Don Janes’ White River Jct.
Central Vermont No. 452, an M3a class Consolidation, is being turned on the turntable (above) and will be soon be heading south to Palmer, Massachusetts, on a local freight. The switchtender has lined the route (below) and looks on as a northbound B&M freight, behind a pair of aging A-B FT’s, makes it way slowly past the yard office towards the yard.
which skirts around the outside of the yard. A long runaround track, the diesel serving track and caboose stor- age track as well as turntable leads run off a separate lead at each end of the yard. Due to space limitations I had to leave out a few of the tracks shown on the plan, but overall it is a close rendition of the actual yard. It took a lot of planning to get the yard laid out the way I wanted, so I used pieces of flex track and built up turnouts to play with the location until I came up with an arrangement that worked. Once this was established I marked all the track centers and glued cork to the plywood where all the tracks were to go. At this point I had to make a major decision as to whether to use hand laid track or flex track and whether to go with ready-made turnouts or build my own. The rest of the layout has hand laid track and scratchbuilt turnouts. After much de- liberation and weighing the cost factor verses the time factor I decided to buy a bunch of Shinohara code 70 flex track and invest in Fast Tracks turnout building jigs and associated tools. This turned out to be a very wise choice. The yard ended up consuming 14 No.
6 Fast Tracks jig turnouts and three other ones. Going with the flex track in the yard proved to be a very good choice since it was not only a lot faster but reaching over the layout to drive spikes would likely have put my back out of commission for a long time. I fol- lowed Paul Scoles’ excellent article in the November, 2009, issue of RMC
50 OCTOBER 2012
about weathering flex track and am very pleased with the results. All the turnouts on the layout are powered with Tortoise slow motion switch mo- tors controlled by fascia-mounted tog- gle switches.
Once the yard was completed I need-
ed a yard office. Finding photos of the prototype White River Junction yard office was not an easy task. I couldn’t find any suitable reference photos to use to build a model from, so I used a kit
of an interlocking tower I had
picked up a train show. Although it is not an accurate model of the prototype it does serve the purpose and looks good as a yard office at a major yard.
Once all the ballast, weeds and details were added I put switchstands at all the turnouts. I used Grandt Line and Alder Models (out of business) switch- stands with CV style targets to give a correct CV look to the scene. The CV’s White River Junction yard is bordered by a river on one side and a high hill overlooking the yard and roundhouse on the other. I did not mod- el the actual river but used a long. low tree-covered ridge behind which the river supposedly runs. In my case it is the hidden Rutland mainline. I didn’t want to put a hill in front of the yard scene, so I added a few old mills in the foreground to give it a New England flavor and also break up the long straight run of the yard. I feel these foreground structures make the yard look longer because there is a stretch just north of the roundhouse where the tracks are hidden by the buildings, then show up further down, giving the illusion of distance. To separate the entire yard scene from the rest of the layout I added a river at each end, the south end crossed by a scratchbuilt stone arch bridge and the north end on a 150-foot Micro Engineering deck bridge sup- ported by New England Brownstone abutments and piers. Although not true to prototype as far as the location of the rivers, there are several river crossings in White River Junction, so, again, I felt these added to the feel of the area. The White River Junction engine servicing area and freight yard was a very ambitious project and took up a lot of time, but was very enjoyable to build and plan. I now have ample room to store and service locomotives and stage freight trains for their next run down the Connecticut River Line.
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