Almost Wordless Wednesday #14

Latest Toledo Central Union Terminal plan

I think for the first time I have a plan that I like for a passenger terminal to fit in my space. It is actually a decent representation of the actual TCUT layout.

Minimum Radius (passenger cars): 40" on visible track, 36" on hidden

Turnouts: #6 & #7 in terminal & coach yard, #9 on mainline

Terminal track lengths: 123" (8 x 85' cars w/A-B locomotive), 140", 143", and 151".

I am considering a partial mushroom double-deck for the rest of the layout in order to maximize usage of available space. This will require a helix to transition between decks.

Wordless Wednesday #13

Next project...

Not so Wordless Wednesday #12

Check out this 1955 video about grain operations in Canada. Lots of good railroad scenes but it also goes really in depth about how a grain elevator works. There is also a good scene of a tilt dumper used to empty the boxcar inside the elevator.

Grain Handling in Canada by Guy L. Coté, National Film Board of Canada

Here's another one from YouTube, also a Canadian video from 1981 about a small prairie elevator. Very entertaining, especially because one guy does the whole operation by himself, to include moving railcars by hand.

Prior to the late 1950's, most grain that traveled by rail was transported in boxcars. Covered hoppers for grain just weren't part of the picture yet. When 100-ton railcar trucks hit the scene in the late 1950's, the covered hopper became the preferred method because now the cars could handle the weight of a larger load of grain. Even in remote parts of Canada, boxcars were still used to transport some grain until the early 1990's. In a grain boxcar, a "grain door" made of wood or reinforced cardboard was put up inside the boxcar doors that covered the opening from the floor up about 3/4 the height of the opening. Flexible chutes were used to load the grain through the opening. To unload the grain from the boxcar, the wooden grain doors were either pushed inside by a hydraulic plunger or the heavy cardboard grain doors were simply just punctured to allow the grain to flow out. It was a dirty, dusty, manual labor job because the remaining grain had to be swept out of the boxcar by hand.

I was completely unaware of how grain elevators operated until just recently. Not sure if things were done the same way in USA as they were in Canada because grain handling is run by the Canadian Government unlike here in the US, but I would imagine things are similar. I was intrigued to learn how a single type of grain is "graded" and different grades of the same type of grain were separated at the elevator, and this was done for each different type of grain in the elevator.

Small elevators like the one in the video received grain from local farmers by truck and shipped it out by rail. Larger elevators would receive the railcars from the small elevators and would then ship the grain to the end user by rail or ship if the larger elevator was located at a port. They would make up cuts of cars for customers based on the type and grade of grain requested and where the customer was located. Large elevators located at Great Lakes ports (i.e., Toledo) would take in grain by rail or by Great Lakes freighter as well as ship it out the same way.

I see a lot of model railroads with a small grain elevator where a few hoppers get spotted during an operating session and there seems to be little thought about how they really work. I think there is great potential to model grain operations at a large elevator on a model railroad now that I know how they work. 

Toledo & Sanborn maps.

Toledo.

The more I research it the more I like it.

First I looked at Cleveland and then at Cincinnati, but the cons of both outweighed the pros.

Now I have had to go in and re-design the blog again because I have moved on to the next major city in Ohio.

Toledo has all of the elements I've been looking for from the get-go. It has a union passenger terminal which was used by four lines; NYC, B&O, C&O, and Wabash. In addition to that, the NYC Water Level Route ran right through it. Toledo had a terminal belt railroad that in addition to those four railroads also interchanged with NKP, PRR, WLE, Ann Arbor, and DT&I. It is a Great Lakes port city with a large river (the Maumee River) navigable by large Great Lakes freighters.

In addition, the Toledo area is flat. Where railroad right-of-ways crossed over each other, it was either a level crossing or a man-made overpass. Really, with only a few exceptions the banks of the Maumee River and tributaries are the only natural terrain features in the area.

Sanborn Maps.

I discovered a depository of Sanborn maps online. You can find it at Digital Resource Commons Ohio Link . You can search for cities in Ohio and you can also refine the searches to look for specific locations within the city. The one thing I don't like about the site is that the maps are not arranged in any sort of logical order. You have to use the search engine to find what you want and there is no browsing tool for map searching. There are also multiple maps for a specific location spanning several decades so you have to watch out that you are not pulling up a 1904 map when you want a 1951 map of the same spot. Another thing I don't like is that all the maps are in JPEG 2000 format (.jp2). This format will not display in any of the readily available Windows-based photo viewers. There is a free image viewer called FastStone Image Viewer available online though that is actually a very nice image viewer and it will display the .jp2 files. You can then convert them to any other format you like. I like .bmp format because it doesn't distort as you zoom in like a .jpg does, but they are huge files and don't post well on blogs.

Here are a couple samples of the Sanborn maps from Ohio Link:

This is Toledo Central Union Terminal circa 1951, right after completion in 1950.

And this one is an area just north of the terminal and is where the NYC, B&O, and Wabash all had freight houses. There is also a NYC locomotive servicing facility and a Great Lakes Terminal warehouse (basically a non-RR owned freight house).

These maps are giving me lots of planning ideas. I think I will finally be able to come up with a track plan that has the elements I want and fits in my space.

Status Update

Not much activity lately other than Wordless Wednesdays and other non-layout related posts.

Main reason for this was because the wife and I were doing some re-negotiation over layout space in the basement. As is usually the case, it was my own fault. I started to go beyond the original boundary figuring it would be OK, but it wasn't. Long story short, after the re-negotiation I'm still in the same part of the basement and I'm still in my original dimension which is 13' x 27'. I know, stop complaining - there are lots of model railroaders that wish they had that much space.

Also, I have to say that we still do not own this house yet. Our other house still has not sold due to 3 different buyers failing to get approved for financing. We are in our 4th contract presently, which is actually looking good for finalized sale here in April. Fingers crossed. Once I actually own the house, I will feel better about drilling anchor holes in concrete block for benchwork.

A quick recap on my layout planning activities to date. Passenger ops, passenger ops.

Originally I wanted to model Cleveland Union Terminal, or some facsimile of it. Research pointed to the fact that CUT wasn't well liked by the tenant railroads, and I started to share their pain trying to come up with a functional track plan in HO scale for it.

I started searching for alternatives and found Cincinnati Union Terminal (also called CUT). Perfect layout as far as facilities, which is actually not good for modeling because end-to-end CUT with coach yard and facilities is over a mile and a half long which is about 85' in HO scale. Operationally though, Cincinnati is a dream.

Some more research led me to Toledo Central Union Terminal (also called CUT...). I found an article and track plan for it in the Feb 2003 issue of Model Railroader.

The MR plan is for 20' x 27', of which the long dimension fits perfectly in my own space. The terminal layout is on a curve at one end, which is great for modeling because all layouts have corners. The thing I don't like about the MR plan though is that there are no freight operations. I still want to have passenger AND freight operations. And I want to do it in smaller space.

Here is my first go-round at a rendition of Toledo Central Union Terminal. This actually fits in my space with room to spare.

In the MR plan, for the curved end of the terminal they use 28" radius curves and #6 turnouts on both throats and #8 for crossovers. In my plan, each pair of platform tracks is 36" on the inside and 38" on the outside. This will allow the long passenger cars to not hang over platforms as much as they would with 28" curves. I use #6 turnouts at the curved end, #7 at the other end, and #9 for the crossovers. I also added mail and express to the right of the terminal ala Cincinnati style, and I fit it all into just over 20'. The shortest platform track is just under 11' long which will allow me to have 9 & 10 car passenger trains. There is still plenty of room left in the layout space to fit in a coach yard, engine servicing, and some freight operations.

After a couple hundred hours and several dozen unsuccessful CAD designs trying to do Cleveland and Cincinnati, I think I may have just stumbled onto something here in Toledo. Stay tuned.