I just stumbled across TrainLife, a great site if you need online access to full copies of certain out-of-print model and railroad magazines, including Model Builder, Model Railroading and Railmodel Journal.
Category Archives: Research
Maritime Madness
After our disappointing visit to Searsport on Friday, it was very refreshing today to find the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. The museum is a wealth of information on ship-building in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I picked up a couple of books, and took several photographs, including this one of an HO scale model of a turn-of-the-century shipyard that was in Bath (the museum is situated on the original site, and features restored buildings from two shipyards).
We didn’t have time to go through the entire museum, but we’ll make a point of spending a couple of days at the museum on our next visit to Maine.
New Schooner for Searsport
While traveling from Bar Harbor down to Rockland, ME today, we rolled through Searsport, ME, and stopped at the home of Blue Jacket Shipcrafters. We picked out a nice model of a Friendship Sloop for our living room, and Donna bought me a beautiful kit of an 1877 New England Schooner. It will make a lovely addition to the town of Searsport on the Corinna & Searsport.
We also spent some time poking around Searsport. It’s amazing that almost no evidence of the once major shipbuilding industry remains. I did find one original looking boat shed and some evidence of the marine railway that used to serve it.
Many of the buildings in the town of Searsport are intact, based in the few pictures I’ve been able to find. Of the nine shipyards once in operation in Searsport, I could find obvious remains of only two — maybe three. Searsport was once the busiest port and shipbuilding center in all of Maine, but it is curiously un-documented, unlike other ports such as Rockland.
On another interesting note, there’s a print on the wall in our room that shows the two four-masted schooners (Hester and Luther) that were brought to Wiscasset in 1932 by Frank Winter, who was owner of the WW&F at the time. The ships languished after the railroad’s demise in the mid-thirties, and were finally removed in 1998. (more details on the Hester and Luther can be found here).
On30 Freight Car Trucks and Coupler Selection
I received an interesting question via the site today from Tom Rose:
I am learning about the differences in coupler height on the different Bachmann issue freight trucks. It seems like I can easily buy the center height shank coupler, but how about the shank even with the top of the coupler? Does Bachmann sell these too? What is the number of this coupler? Are the EZ-Mate HO Couplers really the same size as the On30 couplers? Thanks much!
The short answer to your first question is that Kadee, Bachmann and McHenry all make “drop-in” couplers with center-shank, over-shank (shank even with the top) and under-shank (shank even with the bottom).
For your second question, Bachmann uses the same couplers for On30 as they do for HO. So, the Kadee, Bachmann and McHenry HO couplers will work fine.
Now, it gets knotty. Bachmann has made On30 trucks and underframes in two heights — the original “high” riding cars, and the newer “low” riding cars. Bachmann supplies the appropriate couplers with the cars so that the height will be consistent across their product line. This coupler height coincides with the NMRA-standard HO standard gauge coupler height. This, traditionally, has been the height that most On30 modelers have used, even before the Bachmann products came on the market.
Some modelers feel that this coupler height is too low, especially if they’re trying to represent 3-foot prototypes using On30. Other modelers feel that they would prefer to use On3 couplers, as they are supposedly more appropriately sized, and mount them at the correct On3 coupler height.
So, Tom, I hope that I’ve answered your questions!
A Prototype Peek
This picture at railpictures.net shows the prototype Lake Placid yard. This shot was taken from what would be the station on my version of the yard, looking from the stub-end back towards the yard throat.
Obviously, I’ve taken a few liberties with the layout — moving the station and relocating the tracks slightly. I do, however, think that I will have done a pretty good job of retaining the flavor of the operation of the yard.
I thought that I had, at one point or another, outlined the operations and basic movements that occurred at the yard, but, I can’t find the posting anywhere. I’ll try to dig up the text, and post it in the next few days.