A Few Images

With spring in full swing in New Jersey, I'm tied up with outdoor maintenance and with family trips.  So, here are a few photos from the last operating session for you all.  These are taken with my iPhone, with brightness and a bit of cropping adjusted afterwards in Photoshop.

First, new C40-8W 6213 share shop space with a former Reading GP40-2:

A beat-up old Erie Lackawanna gondola sits in Onondaga Yard:

The backshop area at Onondaga Yard, after midnight on May 9, 1994:

WAON-10, the Onondaga Cutoff local job, returns to Onondaga Yard in the late afternoon of May 9, 1994 ahead of some rain showers:

Downtown Syracuse, NY, shimmers in the valley below as dwarf signals and a safety light glow at CP282, before dawn on May 9 1994.

Yard lights provide illumination for YAON-20, doing overnight classification work at Onondaga Yard.

Operation sessions provide lots of good opportunities for snapshots like this, and really let the 'creative mojo' get started.  Often it is images like these that can generate some more ideas for scenes, which helps to keep me interested.

Enjoy the turn to summer, and check back soon - there is always something changing on the Onondaga Cutoff!

~RGDave

Some Prototype Inspiration

Now and again, we come across a photo that is just asking to be modeled.  For the new branch line out of Onondaga Yard, I needed to construct an underpass where it crosses beneath the Onondaga Cutoff Main Line.  I had planned on a simple concrete tunnel, narrow and height-restricted to less than 16 scale feet.  

Last week, however, regular Trainmaster Rich W. forwarded a photo to me courtesy of Fred Chidester, which shows a bridge that has presented itself to be the perfect prototype for the underpass.  This deck-girder bridge, constructed in the 1930's or 1940's with the New York Central lettering and logos still obvious in 2016, will be replicated on the OC.

Atlas Model Railroad Co. makes a thru-girder bridge whose girders are a close match for this one.  It is a bit of a project to cut the bridge apart and then convert the girders for use in my situation, and I will document some of that project here.

With springtime comes the annual lack of time for layout progress, but we will keep pushing as always and present that here.

~RGDave