Railroading on the D&H Sonnyvale branch
A D&H Alco S-4 moves a Santa Fe reefer through downtown Sonnyvale (right). The loco is one of 51 S-2’s and S-4’s the railroad bought from Alco between 1944 and 1950.
switch lists helped me develop a good profile of who shipped and received what, how often, and in what cars. By looking up reporting marks and car numbers in an Official Railway Equip- ment Register, I was able to assemble a fleet of cars that replicates those which appeared on the actual branch. A com- puter program written by a longtime friend and fellow modeler transforms my customer and freight car data and all its variables into consecutive daily switchlists. My busiest customer gets switched every day, but some cus- tomers might pop up only once a year. As a long
time D&H railfan, I WILLIAM SCHAUMBURG
Powered by a freshly-painted RS-2 in the blue and gray lightning stripe scheme, the lo- cal passenger train heads down Woodchuck Hill in Jasperdale (above). RS-3 4069 spots an LP gas tank car at Adirondack Bottled Gas (below). The real Adirondack Bottled Gas, located in Hudson Falls, N.Y., was the inspiration for the distributor on the layout.
thought I had a good handle on opera- tions, but the two D&H retirees in my regular operating crew set me straight! Yardmaster Bill Frazier and conductor Jim Lafayette were the last people I would have expected to become model railroaders, but less than a year after they bid farewell to their jobs, they each created their own HO worlds, worlds without rain, snow, and higher- ups telling them the latest best way to do their jobs. I’ll never forget Bill’s first “train night” as we all went about our work delivering freight and little pas- sengers with the aplomb of the “pros.” “We were never ever this serious on the real railroad,” he exclaimed. That, and other utterances from the “real rail- roaders” have set the tone for what we do. Spend a day on the Sonnyvale branch and see what I mean. Junction Yard comes alive at 7 a.m. when the crew of the “Hill Freight,” a turn to Sonnyvale and back, begins making up its train. The yard clerk has already typed and handed the conduc- tor a track list showing the cars on each track and a switch list from which the crew will make up its train. Many modelers today move cars about their layouts according to car cards which provide some basic waybill-like infor- mation regarding shippers and con- signees. On the Lake George branch, however, crews worked only from switch lists. A retired conductor who worked in the transition era and be- yond told me that he never handled waybills on the Lake George branch. They remained with local agents and clerks who tracked freight cars for billing purposes. Jim likes the Hill Freight and often grabs Bill to be his “grumpy old engi- neer.” Being a model railroad, it’s easy to look down upon Junction Yard and
44 APRIL 2013
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100