Path Valley Lines

[VagelK]

The Path Valley Lines is my new name for the Blacklog & Shade Gap Eastern layout that lived digitally on the former RR-Line forum from 2009-2025.  The new name reflects both its geographical setting & the presence of two HO model railroads:  the narrow gauge B&SGE and a branch line of the standard ("of the World") 😉 gauge PRR.

I'll start the tour with a couple before and after (actually, after and before) views of the scene that greets visitors as they enter the layout.  The B&SGE mainline loops around Richmond Hill as it runs northerly between the terminal yard at Richmond Furnace and Springtown, PA.





I hope I spell Sellios correctly in the probation section. 🙄

[VagelK]

I'm trying, again, to embed an image in a post.



I think I figured it out.

[GPdemayo]

Enjoyed the photos Vagel, I'll be looking in.....

[deemery]

Looking forward to more photos!

dave

[VagelK]

We'll start at Chambersburg, which was the historic HQ and operation hub of the PRR's Cumberland Valley Div. (downgraded to Branch by the 1930s).  The roundhouse area is not true to the prototype, but not totally fictional, either.





The diseasal servicing facility IS fictional; in the diseasal era there was an EMD SW-something or other assigned to C'burg for duty but the Hagerstown, MD engine house for maintenance.



Recent work in this area involved installing water stand pipes & details around the coaling bunker.





I captioned the last image, "It's all fun and games until a pigeon poops on you."




More in my next post.

[PRR Modeler]

Great layout photos Vagel.

[nycjeff]

Hello Vagel, I'm really enjoying your layout photos and a belated welcome to the forum. I'm looking forward to seeing more of your modeling.

[VagelK]

Many thanks for the kind words.  I'll pick up at the un-sceniced diesel service area, which is at the north (RR east) end of Chambersburg Yard.  By the way, I probably ought to show a layout schematic:



The arrow shows generally where I stood to take most of the pics in my previous post.  If you go back and look at the diesel facility you'll notice a highway overpass above and behind it.  That hides (or tries to hide the giant hole where the standard gauge goes into the long hidden part under the narrow gauge B&SGE.  It's also a transition in time from more or less the present to 1938, thus the attempt at a scenic block of low hill with tall pine trees.



The highway miniatures are late-40's to late-50's (except for that tiny, little E. German "Trabant" that's pulling out to pass, which remained unchanged for 30 years until the fall of the Iron Curtain ... my Cold Warrior slip is showing).  By way of explanation of the time shift, PRR motive power on the layout runs from early-1900's steam to 1960's diesel-electric, the latter heavily weighted away from EMD products.  This is the result of undisciplined purchasing during the 1990's and early 2000's before I started the layout; so, Chambersburg is sort of an HO RR Museum of Pennsylvania with a Pennsy collection that the 1:1 scale museum in Strasburg WISHES it had.

So, in my twisted logic, when trains leave Chambersburg in either direction, they dive into darkened underpasses and pass thru a time warp to emerge in October 1938 Path Valley.  Ahem.  So, on the other side of that line of pine trees is Tuscarora Valley Jct.



The tail of the "wye" at TV Jct was once a 2-mile connecting track to the real-world Tuscarora Valley RR, which ran from the hamlet of Blairs Mills to Port Royal, where it connected with the PRR's Middle Division.  It was abandoned in 1934, but my friend George Pierson, who also wrote the history of the TVRR, modeled it beautifully, and we had an occasional exchange of joke letters complaining about service on each other's railroads.  Below is his module depicting the engine house and yard at Blairs Mills, with examples of his superb modeling.



Sadly, in 2024, the HO TVRR was also dismantled, but George's modeling lives on - unlike me, he is an accomplished kit-basher of HOn3 locomotives - all of mine are strictly out of the box - and he built three B&SGE engines to replicate interchange service between our two lines.  I've put his B&SGE No. 4 to work on the daily mail runs, and she is pictured below coming into the "new" depot at TV Jct, since the old one was no longer convenient to the post-interchange flow of traffic.



More scenic work has been accomplished since that picture was taken, so I'll leave off for this installment with a later view from the same perspective showing the addition of a milk platform and Fall cornfield and woodline backdrop embellishments printed and trimmed from an image found by Googling "Fall Cornfields." 



Until next time, see ya on the railroad ...

[friscomike]

Howdy Vagel, your layout looks like it's a lot of fun to operate. Excellent work.  Have fun, mike

[VagelK]

Howdy Vagel, your layout looks like it's a lot of fun to operate. Excellent work.  Have fun, mike

Thanks, Mike.  It IS fun when everything "cooperates."

[ACL1504]

Vagel,

Nice layout photos. Love those old locos.

Tom

[jbvb]

Welcome, Vagel. Nice photos, good explanation of your plan. You've gotten a lot done since I saw the B&SGE on my way to the 2014 convention in Cleveland.

[GeorgeD]

Excellent pictures, Vagel.  It's good to see an update on your layout.

George

[VagelK]

Thanks, again, all, for the encouraging words.  Yes, James, both the B&SGE and its adjunct PRR have come a very long way since 2014, with very much of the progress made since late-2022 to get ready for the Pittsburgh NNGC last September.  Over in the HO/HOn3 Line topic area I might do a series of scene-by-scene build topics in the future.

Continuing the tour, the next station stop on the B&SGE south (RR east) from Tuscarora Valley Jct. is  Dry Run, which, although it's a real village on PA 75 in Path Valley, never saw a railroad (although it might have had some rather far-fetched visions back in the early-1900's come to fruition.



As the schematic and the second photo looking back toward TV Jct show, the track arrangement for Dry Run kind of melds with TV Jct out of necessity due to the overall geography of the railroad on the peninsula that holds this half of the layout.



Now, the main reason FOR the B&SGE is the blast furnace operation at Richmond Furnace, on the other side of the backdrop.  The B&SGE ships iron ore to the furnace from from mines on the Buchanan Branch (to be covered in a later installment) and coal to feed the beehive ovens that make coke to smelt the ore in the furnace (also to be covered later).  The coal comes from mines served by another fictional narrow gauge line, the On3 Cumberland & Susquehanna of fellow East Broad Top enthusiast, founding member of Friends of the East Broad Top, Inc. (FEBT), and railroad history author Deane Mellander, whose layout is unfortunately moribund these days.

The B&SGE-C&S interchange is modeled by means of an empties in-loads out arrangement via the backdrop here at Dry Run.



I hid the hole in the backdrop at Dry Run with overlapping scenic ridges and a diagonally halved remnant of a truss bridge salvaged from the long-gone layout of the late-Rick Shoup, one-time Achievement Program chair of the NMRA, who was also a founder of the FEBT.  The bridge carries the HO-scale version of Deane's Cumberland & Susquehanna over Mellander Yard.

Two line-side customers sandwich the B&SGE's freight office on a shared siding across from the yard.



D. A. Mitchell Supply is an homage' to my spouse (Path Valley Lines CFO and Head of Property Acquisition), Debbie, who, as a retired Army Quartermaster Corps LTC out-ranks the PVL's Gen'l Superintendent in retirement as she did on active duty.

At the other end of the siding is the fuel yard of Isaac Crappe & Son.  Now, there really WAS a business owned by one Isaac Crappe, but it was a scrap yard, and it was located along a coal spur of the Reading Coal & Iron Co. that ran behind my Dad's boyhood home in the borough of Shenandoah in Schuylkill County, PA.  When, in his old age, Dad saw the first version of this fuel yard on an earlier layout it had all the effects I could have wanted.  And, yes, Isaac was known locally as "Crappy."



Dry Run sees three round-trip trains daily:  the east- and west-bound mails, the coal turn, and east- and west-bound Path Valley Locals, each of which takes on water at the replica of the EBT's enclosed water tank at Mt. Union - the original was destroyed by arson in the 1970s, as was the EBT's yard office (also represented in HO scale next to the tank at Dry Run). 




Just beyond the yard office you might notice grade crossing planks between the rails with no road to them yet ... that will come, I hope, in the not-to-distant future.

Next time we'll visit Springtown.

Vagel

[VagelK]

I'll pick up from where I left off last time, hoping folks are still tuning in.  The next town along the narrow gauge line is Springtown, which is separated from Dry Run by a high hill and an "S"-curve trestle over a short visible section of hidden trackage to allow continuous running on the HO standard gauge PRR.  None of that shows up on the schematic, because back in 2008 when we started construction I didn't know what I wanted to do here.



I've increased the resolution of the pictures from 150 to 300 dpi, so they're going to be a bit larger on-screen. 

Driving south (RR east) on PA 75, we pass by a Mail Pouch barn (something no layout depicting Appalachia is complete without).  Like many of the really nice non-kit built structures on the layout, this was not built by me.  It's the work of Sam Swanson, who scratch built it from thin resin walls and roof sections that he cast in molds he made himself; it's prototype is a barn near Morgantown, WV that was a regular feature of his commute to classes during his college days at WVU.



The trestle was inspired by the one on the Ohio River & Western, with the addition of a mid-span steel deck girder bridge over the standard gauge inspired by a similar arrangement on the Rio Grande Southern to span a state highway near Durango, CO.  The late-Don Reed scratch-built it to fit the scene from a photograph; the steel span is a Micro Engineering kit that I modified as a skewed span.



Unlike Dry Run, which is a real place but never had a railroad, Springtown is a fictional place name (although there IS a Springtown Road that "Tees" with PA 75 between Dry Run and Richmond Furnace). 



It is typical of many village centers in rural south-central PA, with a store-front post office and filling station.  In this case the store keeper is also the B&SGE's contracted agent; the passenger shelter is across the street next to the milk platform.



There are two industrial customers in town, which share a switch-back siding.  Springtown Milling Co. occupies the modified Walthers Sunrise Mill, backdated by replacing the provided rooftop cyclone dust catcher with a traditional elevator tower and down pipes.

Rosenberry Lumber Co. is a real firm that has been milling hardwoods in Path Valley not far from where it is represented in my fictional landscape since the 1920s.  Springtown, by the way, is one of the few "places" on the B&SGE where almost all the structures were built by your's truly.  Rosenberry Lumber's office is the exception; it was built from a C.C. Crow plaster kit by fellow HOn3 modeler Kevin Kuzman.



And that's it for this installment.  More next time.

Vagel