First draft of CUT track plan

I probably shouldn't have posted this right on top of a Wordless Wednesday post, but oh well it's my blog and I can do what I want with it.

Here is a shot of my first attempt at a somewhat doable CUT track plan, at least for the terminal area. Well, it's not really doable because it is way too long at 36' length, especially since the connections to the rest of the layout on the left end are not even there yet. I'm about at the limit on length because the left end needs to be kept open (to a degree) for movement to and from the basement steps and the rest of the basement. The brown square in the lower right must be kept clear for access to my electric panel.

This plan has all the major elements I am looking for in the terminal. Minimum radius on passenger tracks of 40". I wanted to do #8 turnouts but they are too long, so these are all #6. Also, a #8 double slip switch has 4 throwbars instead of 2 for the #6. There are 5 platforms at the terminal with the longest platform track being 11'  long. There are two sleeper stubs and also runaround tracks along the top and the bottom of the terminal. There is mail, express, commissary & Pullman, coach yard, and locomotive service. There is a certain level of challenge to the trackwork from an operational point of view, but it isn't beyond reach from the constructional point of view. A 130' turntable tops it all off. The loop around the roundhouse area actually existed at the real CUT for turning entire strings of passenger cars rather than doing them one at a time on the turntable.

I can envision stacking dogbone loops under the turntable loop and staging yards underneath the terminal tracks.

Next step is to maybe bend it somehow or figure out other ways to reduce the overall length. If I can bring the left end in about 10', it will give me room there to extend those connections to the rest of the layout.

Not So Wordless Wednesday #3

Norfolk & Western Class J 602 preparing to leave with the Powhatan Arrow at Cincinnati Union Terminal

I just can't resist commenting on this photo. The more research I do on Cincinnati Union Terminal, the more excited I become to model operations there. The N&W J Class locomotives were used on their named trains such as the Powhatan Arrow, Pocohontas, and The Cavalier, all of which were Norfolk to Cincinnati trains although The Cavalier switched its terminus from Cincinnati to Portsmouth OH by 1957. Interesting to note is the N&W was very late to dieselize its passenger fleet and ran all steam up to that same year.

Now all I need to do is get my hands on an HO scale version of one of these beauties.

EDIT: The original caption when I first posted this photo read that the Powhatan Arrow pictured above had just arrived at the terminal. This is incorrect because in 1952 the westbound train arrived at the terminal at 10:45pm and would have been facing the other direction upon arrival. N&W approached and egressed from CUT from the north end (railroad east) of the terminal. In the photo we are facing south-southwest and the sun is obviously fairly low in the eastern sky (to the left) which is evident from the lighting and shadows. Although we don't know what year this photo was taken, in 1952 the Powhatan Arrow left CUT for Portsmouth OH at 8:20am, so it is safe to assume this shot was taken in the morning sometime around when the train would have been leaving the station.

Wordless Wednesday #2

The Men Behind The Curtain: Inside Cincinnati Union Terminal Tower A

Scale track plan of Cincinnati Union Terminal

Just to see if it could be done and to say that I did it, I used AnyRail5 to make a loose scale track plan of Cincinnati Union Terminal, using this diagram:

Here is the end result. It actually fits in my train room. The entire train room (13' x 46'). The 8 platforms are about 1400' long instead of the 1600' that they really were. Other than that, it is pretty close although I did have to freelance in a few places to get the trackwork to align. I had to use #6 turnouts instead of #8's like I wanted to because the #8's made it about 10' longer, but then again this is just an experiment.

The bill of materials, track only:

44 x #6 Double Slip switches
45 x #6 Left turnouts
46 x #6 Right turnouts
24 x #6 Wye turnouts

Grand total of 841' of track.

Now that I have the Full Monte, I can begin the selective compression process. The remarkable thing is even in the full blown state it is in right now it is only just under 6' wide.

The terminal throats and ladder trackwork are very interesting and were designed with ease of operation in mind. The terminal was designed to allow switchers to buzz around both ends of the terminal to switch cars to and from passenger trains that may only be in the station for a few minutes, all without interrupting the traffic flow of the trains coming and going. Everything is double tracked at a minimum and in some places it is 3 or 4 parallel tracks and there are plenty of crossovers and double slips to allow the switchers to go around traffic.

Boiling the plan down to a workable size while still capturing the feel of it will be the challenge. This is the part where Cleveland Union Terminal gave me a headache.

Here's a copy of a Sanborn map that shows how the platform widths conform to the transition from double track under the concourse to triple track towards the ends of the platforms.

Did I say CUT? I meant to say CUT.

You are not in the wrong place.

As much as I have tried to come up with an acceptable plan for Cleveland Union Terminal over the past few months, I finally reached the point where I was spending a lot of time getting nowhere and I have decided to abandon the Cleveland Union Terminal project. I now switch the focus of my project to the Cincinnati Union Terminal.

Here are some of the problems in modeling Cleveland Union Terminal.

• All of the passenger platforms are underneath the station. This essentially would turn the terminal into hidden staging. I want to be able to see the beautiful passenger trains parked at a platform. I also want to be able to access couplers to switch out cars in a passenger consist, although at Cleveland I have come to realize that there wasn't a whole lot of consist switching going on there. Kind of hard to do that underground nonetheless. I thought about using a material such as lexan or plexi to allow the platforms to be viewed, but I never could visualize that as having any semblance of a realistic looking model and it still wouldn't fix the accessibility issue.

• "Selective Compression" ended up never looking the way I wanted it. As mentioned in previous posts, to model the terminal to scale would take up the entire train room at 13' x 27'. Selective compression to reduce the model to an acceptable size to still have room for more layout just wasn't doing it for me.

• The more research I did on Cleveland Union Terminal, the more I discovered how much the place was disliked by the railroads that used it (and the one that didn't use it - PRR). This had the undesirable secondary effect of also causing me to dislike it! I eventually found myself trying to reduce the passenger operations to more of a background role and focus on freight operations, but that is not what I set out to do. I ran into one description of CUT during WWII and it was described as "CUT was a dismal place during and after WWII. The beautiful skylight windows in the main concourse were painted over black during WWII and it had the effect of darkening the whole place, giving it a sort of dungeon feel". Hard to keep positive thoughts about a place with a description like that.

• Electrified operation by CUT power. This would not normally be a big deal, but the P-1a's used by CUT are only offered in HO scale by one manufacturer at $1000 each. That makes it a big deal. The P-1a's were still in use during the time frame that I wanted to model, so removing them from the picture just didn't seem right.

I could go on.

Exit CUT, enter CUT.

One day a few weeks ago while doing some research, I entered "Cleveland Union Terminal" into a search engine bar. Other suggested searches popped up as usual, but one caught my eye and that was "Cincinnati Union Terminal". I clicked on it and the rest is history.

Things I like about Cincinnati Union Terminal.

• Open platforms. I am really looking forward to modeling a station with open platforms.

• I really dig the Art Deco appearance of the terminal. It almost has a Gotham City look to it. Indeed, the DC Universe Hall of Justice is modeled after it.

• There are SEVEN railroads that use Cincinnati Union Terminal. B&O, C&O, N&W, PRR, NYC (CCC&StL or Big Four), L&N, and Southern. CUT was one of the busiest railroad passenger terminals in the country.

• Hand in hand with the above bullet, I already have a starting collection of HO scale passenger equipment from B&O, C&O, and PRR. If I had stuck with Cleveland Union Terminal, most of that equipment would not be of any use.

• The terminal appears to be easier to scale down by selective compression and the trackwork will be easier. In reality each of the 8 platforms was 1600' long but the yard throats are essentially straight in. I struggled with this on the Cleveland terminal because the throats on both ends are on nearly a 45 degree angle to the platforms. The shorter I made the platforms at Cleveland, the more it made the whole terminal look like it was on one big curve. 

• The express & mail facilities are separate but adjacent to Cincinnati Union Terminal. At Cleveland it was all done on the passenger platforms, again - all underground.

• The coach yard and engine facilities are separate but close to the terminal. At Cleveland the coach yard was part of the terminal but there were no locomotive service facilities there.

• I still have a river to model (the Ohio River). Not as crooked as the Cuyahoga River though.

• The real thing still exists as a passenger station (albeit on a much smaller scale and now with only Amtrak), and it is also within a day's drive if I want to go see it in person.

I am one of those guys that really hates to admit defeat, but sometimes you just have to move on.

The inaugural Wordless Wednesday, First Edition.

Ok, so a lot of fellow bloggers have Wordless Wednesdays, Throwback Thursdays, etc. I've been really racking my brain daily trying to come up with a workable plan to fit CUT into my 13 foot x 30+ foot basement, so far unsuccessfully. Quite frankly, I'm getting tired of layout planning and am ready to get some benchwork started. So, to keep the blog going, I'm jumping on the train.

Anyway, here's my maiden voyage of Wordless Wednesday and it kind of sums up where I'm at with planning CUT. Wordless Wednesday #1 begins after I shut up.