Erie-Lackawanna

The Erie-Lackawanna was my second railroad. My first was the PRR; I was born in Philadelphia, and a very early memory is of riding from Johnstown back to Philadelphia on a PRR train. Later, we moved to a central New Jersey town along the Amboy Secondary. But in 1957, we moved to Chatham, on the then-Lackawanna Morris & Essex Division. Our house was about two blocks from the tracks, and I could hear the Owl coming down the hill from Summit at night, dynamics whining.

My family has Lackawanna and Erie connections that go even farther back. The Bruce side was in Newark for two generations starting about 1900; my paternal grandmother was born in Campgaw on the then-Erie subsidiary NYS&W. My uncle began his working career as a steam fireman on the Lackawanna; he eventually rose to become CEO of Illinois Central; before that, he worked for Mr Perlman on Western Pacific.

By the time I was taking Latin in the 8th grade, the classroom windows overlooked the Chatham Lackawanna station. By then, it was the E-L, but the westbound Phoebe Snow went by at about 10:30, and if I turned around in my seat, I got a great view out the window. The problem was that this irked Mrs Wirsz, the Latin teacher. Finally, when the time came around and you could hear the diesels approaching, she would say, "All right, class, we're going to take a short break while John turns around to watch the train." I did OK in Latin, still speak it in church.

Not long ago, I ordered Revelation Video's Before The Hyphen, a DVD with archival footage of Erie, Lackawanna, and early E-L trains. This had footage of both the Lackawanna (Owl) and Erie (Atlantic and Pacific Limited) mail-express trains, which lasted through the mid-1960s and often had PA-1s, although usually mixed with Es. I'm still working out how I'm going to run a mail and express train on my layout, and this got me to pull a Proto 2000 E-L PA out of the display case and install DCC:

As you can see, I also have some Northwest Short Line brass Erie Stillwell coaches to go with it. The P2K is a very easy DCC conversion, so the next time I order decoders, I'll probably put one in its mate and run an A-A set. It'd be great, though, if one day someone would come out with an E-L E8. Meanwhile, I need to dig out some of my E-L head end cars.

There's a very good rundown of E-L passenger service here. During my time in 8th grade Latin, the Phoebe often had three units, one of which would be a PA, usually trailing. By then, the E-L was turning it into a mail-express train as well.

A few more E-L models that have gone through decoder installs:

A 1990s Walthers caboose kit I pulled off the back burner after seeing the new video:

More Vintage!

John R's post on (in part) bringing older models to life has made me up the priority on another post on the same thing here. He mentioned Varney cars. By the early 1960s, these were hard to find. I was being inspired in my early teens by the first published photos of Allen McClelland's V&O, and he used a lot of Varney hoppers, the prototypes of which were still very common. But in the early 60s, models of any such common cars were hard to find and, like Ulrich, expensive. McClelland had probably found his years earlier.

I finally found some second-hand Varneys at the old Troxel Brothers Models on Western Avenue in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. These were pretty dodgy. Varney was known in later years for cheap plastic that would warp (giving any plastic models, good or not, a bad rep in the 1950s). I found this out first hand. Here's one that warped, but I made lemonade out of lemons and did it as a swaybacked car using Herald King decals:

Here's another Varney with a different problem. I relettered it with dry transfers:

But notice the swelling and cracking at the center of the car, something that happened after I painted it in the 1970s. This was caused when the (cheap!) zinc alloy weight swelled and cracked:

The Germans call this Zinkpest, a very good word. I can probably salvage this car by removing the weight, crimping the swelled plastic back in place, and touching things up with paint and plastic cement. But I notice I did this before I began to understand the problems with pre-1960 or so coupler pockets. The coupler pockets here will need surgical replacement, too. No shortcuts with vintage stuff, I'm afraid!

Here's the problem with early coupler pockets. Apparently it was the introduction of the "NMRA" X2F horn-hook coupler that resulted in the coupler pocket dimension we now take for granted and first seems to have appeared on Athearn plastic cars in the late 1950s.

This Ulrich GS gon is a great model, outstanding for its day (but expensive) and certainly very good layout-quality even for now.

But as it came from the swap, it had only one coupler, an old Kadee #4. The chassis will begin to tell the story:

The old standard coupler pocket had a thin pivot post, onto which a coupler with a long slot in the shank would be installed. The slot had a spring that fit behind the center post -- the old Kadee 4s had an additional complication, in that they had a little keeper rod that went inside the spring to limit the travel of the shank. Once this was assembled, you then attached the coupler pocket cover over the center post and peened the top of the post to make it mushroom out and hold the cover on. Here's the end of the car where the old coupler fell out, which continues the story:

I believe that old Kadees, some dummies, the old Roundhouse-Devore couplers, and probably others worked this way. It was sort of a pre-standard, and it was awful, in that it was overcomplicated and fussy to assemble, and at best, it wasn't adjustable or maintainable.

Plus not everyone wanted to actually peen over the center post. I think that's what happened to this car:

The original owner installed Kadee 4s, which means it must have been post-1960 or so, but he didn't want to peen over the center post, so he just used model airplane glue to hold the coupler pocket cover on. The evidence speaks for itself. 55 years later I'm gong to have to Dremel all this off to clear out an area to install Kadee 158s with the plastic coupler box, attached with 2-56 screws. Let's hope some guy who gets this down the road in 2070 or so appreciates what I've done.

There are no shortcuts with vintage stuff! It took me a while to understand this when it was new.

Vintage

I probably have an attitude to the hobby that's a little like the guys who collect tinplate -- many of them like to relive the excitement of toy trains that they had when they were kids, either running them themselves or just wishing they had them then. I'm not really into tinplate, but when I started to read MR and the other hobby magazines when I was about 10 years old, I found what was in the stories and ads delightful, and I still like to recapture that delight.

However, I have a feeling that none of that stuff ran very well in the 1940s and 50s. The motors weren't good, the gears were plastic and wore out quickly (if they worked at all), the couplers weren't much good, the wheels and trucks were bad, and so forth. So what I like to do is track down some of the older models from the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s and try to bring them up to date for contemporary use.

The big things that have to be redone are trucks, couplers, wheels, and weight, as well as touchup of paint and replacement of parts where needed. Here's an example of an Ulrich N&W hopper from the 1950s that I now run with stuff 60 years newer:

It's a perfectly acceptable layout model. Here's another Ulrich hopper that's in the pipeline:

For starters, it needs contemporary trucks, wheels, and couplers. But as on the N&W hopper above, couplers are actually a big issue. I had to hack away at the 1950s coupler pockets with a Dremel on the N&W to carve out an area where I could install new Kadee 158s. The guy who had the D&H car here apparently did the same with a milling machine, but he stopped short:

He had the right idea, which will make things much easier for me, but it looks like, at least on the left, he tried to attach a coupler pocket with epoxy, which probably lasted a few hours at best. Why'd he go to all the trouble of milling and then not just drill #50 and tap 2-56? Who knows?

I probably held off on this one for a long time because the factory paint here is wrong -- the prototype D&H cars were black. But now I think out of respect for what it is, I'll just go ahead and finish it in red, new trucks, Kadee 158s (mounted with screws drilled and tapped), probably heavy weathering to take attention away from the color.

Another 1950s manufacturer was Central Valley. I get the impression that these kits were beyond a lot of modelers at the time; almost all that I find at swap meets aren't finished. For instance:

I'll need to dig up the grabs from another 1950s kit and finish this one. Here's another Central Valley I pulled out of the backlog not long ago:

Typical deal, one truck missing, dummy couplers, generally beat up. Here's the underframe:

You can see where the guy discovered, as I did long ago, that the Central Valley original dress-snap truck attachment was a bad idea. That was apparently back when dummy couplers were still an option! I found a set of original Central Valley sideframes, added new Kadee wheels, got rid of the dummy couplers, and at least cleaned up the chassis:

Still a way to go, but with Kadees and some paint touchup, it'll actually belong on a layout.

What's a little sad is that most of the vintage cars I find at swaps probably never gave their earlier owners any satisfaction. With work, though, they can be as delightful now as they could have been then. Maybe more to me -- gives me a sense of maybe fixing things I could have done better a long time ago.

Tweaks

I don't obsess over detail, but I usually make changes to any new model to suit my own preferences. One of the biggest is operational reliability. Couplers are a big issue: the plastic Kadee clones never work as well as the real metal ones (the Walthers metal ProtoMax are just as good, though), and McHenrys break almost immediately after you put them on a layout.

I tend to tolerate the Bachmann plastlic ones a little more, both because they're not quite as bad as Accumates and McHenrys, and because Bachmann's coupler mounts make them a pain to replace. MB Klein had a sale on Bachmann last month that went even beyond their normal disocunted price, and I picked up a NYC RS-3:

I replaced the stock decoder, also for operational improvement, but as long as I had the shell off, I decided to bite the bullet and Dremel off the cast coupler mount:

Then I drilled out with a 50 drill and tapped for a 2-56 screw to install Kadee boxes and couplers:

Since I was on a roll, I went ahead and did the same with a WM unit:

I lived with my family in Maryland for several years, but I was in college out of state for most of that time and never got a good enough chance to railfan the WM. As Bill Schaumburg once put it, modeling gives you a chance to relive the memories you never had!

I got a couple of NYC boxcars with the same order. I like the new Walthers Mainline boxcars more and more. Here's a Pacemaker car:

However, the factory paint left the underframe in light gray. Photos of even new cars show the underframe black, so I masked off the sides and hit the underframe with an airbrush. I also painted the truck sideframes and wheel faces black.

This Accurail car was all jade green out of the box, but as far as I can tell, NYC jade green cars with the large emblem had black ends and roof, so I fixed this at the same time as the Pacemaker car:

Note the replacement Kadee 158s. It also got Kadee wheels. Eventually I'll also add A Line stirrups to the Accurail car.

Retro

When I was in my teens, I scratchbuilt a lot of HO cars with cardboard and balsa, more or less along the lines of the MR Dollar Car series in the 1950s. Very few have survived -- they were too flimsy for serious operation on any kind of layout, and since they were brush painted with really horrible Walthers decals, they didn't deserve to. One of my late efforts, apparently done on a college vacation, was this PFE reefer, built following an article by John W Ascher in the April 1967 MR:

This is pretty beat-up and too flimsy to run, so it sits in a display case. However, in the early 1980s, I was looking back fondly on some of those early total scratchbuilding efforts. At the time, I had access to a table saw and found some scrap 2x4s at a construction site. The wheels started turning, and I began to mass-produce wood hopper car bodies. I finished something like eight or a dozen of these, and not long ago I ran across a stash of unfinished versions from this project.

My idea at the time was to build a unit train of PRR H39 hoppers like those I'd seen in the 1960s on the Northeast Corridor. Here is one of the finished ones I found, long packed away:

There were some good ideas there, but there were also some flaws in my thinking. The biggest one was that I could use dummy couplers, since it was a unit train. Nope -- more recently, companies like Walthers have had the same bad idea on coal gons and such. Dummy couplers are too fussy to mess with, even on a unit train. So I had to back off and replace them with Kadee 158s.

The other thing I found was that plastic and brass cars are engineered so they basically run when you put them on the track. With dimensional tolerances much greater in this project, I eventually discovered that things would happen like wheels scraping on the hopper bottoms. Here's where I had to carve out recesses so the car would actually run:

The partially finished bodies I found will give an idea of what I did. I started with a piece of scrap 2x4 and basically rough-cut away everything that didn't look like a PRR H39:

I think this one must have been a reject from the production line, since I can see a big discrepancy, but you get the idea. I would set up the saw for each set of cuts and run a whole bunch of wood blocks through, so this was true mass production.

Then I would finish the shapes of the hopper bottoms with a sanding disk in a Dremel, smooth out the sides, apply several coats of sanding sealer, and mark out the ribs. I also drilled holes in the top to take low-temperature alloy to bring the car to NMRA weight.

The center sill was brass square tubing, also filled with low-temp alloy. The bolsters were standard Northeastern wood, that you could still get at the hobby shop then:

Here you can see the process a little farther along, with wood shapes added for the ribs:

Although I did finish eight or a dozen of these, it looks like I stopped before I finished all of them. I'm not sure if you can even get the same wood shapes these days, but now that I look these over, I could probably finish them with styrene shapes. Hmm.

I should probably dig out some of the finished ones, for that matter, and put them into operation. The finished one here, with NMRA weight built in and upgraded with Kadees, is now in my operating fleet.

Gulash-izing My Scenery

I keep rewatching my whole Emery Gulash DVD collection. (I wore out my VHS Penn Central set, then wore out my first DVD Penn Cemtral set -- luckily, Green Frog ran a sale on the remastered PCs a few years ago.) One of the things that always inspires me is the foreground details he includes in his shots.

One frequent foreground anchor he uses is mounds of ballast and dirt. These are easy and inexpensive to include on layout scenery. Here's an example of some I recently spruced up, with other urban details:

The burned-out car is a cheapo Bachmann that's been worked over with a Dremel and some paint. I got the idea from Peter Feigenbaum.

He also often has shots of his railfan buddies, and he likes photos of railroad trucks and vans:

I always liked the shots he took of the Maumee River swing bridge in Toledo, especially the collection of relay cases, battery boxes, and so forth on one bank. Here's my version:

Here's a shot of the Maumee River relay cases I found on the web:

Here's a shot not directly inspired by Emery, but it shows where I'm "dirting in" the Bollinger Edgerly B&M-New Haven tower kit at Manhattan Transfer:

The Detroit Michigan Central Station

Along with my fellow bloggers John R and Ralph V, I'm a big fan of Emery Gulash DVDs, most of which are available from Green Frog, though he's done some for other producers. One of his very common locations was the Detroit Michigan Central station between the years 1955 to 1980 or so. I've never been to Detroit, almost never to Michigan, but it's worth pointing out that about 1960, Detroit was the fourth-largest city in the US. The Michigan Central station, completed in 1914, was in many ways comparable to New York's two great stations, with electrified operation and reached by underwater tunnels. Architecturally, it was in the same beaux-arts style. I didn't pay any attention to it until I began to watch Gulash DVDs.

Here's a postcard view from the front, probably in the 1940s:

Researching the station, I discovered that the skyscraper section was never finished on the inside, with original plans for a hotel or office space never completed. The space was eventually used for railroad offices, but some floors were never occupied. The building is currently being restored by a developer, but it's likely it won't ever be fully occupied at any time.

Here's an overall view from the track side, showing the low Bush train sheds:

Lincoln Bush was an engineer who pioneered the use of reinforced concrete in railroad structures. As Chief Engineer of the Lackawanna, he developed a concrete train shed that had a trough over the tracks that would allow smoke from locomotives to pass out of the shed. The design was used for Lackawanna stations in Hoboken, Scranton, and Buffalo, as well as for the Jersey Central terminal in Jersey City, Chicago Union Station, and the Detroit Michigan Central station as shown here. There are probably others.

Here's a cropped enlargement from the postcard view above:

Here is a cross section drawing of a Bush train shed that I found on the web:

The station has other good focal points. Just east of the station is the 15th St Tower. This view from a postcard shows the tower behind one of the original electric locos that operated through the Detroit River Tunnels, which opened in connection with the new station:

There are some good shots in Gulash DVDs of trackage in the 15th St area. Here is part of a Sanborn map showing the viaduct from which Gulash sometimes shot:

East of the tower and viaduct was the entry to the Detroit River Tunnels. Before the tunnels were completed, the main line went further downtown to a station on the riverfront. Trackage was diverted to go around the tunnel portals, but over the years, it was gradually removed. The trackage to the left in the postcard view below seems to have lasted into the 1960s, and at least one Gulash shot shows trackage on the east side being removed from the area around the 15th St tower.

Here is a contemporary view of the Detroit River Tunnel portals. Pretty much all other trackage is now gone.