Thursday, September 21, 2017

More research; more acquisitions

The summer overtime season is winding down and now I have a little more time to put into model railroading.

Recently I acquired two books that I probably should have bought long before now. Both are published by the Pennsylvania Railroad Technical & Historical Society. The first one, Pennsylvania Railroad Passenger Car Painting and Lettering, was published way back in 1988. The second one, The Pennsylvania Railroad in Columbus, Ohio by Rick Tipton, is much more recent and was published in 2011.






The Tipton book was worth the cost just for the half dozen separate fold out maps that come with it. One of those maps is the Spruce St Enginehouse facility, circa 1950. I have not yet seen this map anywhere on the internet, apparently it is a digital recreation of an original PRR document at the PRRT&HS archives in Lewistown, PA and was done just for this book.



This map will be indispensable for layout planning because it shows all of the trackside details one would see at a typical steam locomotive and coach yard facility. Taking note of the roundhouse, you can see there are 32 stalls and a total of 38 tracks in a complete circle around the turntable. Interestingly, if you divide 360 degrees by 38, you get 9.47. That number is coincidentally the same as the diverging radius of a #6 turnout. That will come in real handy when using my track planning software, AnyRail 6.

Speaking of turntables, my latest model railroad acquisition is the Walthers 110' motorized turntable.


I figure the turntable is going to be "ground zero" for the Spruce St project, so best to get it now when it is still being manufactured and is available for under retail pricing. MB Klein had it for $249 which is $100 under Walthers MSRP. I think for this project the 110' turntable is a much better fit than either the 90' or 130' offerings by Walthers.

Last but not least, I also picked up three more Branchline heavyweight sleeper kits that I got for roughly $13 each.


All three of these are heavyweight Pullman 12 section, 1 drawing room sleepers and are painted in Pullman pool colors (Pullman Green with black roof).

Earlier this summer fellow blogger/model railroader Rick DeCandido, who operates the Fillmore Avenue Roundhouse, posted about "Excess and the Railroad Modeler". The theme of the post is that most model railroaders have items in their collection that have nothing to do with their layout (or in my case, my theoretical layout...). I am no exception to that concept, and I own a lot of locomotives and rolling stock that will never roll on Spruce St.

To dovetail that concept into my latest research into the PRR Spruce St Terminal and Columbus Union Terminal, I have much to my dismay also discovered that many of the PRR items I originally thought I WOULD be able to use on the layout are indeed either completely incorrect models (most of my Walthers PRR passenger fleet) or not from the era (1946-1947) that I want to model, although for time frame some of my good equipment just needs to have the era appropriate paint scheme. One example would be the three Pullman sleepers above. I have come to discover that Pullman Standard, with Pennsylvania Railroad as one of its biggest customers, actually painted the vast majority of the PRR purchased Pullman equipment in PRR colors (various shades of Tuscan Red). Therefore, the three Pullman Green cars above were more than likely never used by PRR. A disclaimer here is that I acquired the three sleepers above BEFORE I bought the two books mentioned earlier in the post. I was also saddened when I discovered my Walthers PRR passenger car fleet is mostly incorrect as many Walthers models are based on prototypes from other railroads such as UP, AT&SF, etc., and most of that equipment was never used by PRR because PRR had a lot of proprietary equipment made by their own car shops in Altoona or made by other manufacturers (Budd, ACF, PS) to PRR specifications. Indeed, I am discovering that PRR is not as easy a railroad to model as one may think.

Now it's back to the drawing board to finalize my track plan for the Spruce St project, armed with my new maps and research.