Welcome to Trumansburg
PHOTO COURTESY OF BOB BOWERS
This 1952 aerial photo of Trumansburg (above), shows the coal dump and sauerkraut plant. Note the lack of a spur track to the plant. It had been taken out in 1949. On the au- thor’s diorama, which is set in 1941 (below), the service track to the sauerkraut plant is still in place, as the plant was still using the railroad for shipping and receiving.
world famous Black Diamond Express, or, called by some, “the honeymoon train.” Of course, this opened up great business and travel opportunities, as well as huge agricultural prosperity. Not only was Trumansburg the second largest shipper of hay in the United
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States (second to Waterloo, New York) but it was also a huge source of fruit and produce crops. After all, this was a time before California had blossomed as a fruit and produce giant. Many thousands of tons of peaches, apples, grapes, plums, pears and nuts of all
kinds, as well as produce and grains of every description, were shipped from Trumansburg every year. Fortunately, some of the old build- ings were still standing so I could not only measure them to build exact repli- cas, I could still survey the land be- tween them for exact placement of the buildings. The greatest aid I got was from Sanborn Insurance maps and old Lehigh Valley railroad maps. These maps not only had the track plans but all the businesses the railroads serv- iced. By comparing these maps to the actual location I found they were drawn with extreme precision, so why not enlarge those maps to HO scale and use them as a template? With the help of Jay Hart, a friend who works in large scale computer formatting, I did just that. We measured the footprint of one of the existing buildings and en- larged the maps to match those meas- urements to scale. After doing this I measured locations on the enlarge- ment, then checked them back against other existing structures to make sure the template was correct. I also bor- rowed a transit and story pole to sur- vey the old yards and surrounding land to establish my elevations. Even though I am not a surveyor, this task was not hard to figure out and was re- ally a lot of fun.
After obtaining this information, we ended up with a map 24 feet long by five feet-six inches wide. Now I was able to
JANUARY 2013
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