Dick Elwell’s Hoosac Valley


ground cover and handmade trees in Nature’s brightest display of color. Trees are made mostly from weeds– peppergrass and wild oregano–then dyed to provide bursts of fall’s golden glow.


As our eastbound freight nears the


Sawmill River, we want to take note of the three-story structure looming above the falls. The Martin Manufac- turing Company is a well-known South River Model Works kit, one of the com- pany’s annual craftsman offerings. While some of the HVRR’s South River structures were assembled from kits, others are the “master model” itself, the structure that proprietor Bob Van Gelder builds and from which all sub- sequent iterations of that year’s kit are crafted. Martin Machine is one such “mas-


ter.” Standing on the layout between a single-track bend in the mainline and a stretch of branch line, this historical- ly accurate structure comfortably occu- pies a wholly inaccurate setting. In the real world Martin Machine occupied a riverside site from the early 1930’s un- til 1987 turning out hydraulic marking machines for companies worldwide. This equipment enabled Martin’s cus- tomers to impress information into their products, whatever the surface, including steel and wood. Hillerich & Bradsby, for example, stamped the white-ash hardwood of its Louisville Sluggers® helping


players


everywhere to hold their bats “trade- mark up” to avoid splintering them. This imposing 19th century mill still stands in Conway, Mass., although it now contains three stories worth of shops, including what it calls “books you don’t need in a place you can’t find.” You can’t find that place on Dick’s layout, either. That’s because the Hoosac Valley’s visionary wanted the


The Martin Machine Company sits on a hill overlooking the Sawmill River Gorge. This building was built by Bob Van Gelder and was the prototype master for his South Riv- er Modelworks kit of the same name. In this dramatic view, the branch line local tip- toes across the bridge spanning the gorge on its way to switch one of the oldest and most distinctive buildings on the Hoosac Valley Railroad.


on the straightaway. This unbroken run carries us past Dick’s signature scenery and provides an opportunity to enjoy the rolling hills studded with late-autumn trees dressed in red, gold and orange.


Spinning weeds into gold The original HVRR, the layout Dick started in 1961, largely relied on hard- shell for a scenery base: paper towels soaked in Hydrocal®


(not plaster, Dick


emphasizes, which he considers too 46


heavy) and draped over a temporary foundation


of cardboard strips or


crumpled paper. Today Dick is more likely to use a foam-board foundation, both the ubiquitous “pink board,” an extruded polystyrene that also comes in blue and green, as well as the ar- guably messier, less frequently em- ployed white foam. Both are light- weight and easily shaped. Dick covers either the hardshell or foam with real dirt from the land he has lived on for three-quarters of a century, then adds


with Martin’s machines, to remind baseball


This small transition section between Es- sex Junction and Whitehall shows how se- rious Dick is about making the entire lay- out


room as inviting and finished as


possible–nothing is left unfinished. Even the inside of the tunnel is scenicked!


JANUARY 2012


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