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.

Go Big or Go Somewhere Else. Or, "How to make it fit?"

It's been a few weeks since I posted. We are now in the new house and I am about ready to start construction.

I have come to the realization that everything in Cleveland is BIG and would still be BIG if scaled to HO. CUT is almost 27' long in HO scale as I have illustrated in a previous post. The NKP Broadway Av Freight House was about 650' long in real life, or about 7 1/2' long in HO scale.

Everything will have to be downsized. Model railroaders struggle with that reality constantly, and it is nothing new. The key is how to downsize something and still make it look good.

Here is a photo of downtown Cleveland taken facing NE. When you look at the photo, you can really visualize how you could construct benchwork out of this scene. The Cuyahoga River would be aisleways between blobs or peninsulas. Unmodeled area would be backdrop against a wall and/or access room behind peninsulas.

I've really been trying to figure out how to make CUT fit in my basement.

Jason Cook started a thread on this very same topic over at the Yahoo Groups Proto-Layouts group and I have chimed in on the thread with my case.

Cheers

Photo opportunity with NKP 765

It's not everyday you get a great opportunity to be in a photo with a classic steam locomotive like NKP 765.

She was in town leading a train with the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railway for their annual Steam in the Valley event. It just so happened that the Akron Marathon was also taking place today. I was on the marathon escort detail on our police motor unit and I knew 765 was going to be there around 11am. We got a small window of opportunity to go shoot a few pics of her before she left. Much to our surprise, the engineer said we could park our bikes right next to her and get some photos. I'm second from the right...

Some great resources for model railroading research

As I research Cleveland Ohio and Cleveland Union Terminal for my model railroad, I am reminded of my time as a student in the US Army Command & General Staff College. For those that don't know, CGSC is a graduate-level course for Army Majors hoping to become Lieutenant Colonels that covers topics such as leadership, military doctrine, military history, and operational art, to name just a few.

I spent a lot of time in CGSC writing papers as the culmination of researching a given topic. It was no different than any other graduate-level course where you receive a list of questions about a topic and you have to pull research from many different sources and then essay the answers to the questions.

That's kind of what I feel like I am doing here in planning my model railroad. There are so many sources to research from, but the product of the research will be the layout rather than a paper. In the planning stage, you can use one (or more than one) of the CAD-based software programs (I am using AnyRail 5) to create your track plan. Just like writing a paper, with the software you can easily go back and make changes to the plan or even start a completely new one as you develop your final product, and the only thing it costs you is time.

While writing a paper for school, eventually you have to turn it in and at that point no more changes can be made. Building a model railroad, once you start to put track to benchwork with spike or adhesive, you are pretty much turning in that paper and while you can always make changes to a layout, now it becomes more difficult to make them. Long story short: you probably better have your concept and plan realized by that point or now it becomes very painful (and costly - in time and now money) to make drastic changes. I hope to make sure everything is the way I want it before it becomes permanently attached to the benchwork. I'm sure this will be more difficult than I think it is.

Ok, back to model railroading research.

I've found a lot of research sources for CUT and 1940's-1950's Cleveland, some of which I have mentioned in earlier posts. There is the Cleveland Memory Project and it's excellent photographic collection from the construction of Cleveland Union Terminal. You can find it here. Most of the photos are from the 1920's up to 1930, when CUT opened for business. The problem is there are no photos from the operational period (1930-1970-ish) of the terminal in the collection.

I have found a few other resources that I think all model railroaders can use for researching their layouts. One is Historic Map Works, which they say has 1,662,956 historical maps & images. They have a collection of the Hopkins plat maps of Cleveland from the 1930's, which I have found invaluable for track planning because the maps are scale drawings to include all rail lines and who owns them. They also show who owns a particular building and what type of construction - brick, stone, frame, etc.

Another great source of material is the Library of Congress at http://www.loc.gov/. They have an extensive online library to include photographs from all time periods in US history. At the top of the home page is a search bar and if I type in "Cleveland Union Terminal" I get 342 results, everything from photos, prints, and newspapers, to drawings, maps, and diagrams. In particular, I found a collection of 161 photos from a Historical American Buildings Survey of Cleveland Union Terminal from the late 1980's. Included in those photos are three .tif file images of the original blueprints from the terminal from the 1930's that detail the three main levels of the station. More on those later in another post.

Finally, one resource I've been searching for and finally found is an online version of The Official Guide to the Railways. There is an online version of the August 1952 publication available here. For anyone modeling passenger operations, the Official Guide is indispensable. It has full timetables for passenger trains and it also gives you a pretty good idea of what cars a given train ran with and what cars got switched in and out of the train at certain stations.

Now, back to typing my paper...

First recon & pictures of the train room

Went down into the basement of the new house today to check out the future train room. We still haven't moved in and the current owner hasn't moved out yet, but we have access to the house. We have steadily been moving stuff that we can move in our cars from our current house into the new house.

This is the train room. From where I am standing to take this shot to the far wall is 46'. The distance between the left and right walls is just under 14'. The doorway leads to the other half of the basement. The stairs leading into the basement are to my immediate left.

From the far corner of the doorway to the far wall is just under 28'. The doorway is 36" wide. The plan for the layout space is to go along the left wall from the far edge of the doorway down to the back wall, wrap around to the right wall, and back this direction roughly even with the closer edge of the doorway or about 31'. That will leave me with about a 14' x 15' area from the doorway to the stairs to finish as a lounge/man cave area. This entire half of the basement will be finished from floor to rafters.

As an added bonus, I bought all the power tools in the photos from the owner of the house for $400. I picked up a mini scroll saw/sander with moto tool attachment, a band saw/sander, a floor drill press, and a table saw. I'm anxious to put them all to work on the layout.

Except for one corner here in the train room, the basement is dry. There is a downspout with below ground drain pipe at this corner of the house and I suspect the drain pipe is blocked or broke and this is from water seeping through the foundation from the downspout. Hopefully all it will take to fix is un-blocking the downspout drain or at the most digging the old drain pipe up and replacing it, then cleaning and treating the block from the inside. I don't know if maybe this was caused by an old problem that was fixed already or if it is current, so I'll clean it up first and check the downspout to see if it continues.

I'm wondering if I need to upgrade the electric panel. I would like to add at least two circuits dedicated to the train room, one for lighting and another for outlets, but this panel looks like there is no more room for circuits. I'm not much of an electrician, so maybe extra circuits can be added and all I have to do is get a new facing panel to accommodate more breakers. I may also have it moved to another part of the basement out of the train room.

I can't wait to get started on the prep work, and I plan on starting as soon as I move in. Getting the basement ready for the layout isn't going to be easy and it isn't going to be cheap, but I want to do it right and make it a great space for the layout.

Cheers

Jeff

CUT scaled to the train room

More for the entertainment value than any realistic modeling approach, I made a scale graphic of what the actual CUT would look like in my train room.

The red lines around the border represent the walls of the train room portion of the basement. To scale the CUT map over the train room, I used the real distance along the length of Huron Rd. between the intersections of Superior Av and Ontario St. This is right around 2300' which is about 26.5' in HO scale. It just so happens that the wall along the bottom of the drawing is 27' from left wall to the doorway on the right side. If I was to build an HO scale model of Cleveland Union Terminal, it would take up my entire train room. Obviously that won't work.

The logical next step would be to figure out how to scale it down to realistic dimensions. My intent for the time being is to treat the CUT as a separate Layout Design Element (LDE) that will most likely get added to the layout further down the road. I do not want to try to tackle building CUT right off the bat.

Here is one rough draft of a possible track arrangement as an LDE. Rulings are 12". It uses 8 station tracks (upper 8 tracks) and 4 tracks for the coach yard. I think this track arrangement would definitely fit somewhere in the room and would still make a decent scaled down representation of CUT.

I may put in some stub tracks at the bottom of the coach yard for passenger car servicing facilities. The key to making this thing fit will be using curved turnouts and double slip switches. All of the turnouts above are #8 and the sharpest curve track is 40" radius. The longest station track is just over 8' long, so I may add another 1'-2' of length to this arrangement to allow a train of 8 cars of 85' length plus an A-B-A locomotive set. Right now this track group is right at 30" of depth which was one of my limits because of arm reach.The beauty of doing the design in AnyRail5 (or any similar model RR design software) is I can rotate and move the entire group of tracks around to see how it would fit elsewhere and see what I need to do to make it fit in a specific spot.

Jeff