built in my college dorm room about 50 years ago. Over that time, the decals and varnish had yellowed, and the trucks had disintegrated. I spruced it up, added new trucks, and faded the paint with thinned gray from an airbrush to finesse the yellow. Another purgatory box rehab takes to the rails!

NP 20101 was a puzzle. It wasn't on Station Track 5 where JMRI said I would find it. Luckily, I though I'd seen it recently, and it turned out to be on the Jaques Spur, so I was able to fix things. Stuff happens.

I decided to send the WP box with the track cleaner back for another pass.

PC 5628 pulls the fully assembled train for the return run out of the way to release the CN power for the trip back to Zenith.