Notes on Designing, Building, and Operating Model Railroads
A hobby adventure
Brian Ehni attended the Red River RPM near Fort Worth on June 25th. He sent along a few images and notes on the event. Here’s Brian with the report.
We were in the Grand Ballroom of the Forest Hill Civic Center, with clinics in room 202 and a nearby break room. The room was pretty large. They had free water and soft drinks in the kitchen, which were paid for by the $20 entrance fee.
Continue reading “Red River RPM and more”
I recently attended the 2022 Layout Design and Operations Weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I signed up to operate on three layouts and to present on Prototype Inspiration for Manageable Size Layouts. I had a blast!
Continue reading “Take me back to Tulsa”
I’ve been planning a new layout since late in the summer of 2019. I came across the image above a few years ago and it has inspired research into the Baltimore & Ohio’s Allegheny Yard branch in Pittsburgh. In the lead image we see the Allegheny River and the School Street yard sitting on the north shore, circa 1923. Today, the Pittsburgh Pirates play baseball along this shore at PNC Park. The stadium dominates the scene and would be hiding the building with the Teaberry Gum sign.
All images in this blog post are from the Pittsburgh City Photographer collection on the Historic Pittsburgh site, unless noted otherwise.
Continue reading “New layout planning”
Do you recognize this coal hopper? I know you recognize the railroad name, but do you recognize the car design? It looks similar to many hoppers used in the first four decades of the 20th Century. The B&O had more than 1400 of these N-12e class cars listed in the October 1926 Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER). There were 14,364 overall N-12 class cars. Are you surprised?
Continue reading “1926 B&O freight car fleet – 3”
I picked up a few neat photos at the St Louis RPM last summer. I used these in my RPM Chicagoland presentation and thought I’d share them with some notes. Photographs were often taken to document projects in many cities. In these cases, the Reading Company hired a photographer to snap progress photos of a new project at their Port Richmond yards along the Delaware River in Philadelphia. You can see some concrete footers extending through the above image that will connect a new grain pier with a grain elevator. Click on any image here to view a larger size.