Boston & Maine Eastern Route Progress

[jbvb]

I started out using some old tinned buss wire, but whatever they'd used had a higher melting point than my 60/40 solder. I switched to 24 GA solid copper for the rest of the cross-wire but the lousy solder gave me intermittent open circuits till I replaced it years later.





I did get all the diodes pointing the right way, but I found and fixed three bad joints testing with the "diode check" function of my DVM.
Next morning, before it got too hot up there, I started running feeders. Once those switches worked, only six inches of track was needed for the Brass Spike ceremony.

[jbvb]

20-Jul-10: Someone hid a moron magnet in my car? The night before on the way home someone tried to replay my summer 2009 accident by coming out of a side street (stop sign) without looking. I had a bad feeling and slowed down and was able to dodge him. That was good luck, as my wife was sitting where the last guy center-punched me. Also luckily, the guy coming the other way stopped short as I crossed his lane to the shoulder. That day I biked 8 mi. to the train station: smaller, more agile target.

In non-photogenic model RR news, I worked off the tension by wiring up the diode matrix. Two sets of points were sticky from ballast but *tried* to throw.  Alas, one coil wasn't getting juice, so the DVM accompanied me under the layout, the next evening.

21-Jul-10: With apologies to Bret Harte:

What was it that the engines said
Pilots still a ways from touching...



I fixed a couple of bad connections, cleaned out more ballast and adjusted one machine. Then everything worked, but alas, not enough oomph from some buttons. (turned out to be high-resistance joints solder and terminal strip connections).

29-Jul-10: How to make trackwork photogenic? Run a train past it? At any rate, I had the switches on the siding at Newburyport West about half done. You can see the first "fascia knob" control in the lower left (except I hadn't chosen a knob style yet). I had to build more fascia before installing controls for the new switches.  Also, the boxcar for testing track has wheels .088" wide.  They look better end-on and I build my track to suit them but I doubt I'll ever convert my whole fleet.



I completed the main line on July 23, and I spent time running trains thereafter. I was happy with how several design decisions came out:

Grades: The ruling grade is around 1.2%, which happened to be westbound through staging. It turned out that my 8-coupled steam can just manage the longest freight that fits in staging, 28 or 29 cars.

Mainline configuration: The main is mostly double track, with single track segments through Bexley Arch (stand-in for Salem Tunnel) and across the Merrimac River drawbridge. I can run two passenger trains in opposite directions without a lot of stress. It remains to be seen how well I've emulated the web of running tracks and leads the B&M used to let switchers work while the commuters streamed past.

DC + DCC: What I use depends on what I want to run. I don't think I'll be mixing them much until things are complete enough for guest operators. DCC works best if I'm running two trains myself. DC lets me bring out the exotic (to me) equipment that hasn't gone to a Hub show in years.

As might be expected, the track needed more shaking down for long freights. So did the cars; the freight shown is mostly older equipment that I pulled out of module service as I completed my 'Green Dot' exhibition fleet about 10 years ago. Several cars need a trip to the workbench, once I get the taps and dies put away. Wiring and panels have been (knock wood) fine, except that I need to spend another hour with the diode matrix one of these evenings. I had some work ahead of me before I could leave a train orbiting and railfan it, but it sure felt good to take a break from work and run something for a lap or two.  I hoped to finish some scenery that Fall, but that wasn't to be.

[jbvb]

9-Aug-10: I had 8 turnouts ready for mechanisms, which in turn were waiting for me to build the fascia/control panel. But the previous evening I was drawing the panel to scale, I had a flash of inspiration about my track plan for Newburyport's City Railroad spur. This two-mile spur ran down to the waterfront and served various industries. It and the Pond St. freight house spur were originally built by a B&M venture into the Eastern's territory around 1849, when the fact that neither competitor was more than 70 miles long didn't prevent them from waging a bitter 30-year railroad war. Here's some ace Paint work to illustrate:



I had planned on modeling the waterfront runaround, in part because it made the area more self-contained. But I also wanted a fairly heavy passenger service. I'd been worrying about how the daily local could clear both mains at Newburyport if it had more than 5 cars (even the prototype's siding was a little short to reliably hold the local when it worked through to Portsmouth). But then I got thinking about the runaround beside the Rt. 1 overpass (current site of the commuter layover yard). I never saw the City RR in service, and I only saw that siding used a couple of times in years of watching B-21 switch town. I realized that earlier, when the City RR was active (including perishables to Swift), those two tracks made a usable replacement for the yard that used to be between Low St. and MP 37.

Next I measured exactly how I built the siding along the main and re-drew the City RR. I hoped for 7 car lengths, but got 6, which works OK for a reasonably sized local.

22-Aug-10: I had got the fascia/control panel for Newburyport West installed, decorated and wired. I spent most of that day installing a couple of switch mechanisms, but as dinner time approached I set up the camera and ran the first train into the new block:



The westbound local running wrong main (because the crossover wasn't finished) to switch Georgetown Sand & Gavel.  B&M 1170 is a stock P2K S-1. The pushrod switch knobs are brass acorn nuts drilled out 1/16" and soldered to the brass rods. Between the panel and the roadbed you can see several different approaches to stabilizing the rod under compression.

[jbvb]

22-Aug-10:  Another view, looking west along the tracks from more or less the roof of the future bakery.  It was getting near time to buy masonite and install the backdrop in this area. There were a number of roads to get sorted out before I could do the next big chunk of fascia. And of course, six more switch mechanisms here and the westbound main to lay in West Lynn...

15-Sep-10: No photogenic progress to show, which is not to say I hadn't progressed. There was more backdrop, but just blue hardboard. I was up to 55 turnouts and all but one B&M block in service. I only had about 10 feet of B&M track to lay before I ran out of benchwork. And I spent a couple of evenings running trains and tuning track and cars. At the end of that I blew my 16V power supply fuse, so I was working on the right way to power my mix of 48v and 24v single-coil turnout solenoids. I started with 2A at 12VDC. And I drew a wiring diagram this time. My color coding was good enough that I was able to figure it out, but it took a while to remember I'd used a common ground for the 28V and 16V supplies 12 years ago.

19-Sep-10: Another weekend of non-photogenic wiring and tuning track and equipment. However, it ran much nicer. I asked my daughter to take pictures of how I "scribed" a piece of backdrop to get it to fit:



The mismatch is present because the ceiling is straight and the baseboard under River Works isn't quite level. I set the compass to the size of the gap.



I 'scribe' along with the compass point following the surface I want to match. In this case, I took off the extra material with a plane. A bandsaw, saber saw or jigsaw would be better if more material needs to come off, such as when coving a backdrop corner against a sloping ceiling.  I learned the technique and the name from Wooden Boat magazine. Carpenters may call it something else.

[jbvb]

26-Sep-10: Progress since my last report was limited to backdrop and roadbed:



This is the coved corner between Newburyport West and Newburyport. I started with a cardboard template and adjusted both that and the final hardboard with the "scribing" technique from my prior post. The backdrop's radius is about 18".



That night I built the last bit of roadbed that goes on the currently existing benchwork: The spur and foundation for the CBS/Hytron (later Owens-Illinois) plant (left of the main).

[jbvb]

11-Oct-10:  I was getting up early the next day to catch the Acela to DC, but I did get some modeling in:



The Owens-Illinois spur (stone ballast, because it was built during or after WWII) and its turnout were in service.



Fascia-mount turnout controls work well for local spurs, but you do have to get the fascia into place first. It's masonite, and I also used that as substrate for the roads.  I was waiting on both another bundle of Code 83 and some Humpyard Purveyance turnout levers to continue trackwork.

[jbvb]

13-Oct-10: I'd gotten a lot done for a handlaying, rivet-counting lone-wolf in the past few years. Encouragement from RR-Line people
helped. Business and vacation travel prevented much more progress in October, but I hoped to get more done in early November. Late November will be cleanup, organization and polishing, as I invited locals to drop in before or after the Tour De Chooch (North of Boston layout tour Thanksgiving weekend, 2010 Tour Flyer at http://www.trainweb.org/cmrc/TdeC2010.pdf, see trourdechooch.org for current).

28-Oct-10: Since I returned from my K&WV Ry. vacation (West Yorkshire, UK), I'd only gotten a little modeling done: tracklaying on the last of the westbound main past River Works, but I tried to make it photogenic:



When handlaying a crossover or anything else where turnouts are close together, particularly when points aren't all facing the same way, there's a choice: If you build each turnout independently, you get extra rail joints and potential difficulty getting everything into smooth alignment. If you minimize rail joints, alignment is smooth but several individual rails will be parts of more than one turnout. What I do is spike on alternate sides, so I can wiggle the rail out of place, file it or clean weathering off, and put it back to check. This also lets me get one turnout right before starting on a frog or point notches at the other end of the same rail.

Above, I was at the stage where I want to move the rails back and forth to adjust the location of the point of the frog relative to the stock rails installed earlier. It's just about right, so after I took the picture I spiked the rest and started on the closure rails.

7-Nov-10: Yesterday was unphotogenic track laying; all I did with the guard house was cut out the roof. This day started way too early because my wife forgot to cancel the alarm she set for Saturday. With company asleep I couldn't go tramp around in the attic, so I set to work upgrading my home FreeBSD computer. What does this have to do with model railroading? I got XTrkCAD running and made a partial track plan. Alas, I didn't save that version of the .xtc file so actually showing you the image would require pulling it out of a PDF, and I can't say if it would be readable.

I let local modelers know they could visit the Eastern Route as a 'sidebar' to the Tour de Chooch: I got 10 visitors, ran a lot of my equipment and only encountered two operating problems.  But the only picture I took was a new angle on my Rowley modules:



I like it, but I haven't ever gotten around to re-shooting with headlight and more depth-of-field.

[jbvb]

3-Dec-10: The HUB Module Group set up for the Hub (Marlborough MA) show this afternoon. Between this show, business travel next week and showing at the Museum of Our National Heritage (Lexington, MA) next weekend, I didn't get a lot of modeling time. But I did generate another image of my plan, and posting it here will save people scrolling when we move on to the next page.



Save As Bitmap from XTrkCad at 16 DPI, resized to 1600 pixels wide and saved at 50% JPEG quality with ShowFoto. I did some more surveying and spent a while adjusting locations etc. relative to the original plan. This is pretty close to what's built, except the two
peninsulas aren't begun yet. And of course I hadn't made a layout of the GE River Works (right top, between the wye and the backdrop) I was willing to commit to. I should add station and street names, and figure out how to display tunnels and overpass vs. underpass.

A note about the long mainline straights in the left end of the room: it's prototypic. The Eastern built straight across the marshes;  I can see an eastbound's headlight before it arrives at Rowley, 5 miles away.

4-Dec-10: The basic operational scheme starts out with the prototype's:

The 6 short staging tracks (top center) will begin with 1 through and 2 commuter consists in each direction.

The commuter consists will likely make more than one trip per session.

The middle track gets used for freight, most of which moved to and from Boston in 'haulers', jobs which often
made two round trips. These come on stage, work Lynn (top right) and turn in Bexley (bottom center/right). One
commuter train turns there too, but most work at the enginehouse is supplying engines for the Bexley and West
Lynn switch jobs.

A pair of daily locals operate Bexley - Newburyport (left end) - East staging, with most spurs being switched by whichever direction has them trailing point. GE has its own 44-tonner. Because Bexley freight yard has no lead, it will mostly be used for block swapping. Traffic will include two perishable customers, several team tracks and two freight houses, with high/wide loads coming out of GE's Gear Works.

During planning, I decided to extend the prototype for more interest: I plan to operate the two long staging tracks (top center/right, Saugus branch on the prototype) as a connection to the New Haven in South Boston. The EB (clockwise) State of Maine (overnight Pullman) goes on one, and the EB Maine Bullet (NYC - MEC fast freight) on the other. I tentatively plan to run 12 timetable hours per session, with 4-6 operators, so I'd need to wye at least the State of Maine between sessions.

At this point I was of test-operating one freight or another to get a feel for timing and how it will interact with the parade of passenger trains. I thought I had enough running tracks etc. to will go smoothly, but there are several options I was thinking about, depending on crew size/experience/interests.

09-Jan-11: It was more than a month without progress: business trips, modular layout setups and the season left little hobby time.
Over the holidays I mostly repaired scenery on the Rowley modules; to fit into my wife's Prius one must ride upside down, which was harder on the scenery than standing on their backboards in the truck.

I began wiring the MRC Power Station 8 (amps) booster I got at the Hub Show's White Elephant table. Alas, it turned into a reminder of why I still don't want computers between me and my trains: The old MRC booster appeared not to get along with DCC Specialties' "Power Shield" breakers - a PSX-1 decided it saw a short, even with nothing connected to the output terminals. Move it over to a location fed directly from the Prodigy Advance, it's happy. Further, MRC's instructions were written by a B- East Asian english student, and DCC Specialties' had errors over and above poor proofreading.

The monetary pain was the PSX-2 purchased for the Draw/River Works area. But it turned out to work. Adding termination to my DCC buss in that direction (the booster is at one end of a 30' segment of 12 GA) helped too. But I did eventually have to buy an oscilloscope to see what's actually going on.

I don't ever want my hobby to morph into something I need a logic analyzer for.

20-Jan-11: My Division Point B&M P-4b (postwar era) arrived:



The prototypes were too large for the Salem Tunnel, so they never ran on the Eastern Route, but things worked out a bit differently in my imagination. It fits on the Walthers 90' turntable (barely). It runs nicely too. The lights (including class lights, backup light and firebox) come on just as it starts to move.  I am a bit worried by the projecting lever at the front of the trailing truck (just ahead of the angle brace on the TT). It is as wide there as anything else on the engine, but it hasn't hit any of my Eshleman "turnout links" or the like. And unless I install DCC, it won't run on the Hub modules, where obstacles near rail level are not unheard of.

I had put the DCC wiring back together, but didn't write down where things went with it next.  Likely the DCC snubbers fixed it.

[jbvb]

8-Feb-11: Heavy snow followed by rain had me clearing roofs and chopping ice.  I was stalled on other projects, so I started scenery in the Rt. 1A overpass area (Rowley & Newbury).



The masonite on the right was to be salt marsh, after the bed of the Little River was cut out and dropped ~1/2 in. I planned to model a now-gone relic of the Eastern RR: a two-span deck bridge where granite slabs were the load-bearing beams. When the MBTA rebuilt the line in the late '90s, the engineers couldn't prove it would bear the load (even though it had for 100+ years) and they replaced it with concrete.

BTW, that bit of rail was given to my father by a friend in the diplomatic service; it's from the Hejaz Railway (as blown up in various books and movies by Lawrence of Arabia).

16-Feb-11: I was asked about the Salem Tunnel: When the Eastern RR built through Salem MA about 1838, they had to get down to tidewater right through the existing city. They used Washington St., but because of pressure from the city fathers, they built a cut-and-cover tunnel rather than a cut. It was single track and so tight that by the 1930s was a real operational problem; PRR round-roof boxcars were too big, as were most of the other WWII era steel house cars. Steam the B&M bought after WWI didn't fit either. The grade crossings at either end didn't help.

In 1954 they started replacing it, eliminating the grade crossings at either end by making it longer. They also replaced the old at-grade stone castle-style station w/trainshed with a belowgrade station below Mill St. They started out planning for double track, but changed to single when they did the middle part. About 20 years ago, the MBTA built a new station with no need for elevators and much more parking at the Bridge St. portal, on the former enginehouse site. Google satellite & street view of Washington St. in Salem shows it fairly well.

Dave Emery added a Shorpy link to a 1910 image: http://www.shorpy.com/node/9975?size=_original

Years ago, I sketched a few plans involving a recognizable Salem, but nothing that I could fit in my space inspired me; the chimney & framing around it were a big handicap. A now-deceased ex-B&M employee was modeling Salem north of me, but he never got to the scenery stage. But there are at least two models of it in the Wenham, MA Museum.

25-Feb-2011: Progress since I returned from Europe was non-photogenic: filling in spikes where I'd hurried, making a turnout work. But for a while, I'd been thinking about my favorite dinosaur:



I painted a stock Hobbytown RS-3 as B&M 1538 about 1974, long before I had heard of Extra 2200 South or had any source of photos for detailing. I've always loved the way it runs, but some years back the gears got out of whack and I put it to one side. Last night I got it out and fixed the gear tower/truck mesh by careful filing. I lubed it, and the bare chassis took 20 cars around the layout just fine. I plan to fix it up further, but that got posted elsewhere.

28-Feb-11: I responded to a comment: At that time I'd done a number of DCC installations in equipment lacking all-wheel pickup; the only ones that operated decently use Lenz Gold decoders with the supercapacitor add-on. Someday I may get back to that, substituting time & patience for serious re-work of power collection for pricey decoders.  But I don't know if I'll ever do 1538 or my other Hobbytown locos, as part of their charm is the combination of straight DC with a substantial flywheel. I was working out my operational plan and found myself short of a few types of cars and engines. 1538 and an E&P import awaiting paint will fill a gap in "dual service road switcher" assignments circa 1954. I needed to paint/detail several more steam locomotives for circa-1950 operations, and several more RDCs for post-1956. I had plenty of deluxe passenger equipment for 1950 - 1956, but I needed 4 or 5 commuter coaches of various types.

[jbvb]

6-Mar-11: The 1538 project reached the "order detail parts" stage, so most of the weekend's progress wasn't photogenic: Digging in the parts drawer, wiring, organizing things. I did get somewhere with GE River Works' Building 41:



I built the receiving area from Walthers modular walls, using about 1/3 of a tube of Testors to fill joints from behind for strength. But in researching the main brass foundry building that goes behind it, I found a photo of Bldg. 41 before the windows were covered with corrugated fiberglass panels, making this obsolete. The main part uses metal-frame masonry windows; think two Walthers' locomotive shop stacked vertically, with three floors behind the bottom's windows and two behind the top's.  I may be able to use this for Bldg. 30.

Next in line was finishing the River Works backdrop and deciding if I like the tentative plan (the switches are placed according to it) enough to start laying track.

22-Mar-11:  Ron G., who I met via the BM_RR@yahoogroups.com list (now BM-RR@groups.io), gave me a copy of the ICC valuation survey of the Newburyport depot (he got it from the B&M RR archives in Lowell):



I know of a dozen photos from this angle; I have yet to find evidence of a photographer actually walking around the building. Given the survey, I'd been working on a drawing, but I have to recreate the image of it.

[Rick]

Finally getting around to get caught up with your layout James.
That's an ambitious plan but you're tackling it well.

[jbvb]

Thanks, Rick.  Here's the current plan view of the Newburyport Depot, as I drew it in XtrkCAD.



The drawing is full size. The roof itself is 80' parking lot side to track, and I have at best 70' scale feet.  I will have to compress it or build it a little under scale to fit my space.

[comment if you see a file name above instead of an image. Firefox on ubuntu linux shows it, iPhone Safari and Firefox on FreeBSD don't]

[deemery]

I wish I had kept the contact info for the person who did the spectacular colorization of the Salem depot image from Shorpy... 

And that must have been one of the inspirations for doing slate/stone walkways in cobblestone streets.  That's something I did on "Subduction Way" because I knew I had seen it before. 

add:  It took a while, but I now see the Newburyport station drawing on Safari on an old version of Mac OS

dave

[jbvb]

Now I do too.  I will ask if there's anything special about how Modelersforum handles PNG images.

[jbvb]

27-Mar-11: When I get stalled on one thing, the railroad has plenty of other opportunities: I had been thinking about how to do the salt marsh banks of the Little River, just railroad-west of Newburyport. I had done the Rowley marshes with screen, but I had trouble keeping both banks flat and at the same level. Here I used masonite:



I planned to use Enviro-Tex for water, so I took care to level everything. Next I made "bathtubs" for the river bottom using more masonite and 3/4" high strips of plywood; the straight pencil lines show the edges of the "bathtubs". The second one (shown) I knew to scribe and cut the curved ends *before* adding the plywood strips.



I fastened them in place after I cut the outline of the river. I made the near-vertical part of the banks from screen and wood putty.