MODEL
RAILROADING IN A TIME WARP
Groundhog Day is long past (except in the movie, of course, where it
goes on ad infinitum) but when John Swanson’s PRR Cresson Branch came
up on our March home layout tour schedule the opportunity to check up
on Punxsutawney Phil again was irresistible. John is from Punxsutawney
and has set his model railroad in the area from Cresson, Pennsylvania,
just west of Horseshoe Curve, through Punxsutawney and continuing
westward from there. It’s a large layout, weaving through several
different rooms and takes up most of the available space in John’s
sizeable basement. It was designed using the XTrack CAD program. John
uses the standard construction techniques and bench work components
going back to Linn Westcott’s original girder construction method, with
Atlas code 83 flex track and Shinohara DCC friendly turnouts over cork
roadbed, all held together with DAP 230 adhesive – no nails; even his
curves are super-elevated by stringing .029 fishing line under one side
of the track. The primary DCC control system is Digitrax. The always on
Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) configuration running on Raspberry
Pi3 that supports the panel images used to control the turnouts works
via a Microsoft Desktop connection using any PC. And that concludes our
Geek language lesson for today.
The
focus is on operation; he and his fellow modelers have things moving
quite nicely ahead of schedule, and possibly even under budget (What
exactly does under budget mean? I’ve never heard that expression used
around here before) with the goal of instituting operating sessions
later this year. John is using hardware and software that will allow
for control of trains and turnouts via Android tablets as well as by
your standard DCC controllers, a classic example of culture shock to
those of us who still have Lambert and Shinohara Twin Coil machines
thrown by pushing little spring loaded SPST red and green buttons; he
has also installed several Rapido Railcrew uncoupling devices at
strategic locations under the track, a new and much sought after
technological innovation that makes automatic uncoupling during
operating sessions virtually foolproof.
There’s
something about John’s railroad that give you the feeling that you’ve
walked into a time warp. Set in the transition era, there was plenty of
steam and diesel action. The SW's, Sharks, and EMD’s are from various
model manufacturers; the I1s, K4s, and M1 class steam locomotives are
all by BLI, and there were groups of N5 series cabooses spotted at
various locations on the layout waiting to be tied on to
departing freights. A pair of Baldwin Shark units were running that day
with a dozen or so box cars, as was a twelve car Broadway Limited train
made up of the new Walther’s cars and pulled by double headed K4’s, a
most impressive sight. The whole scene was standard early 1950’s PRR
except that they were all controlled by 2017 cutting edge electronic
devices such as touch screen tablets, things that you rarely saw in
sci-fi movies back in those days. You almost had to step back and think
for a minute; in which century are we, exactly? A significant amount of
basic construction is already completed, the track is installed, and
the trains are running over the branch successfully under these
advanced space aged controls. There is very little scenery except for
some switch towers, but there is ample room for it when the time comes.
The only thing missing was an HO model of Phil himself. There was an
unconfirmed rumor that while we were there he was in his hole taking a
nap, having finished his work for the year and collected his check. A
typical celebrity, he couldn’t be bothered to wake up and crawl out of
it just to greet us, his loyal groupies.
For
someone like me, who once had a DC rectifier wired to a Lionel
transformer to power up his Varney F3, visiting John’s layout was
comparable to visiting the Starship Enterprise. I used to think that
DCC was the cat’s pajamas (now there’s an expression perfectly attuned
to the Ancient Modeler’s era), but while watching those trains
controlled by all those sophisticated electronics, I felt more like the
GEICO caveman: a person living in but completely disconnected from the
real world around him as it currently exists. And if that weren’t
depressing enough, Elizabeth Boisvert was there contributing to the
surreal atmosphere by recording the entire 1950’s scene on her
state-of-the-art smart phone camera that takes digital pictures as well
my Nikon, that is when it’s not communicating with some Martians up in
the cloud. My wife keeps suggesting that I join the 21st century with
invitations sent, no doubt, from her iPad or one of the other Treckkie
type electronic communication devices that she has. Maybe I should take
her up on it.
Bob
Rosenberg
