(Not So) Wordless Wednesday on Thursday #16

Hi folks, I know I haven't posted in a while so here's a few photos to catch up. Summer is the busy season for me at work, lots of overtime. Great for the wallet, not so great for life outside of work.

One of the advantages to driving a marked police vehicle is you can go places you normally wouldn't be able to go without one.

One of those places is the Wheeling & Lake Erie yard in east Akron.

The turntable at WLE's Brittain yard. It has been locked in position for many years but they still use the track. 6/29/16 Jeff Leslie photo.

Another view of the turntable. WLE 101 (GP35, P&WV heritage markings) in the background. 6/29/16 Jeff Leslie photo.

My favorite WLE locomotive, high nose GP35 #107 painted in AC&Y heritage markings. I also like the Alco Type B trucks. 6/29/16 Jeff Leslie photo.

Terminal mock-up

Back on May 7th 2016 I took a trip to Toledo with fellow model railroader & blogger Chris Ellis and his family for National Train Day. The event was held at the Toledo Amtrak station, formerly Toledo Central Union Terminal.

As I'm sure many people before me have done, I forgot to take the SD card out of my reader and put it back into my camera. So, I was forced to take photos of the terminal with my cell phone.

My intent was to take some nice hi-def straight-on shots of window detail of the station so that I could make printable overlays to attach to my future model of TCUT. The windows of the current TCUT appear to be basically the same as they were when built in 1950, and that is large glass block walls with embedded regular windows and vents. This was done in an effort to commemorate the glass industry in Toledo at the time. It appears that the windows themselves have been updated at some point, but the overall shape and positioning is the same as when the terminal was built.

Another problem besides me forgetting my SD card was the fact that it was difficult to find a place to take straight on shots of the windows because of the trees surrounding the station. What I will end up doing is taking a couple shots of a small portion of the windows and then copying & pasting those shots into larger graphics across each wall of the station.

Yet another problem is that I am guessing on the dimensions of the structure, basing my measurements on the measuring tool in Google Earth. I checked the Lucas County tax website hoping that the building dimensions and a sketch would be there, but there were none and only the total square footage of the building was listed.

Here is a practice run of a graphic I made in Paintshop Pro from generic brick and glass block pictures found on the internet. I didn't spend a whole lot of time on this because it was just practice. Once I can get some photos of the actual structure I will be able to make it much more realistic.

For purposes of a mock-up though, I can print this and attach it to foam core board to make a reasonable representation of TCUT.

Wordless Wednesday #15

The poster from National Train Day 2016 at Toledo Central Union Terminal on 7 May 2016, honoring the 65th anniversary of the opening of TCUT in 1951. Pictured are the logos of the four lines that used the terminal in 1951.

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.