They Don't Go "Choo-choo" Anymore!

   Most parents today have never even seen a steam locomotive during their lifetime, so I'm not sure why, when they are speaking to their young children, they insist on refering to trains as "Choo-choos", since they are being pulled by diesel-electric locomotives, which hum and rumble!

   Anyhow, just to alert regular readers, this blog entry is not going to have much to do with bicycles. You should keep in mind that, when I dismantled my large third-floor model railroad back in 2010, I made a nice sum of money selling off locomotives, railcars and structures, which allowed me to upgrade my bicycle collection and set some funds aside for buying parts for future bicycle projects.

   A secondary inspiration for this blog entry was a recent conversation among some friends, when I was introduced to someone as "Glen, the bike guy". My buddy Matt immediately piped in, "...but he has plenty of other interests!", which is something I always emphasize when around our crowd of predominantly teachers and/or cyclists.
   You can see photos and info on my old layout HERE, but it has been ten years since I started to build my new Lehigh-Lackawanna layout, which was planned to be more manageable in size and more focused in its geography and detail. I wrote previously about the basic design of the new layout and its early construction, but I eventually found the simple oval was a bit boring to operate, and because my shop space is now a much more inviting space to set up the indoor trainers, I was able to reclaim the wall space around the room to expand the layout.

   I learned a couple of simple lessons from my previous model railroad construction experience, most importantly to avoid any duck-unders, build everything at a comfortable height (for working on the layout and for viewing) and avoid including a confusing spaghetti of track. However, an interesting twist came early on in the process, when a friend was moving and needed a new home for a large piece of furniture, which happened to be the dispatcher's desk from the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western  (later merged into the Erie Lackawanna, one of the railroads I model) station in East Stroudsburg, PA!

   The desk accommodated a seated person and drawers on each side, so the tabletop was a rather spacious 4 x 5 feet. The idea of including it in the layout room came to me very quickly. I had to go through an interesting process of building temporary legs wide enough for me to be able to slide the desk underneath one end of the layout oval. After very careful measurements, I then cut down the existing legs to a proper height on which to rest the oval layout on the tabletop.

   I added facia boards to the sides of the oval section and a dark blue drape to hide the support legs:

  

   As you can see, this photo was taken before the center viewblock/divider was installed between the Bethlehem and P&L Junction sides of the oval. I mention this to not only give context to the construction process, but to also help explain why this article is being written ten years after I started. Finding a usable background image, one with decent resolution that I could fairly easily edit to represent mid-1970s Bethlehem took over a year alone!

   I certainly didn't work on the layout every day, and there were some extended dormant periods - my wife and I having three of our four parents pass in the span of 2½ years made it hard for a while to scrape up enthusiam - but there is a LOT of work involved, particularly when you have a side gig of building/repairing bicycles. I was also still homeschooling both of my boys back when I first started construction of the model railroad!

   I strangely enjoy carpentry and assembling the benchwork for a layout, even with fairly simple tools (I don't have a table saw or band saw). I am definitely not an electrician and had to learn a lot, particularly when it came to the modern world of DCC installation inside model locomotives (look it up, as it's too complicated to explain here). I enjoyed building many structures on the railroad, but the bridges are a bit of a headache, particularly the Hill To Hill span in Bethlehem, which, because there are no existing models that replicate its design, has to be "scratch-built" or "kitbashed".

   Because I was using photo backdrops, instead of painting my own background landscapes, the painting with this layout involved a lot less of the artistic-type brushstrokes, and sometimes even a spray can was the way to go. I also summoned up a bit of tailoring skills to put together the drapery that neatly hides the supporting legs and materials I store beneath the benchwork.

   The planning of the layout with railroad design software and the arrangement and editing of images for the background panels took countless hours at the computer. After all of this, the actual laying of track and connecting the feeder wires to a power source seems rather simple.

   As the oval section of the layout now stands, the P&L Junction side just needs more grass and trees installed where I have the landscaping supplies temporarily stored in the first photo, taken from the room's entryway. Bethlehem is about 80% complete - that darn Hill To Hill Bridge is holding me back! 

   The original idea was to have some sort of fold-up railroad yard coming off from Bethlehem, but the plan evolved to leave the yard in place as an area in which to assemble trains and send them into the scenes on the oval. I then decided it would be fun to add some scenery to the yard area to represent Sayre, PA, which was the operational center of the Lehigh Valley Railroad. I included the passenger station on the backdrop, and I am assembling a model of the employee walkbridge that once spanned the engine terminal and yard tracks.

   No, that building isn't floating in the background - if you look closely, there is a warehouse in front of it, which is unfortunately a greyish blue, not too far off of the same shade of sky I've used to paint the backdrop panel. I'm thinking of tucking some bits of trees around the warehouse roof to better visually separate it from the sky.

   Behind the Sayre backdrop there is a single hidden track which decends a few inches, runs below Sayre Yard and emerges at an interlocking tower leading to the West Side of Binghamton, NY.

   This area, serviced by the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad, is "proto-freelanced", meaning it is based on the real-life location, but I've made up the track arrangement and some of the industries. On his New York, Susquehanna and Western layout, my friend Steve had included a spur that is on a slight rise with a switchback to serve some factories. I really liked this feature, so I've replicated his design here.

   Tioga Mills actually sat on the Lehigh Valley Railroad in Waverly, NY, just across the state line from Sayre, and it didn't look a whole lot like my structure. There is an enclosed area for unloading grain at the silos, as well as a covered plaform for loading finished flour.

   Parlor City Paper Box Company does exist in real life, but it is located in downtown Binghamton, and it is only served by trucks. Binghamton was nicknamed "The Parlor City" because of the abundance of stately Victorian homes built here during the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

   Wainwright Plastics is an homage to an all-time favorite movie, "It's a Wonderful Life". In a memorable scene George Bailey is sharing a telephone with his future wife, Mary, when his friend (and her current boyfriend) Sam calls her. George suggests that Sam's father should move the new Wainwright factory into the old tool and machinery works building in Bedford Falls. References were made that the fictional town was located in upstate New York.

   The West Side also contains a small interchange yard and connecting track with the Delaware and Hudson Railway.

   I have visited Binghamton a couple of times in the recent past, and there are a few distinctive features within the city's railroad corridor that I wanted to include. Rounding the corner, there is a girder bridge carrying the railroad over Route 11, then the main reason I wanted to add this branch of the layout, the dramatic twin railroad bridges over the Chanango River. The Erie bridge will be on the photo backdrop, but I will model the double-track Lackawanna girder bridge.

   Finally, trains will enter downtown Binghamton and pass the iconic North Depot Street warehouses,  pass under the Chanango Street Viaduct (yet to be built) and reach the DL&W Passenger Station. There had been a three-dimensional model of the station produced years ago, but I haven't found anything available, and it is way too complex to scratchbuild. As a result, I had to flip the track arrangement, so that the rails run on the south side of the station, instead of the north.

   If you are interested, when I have the layout more complete, I will take more detailed photos of layout and post them on the Lehigh Valley Railroad Modelers website, which I help maintain for the Anthracite Railroads Historical Society. I'll let you know when that time comes.

Back to more cycling-related topics next time!