Model Railroad Blog

The Plausibility Payoff

This is real railroading. There is no circus train passing a marching band on a nearby street. There are no saturated primary colors or eye-catching architectural masterpieces. It’s flat black tankers under dull brown trees, gray gravel, and mud puddles. The shot was taken earlier this year in Old Hickory, TN at what appears to be a team track facility a block from the RJ Corman yard. At first glance I thought these were incoming loads. They aren’t. Actually, what’s happening is very common. The tank cas are being loaded with waste automobile oil. The vendor, in this case Noble Oil Services, is an environmental services firm that goes from gas station to gas station collecting their waste products. They then go to the team track facility where an empty tank awaits for them to pump the oil into. The employee in the distance is clad in safety gear and reading his cell phone while the truck is pumping out (A ModelU figure maybe). Are the other tank cars spotted for Noble or another vendor? In examining our approach to the hobby we need to decide what we want from our scenes and how to compose them. Are we going to be a like a cat with a laser pointer in our element selection? i.e. “Hey that’s cool, gimme one of those. Oh, there’s something else that’s cool (and totally unrelated), I want one of those too”. Or, do we want to identify and locate scenes such as this and blend them into a fabric of plausibility. It’s not my railroad. You decide.

One of the driving reasons people engage in model railroading is to be transported, to be taken away to “someplace” in miniature. Where that place is seems to fall into two primary camps. First, you have the largest group of folks that want to go to the realm of pure fantasy, a land where fun, caricature, color saturation, amped up and unusual architecture and the out-of-the ordinary drive the composition. If you’re reading this blog, that’s not you. Sorry, you’re in the other camp, you’re in the minority. You want to go to a place that actually exists, existed at one time, or very well “could” have been. If there is no way in hell the scene on your layout would occupy a spot in real life railroading, you tune out and do so quickly. If I had to pick a single word to describe the effect my readers are after it would be “plausibility”. It doesn’t have to be rivet-to-rivet, inch-inch-by-inch accurate, but it needs to be believable.

If that’s your end game, then the focus becomes how to get there. The starting point is careful study and examination. What is it about a location that makes it what it is? Unlike the larger camp, you’re trying to unearth, nail down, and define “ordinary”. You’re doing the opposite of most and trying to edit out the one in a million element defined by shock value. You’re looking for elements with no shock value. It’s day-to-day, down in the weeds, revenue generating railroading. It’s a world typified by dull browns, charcoal blacks, and a dead flat finish on everything. Weeds not golf courses. Operations that tend to be pretty similar week in and week out. That scrap yard is going to need those loaded gons pulled out every week. It’s not going to switch to Tropicana OJ reefers just because Walthers had them on sale and you like the color orange!

It takes time and patience to define “ordinary”, to define the essence of a real scene. If you can do so there’s a tremendous payoff. If you can hit the target, when you walk into your layout room, you’ll feel transported to the world of real railroading and that’s what you were shooting for in the first place.

A New Boxcar

I needed to get a few “less colorful” cars on the layout. I forgot I had this nice Rapido Columbus & Greenville PC&F B100 in storage. Dug it out and spent the weekend weathering it. Most of the effect was done with a wash of artist oils and mineral spirits. After that dried, I touched up a few areas with Bragdon weathering powders. Welcome to the fleet!

Ops 101, Episode 9

Last night I uploaded episode 9 of my Switching Operations 101 YouTube series. In this installment I illustrate how you can get the operational play value of three, reefer served, industries without a single turnout, spur, or structure being needed.

I’ve been very appreciative of the clarification and elaboration provided by the professional rails that follow the channel. Often this great information falls between the cracks in the comments section.

With respect to this episode, professional rail Tim Garland wrote, “

“A couple of things. On NS there is a minimum of two handbrakes applied and any additional if there is a grade involved. Over time the air brakes will eventually bleed off and if there is not a sufficient number of handbrakes applied the cars could roll away. Loaded cars are sealed with a thin metal band that has a number associated with the load. Cars that contain valuable shipments will also have an anti theft lock that requires a bolt cutter to remove it. After removing the EOT a conductor will either lay it on the ground or put it on the locomotive. Once you’re done switching, you can either use the runaround track to transport it to the rear of the outbound train or if during your switching moves you are at the rear place it then or you could couple to the train, pull the rear up to you, hang it, shove back off the crossings and perform the brake test. If it is just a transfer test traveling less than 20 miles back to the yard all the conductor has to do is walk them on to check for application. Once he reaches the locomotive the engineer can use the EOT to verify the brakes are released on the rear.” Thanks Tim!

You can see more of Tim’s excellent work on his Seaboard Central YouTube channel.

Big Lost River

I learned an interesting factoid this week, Cryo-Trans reefers all carry individual names much as passenger cars of old did. Pretty cool. Here Cryo-Trans “Big Lost River” sits on The Big Hole Lead on the East Rail 2 layout. The combination of an old iPhone6 and Helicon Focus creates a sense of size and mass. Capturing this image took an entire evening of trial and error. Take a shot, see what you’ve got, re-position the lights, test, try again.

Lessons From A Pro

The following is a guest blog, generously written by Tom Holley, a retired NS conductor. Thanks Tom!

I thought I might, if you don’t mind, walk you through a typical pick up of a car. I worked for Norfolk Southern, so the rules I use are the rules in effect when I worked. Other railroads’ rules may vary.

Let’s look at a switch engine with one car and a locomotive, going to an industry to pick up one car. We’re operating in the modern era, with an engineer and conductor only crew.

First, after arriving at the switch, the conductor will dismount and pull the engine and car by. If you cut the car off and leave it while you go get the MTY, you’ll have to tie it down and do a securement test. The conductor lines the switch and derail, and ensures the industry blue flag is down. He then tell the engineer that the switch is lined and the derail is off. The engineer will ask for a double check, and the conductor will reply “Double checked.”

The job will then shove down and stop one car length from the coupling. On NS, a conductor can’t ride to a coupling except on a locomotive.This allows the conductor to get down, and perform an inspection on the car. Before you couple to a car, you want to inspect the car for a number of things: are all hoses disconnected, are all ramps out of boxcar doors, are all wheel chocks removed, and are all people clear. Is the car on the rail? The car did not hit and damage a bumping post, did it? You check these things first, before coupling to the car, for two reasons: First of all, safety; are the car and surrounding area clear to enable moving the car? Secondly, to protect your job. It the car is derailed, damaged, shoved off the end of a track, or still hooked up, and you couple to it, it becomes your responsibility, whether you did the damage or not. Also, if you need to adjust a drawhead to ensure the coupling lines up, you have the required fifty feet between cars to do so.

If it’s safe to couple, couple up. Then stretch the car; do not release the handbrake until you’re sure it’s a good couple. (note from Lance. I was incorrect in my video explanation of this earlier) The point of a stretch is make sure the car is coupled. If it’s not, and you release the hand brake, the car might roll off. If it’s a good couple, get three step (or red zone) protection, and cut the air in and knock off the brake. Then pull the car out, and line the switch and derail back. Tell the engineer they are lined, and give him his double check.

Now that everything is together and locked up, if you do an air test do it now. After that, get on the engine and leave. Now, there are as many ways to switch as there are railroaders. But when you are a conductor, and on the ground by yourself, the little things add up. Every switch lined, every hand brake tied, and all the walking done is up to you. So make it easy on yourself. My father, with 48 years of engineer experience gave me some of the best advice I ever got, “When you get tired of walking, then you’ll start thinking.”

Just some observations from an old retiree.

Regards,

Tom Holley