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.