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VMRJ Down by the depot at Northeastern Junction By Al Barten 
Down by the depot, watching all the trains go by. There was a time when hanging around the depot was a daily activity -- something like hanging out at the mall is today. In small towns across America the arrival of a train meant the arrival of friends and loved ones, mail, packages from Sears Roebuck, or just a reason to get together with the boys. In an era free from TV and other popular forms of communication, the railroad was a connection with the outside world. For the young and young at heart, the train's arrival was a chance to watch trains, which could evoke visions of a future career on the railroad or a call to wanderlust and dreams of far off places. For people who's livelihood depended on the railroad, the train's arrival could mean business at the local hotel or eatery was on its way, or it could be a call to action for baggage handlers, cab drivers, and mail handlers. For old-timers the depot could be a source of social interaction, and the train's arrival a reminder of one's past employment. I designed the Northeastern Junction module with something else in mind -- which I'll get to -- but found along the way that taking a break from the "chores" of switching freight cars in order to watch the trains arrive and depart (or go by, in the case of the Boston & Maine Minute Man) was great fun. My original idea had more to do with portraying an approach to working with modules. I had been thinking about group projects for some time and concluded that it would be more suitable to think in terms of nodes and extensions rather than uniformly sized baseboards and standard track locations. I had already begun a short line route with the intersection of two railroads as my starting point, so the Northeast Junction is really a merging of the two ideas. The intersection is what we'll focus on. Interchanges Railroads naturally run from point to point, though in certain situations, such as rapid transit systems, they may loop at each end and thus run continuously. It didn't take early railroad builders long to realize that most of their freight business was derived from through freight rather than local freight. Their response was to create a crisscrossing network of rails that spanned the country. Thus the interchange, or junction, was a place where rail lines intersected -- either from the same company or differing companies. As the introduction suggests, the junction was where the action took place. For model railroaders and train simulators, the junction gives sense to the shipments we see passing through our layouts. Some of those shipments have destinations within the section we are modeling, but many more are just passing through, perhaps heading off in differing ways from the junction. To further the idea of letting interchanges be the focus of simulated rail networks, we've added a new prototype data section to the Journal and stocked it with the first of what we hope will be many such articles, this one being the track plan of the Shelburne Falls, MA, depot area. The plan has some interesting features. First, the two railroads join outside of town and continue into Shelburne Falls over B&M trackage. The New Haven, which joined the B&M to the east of Shelburne Falls, terminates at Shelburne Falls, while the B&M continues on to Mechanicsburg, NY, just north of Albany, and then Schenectady. Second, the Shelburne Falls & Colrain Street Railway terminates at the Shelburne Falls depot and interchanges freight cars with the two railroads. See "Shelburne Falls: New England railroad town." Northeastern Junction The feature of this article is the Northeastern Junction (NEJ). It could be the crossing of any two railroads, but was conceived as a trunk line, say the B&M, that runs east-west along the northern tier of Massachusetts, and a short line that crosses the B&M and serves communities to the north and south. The short line could in fact connect and interchange with another line at some point. 
Interchange schematic. A look at the 1948 Handy Railroad Atlas of the United States shows the following interchanges that meet the general idea of the NEJ. Of course the NEJ is entirely fictitious, so there's no attempt to replicate anything about these interchanges.
The Rutland, though principally a Vermont road, crosses two trunk lines in New York, and is the most like what I had in mind when I began the NEJ as a would-be short-line called the Green Mountain Division. Layout The NEJ was intended to be the starting point, a layout that would give users a chance to extend it in at least four directions. To make it more useful in the interim, I first added return loops and storage sidings to both ends of the trunk line. These are fiddle yards as discussed by John D’Angelo in his article "Tracks to expand your railroad world." 
West Fiddle Yard. I liked the first fiddle yards so much I went ahead and built more fiddle yards, one at each end of the short line. These are different from the trunk line loops in that they also provide yards for storing strings of freight cars and short tracks for additional locomotives. You can use these yards for breaking down and making up trains, and you can also use the loops for continuous running. 
South Fiddle Yard. The fiddle yards are intended to be temporary, so don’t hesitate to tear them out and extend these lines. Note that the fiddle yards are not textured. Note also that the track in front of the grain elevator is LARS-compatible (see John D'Angelo's article "Moving your freight with LARS." I’ve posted the NEJ at the Trainz Download Station (DLS) for downloading. It should be available by the time you read this. The following assets are at the DLS; all others are built-in.
Traffic I’ve provided a siding at the west end of the interchange for the trunk line to store a switcher. It seems likely that with big trains rolling through town, any switching of cars to or from these trains would be done with a switcher. Of course it could also be assumed that only local freights stop here and are thus able to do their own switching. You have a choice. In terms of freight traffic, I’ve outlined the following in the northeastern context. Coal. Coal would be coming in on the trunk line from the west (up from the south or west via the Delaware & Hudson). Long coal trains could serve power plants to the east. Local deliveries of coal to small distributors could head north or south from the junction. Milk. I like to model the 1950s era, so morning milk trains were still a part of the scene. Milk cars could come from the north or south and be joined to eastbound milk or express reefer trains. Express reefer. Again, as part of the 1950s, express freight trains of reefers bearing fresh fruits and vegetables from California would be on their way to Boston on a daily basis. Wood and wood products. To the north there could be thriving lumber/timber products businesses such as lumber, pulpwood, furniture, and paper. Paper production requires chemicals coming in. Stone and stone products. Look north to Vermont for marble, New Hampshire for granite, and Maine for slate. Oil. There’s certainly a market in the northeast for heating oil. This would be coming from the west, but also from the refineries in New Jersey (i.e., from the east via Boston). General merchandise. Look for plenty of boxcars going every which way. Automobiles. Auto trains would be moving east when loaded; west when empty. Intermodal. If you’re interested in more recent eras, there is plenty of intermodal action on the trunk line. Operation I haven’t set up a timetable, but the NEJ would be perfect for timetable and car order operations. I’ve found that you don’t need a maze of track work to keep busy switching freight cars. All abo-o-o-ard! Enough talk. Let’s get on with runnin’ them trains.
Until the next time ...
Al
Article and screen shots ©2004 Alfred Barten. All rights reserved. |
