Maintenance of Way

We took the VIA to Toronto last weekend, and as we pulled out of Coburg I caught sight of this MOW equipment in the yard:

My wife managed to snap a pic of the head end as we went by, and you can't see that further back on the string is a big back-hoe thing, and a control cab at the far end. But a little Googling finds the Herzog corporate site, and a page on the Multi-Purpose Machine, including a video of it in operation (and if you linger on the page long enough, an MPM drives by in the top banner). The cars look like modified well cars, and the "back-hoe" can drive up and down the length of the train.

It just so happens that, a few months back, I built this little cast-metal kit from Railway Express Miniatures (paint job courtesy my dear wife):


Sort of an earlier iteration of the same idea. Very cool to see a prototype.

How Do Trains Stay On The Track?

In case you didn't know, explained by the late, great Richard Feynman:



However, I don't expect it applies so much to the little kind.

Open House at Walkley Yard

Almost every spring, the Ottawa Central Railway puts on an open house as part of the railway-safety program. And for some mysterious reason, in most years the weather is crappy that day. Mike Hamer and the Friday Night Group sensibly went early before things got too wet. By the time we arrived, the intermittent drizzle had turned to steady rain. Oh well.

The Bytown Railway Society had a few pieces from their collection out, including this coal-fired steam crane, shown in operation in these video clips I shot (the background noises are from the OCR locomotive giving cab rides):





Meanwhile, it looks like Trevyn and Adina are still trying to get to Squamish......

Duluth's Other Scenic Railroad


September 10: A block from our campground was a sign pointing down a side-street, reading "TRAIN RIDE". Obviously, we had to check it out, and found ourselves at a trackside shed identifying itself as the Lake Superior & Mississippi Railroad. Back at the (wi-fi equipped!) campground, we hauled out our laptop, found their website, and decided to take the Sunday morning trip. Here is the train we found waiting for us when we turned up the next day -- a 45-ton switcher, two vintage coaches, and the "safari car":

While the coaches are pretty posh, our choice of transport was the open-air safari car -- an old flatcar adapted for passengers.

The tour covers 6.2 miles of track along the St. Louis River, winding west out of Duluth -- all that remains of the mainline of the original LS&M, which operated from 1863 to 1877, before being absorbed by larger railroads. Part of the route is shared track with the BNSF, and in fact our departure was delayed 15 minutes when these two engines came along, ran up the line, and returned with a tank car.

Once en route, we soon find where that BNSF crew was switching: the Tate & Lyle syrup plant.

Proceeding onwards, the line runs through marshland along the edge of the river -- very scenic, and we had a beautiful sunny day. On the way back, this eagle circled above us for a short period, and then we startled a heron in the marsh as we passed.
The LS&M line passes beneath this bridge which carries traffic to the Duluth, Winnipeg & Pacific's Pokegama yard on the Wisconsin side of the river.
Here's the same bridge, seen from across the river -- but what an odd collection of motive power: CN; leased power that looks like ex-Conrail and ex-BN; and Union Pacific.
After a leisurely hour we reach the end of track in the suburbs, and run around for the return journey.





















Between yesterday and today, my capsule review of Duluth train rides is:
The NSSRR is the "rail-fan" trip; but for scenery: the LS&M.

Ore Docks! Mini-quads!

I'd read about ore docks in Model Railroader (see MR November 1992 for a spectacular HO model), but for some reason assumed that, like so many other rail modelling subjects, they were things of the past, now all disused and torn down.

On this trip, I discovered I was wrong. Around Lake Superior, there are several ore docks still standing, and even a few (such as this one in Two Harbors) still in use:
(I apologize for the low contrast; the sun was at a bad angle for photographing the accessible side of the dock).

It's a simple concept: push a string of hoppers up the dock and dump the ore into bins below the track. Later when the lake boat comes in, lower the chutes and fill the hold. Here's a couple of close-ups of Missabe Road (now CN) hoppers up on the dock:





About those hoppers: that's another thing I had thought was gone -- 70 tons? Hasn't everyone gone to 100 tons by now? And aren't they older than the regulatory maximum life of rail cars? Apparently not, as there are plenty in the Two Harbors yard. (I also picked up an informative book from the museum in Duluth: Michigan-Ontario Iron Ore Railroads, by Patrick C. Dorin, which gives the state of the industry as it was in 2002 -- according to Dorin, some lines are still running 55-ton cars).

Now as it happens, I have a fondness for these 70-ton hoppers: Atlas makes a nice one in N-scale, in a variety of road names, which can be readily found at hobby shops and train shows -- often at prices under $10 (a definite advantage when you're trying to put together a respectably long unit train!) As a result, without really trying I seem to have accumulated a fleet of about 75 of these things (now all I need is a proper layout to run them on...but that's another story). So this Two Harbors jaunt was sort of Hopper Heaven for me. In addition, they had some of these:

Look carefully, and you'll see orange stripes up the corners of the end car, and on the fourth and fifth cars along. These mark the ends of one "mini-quad" - four hoppers permanently joined together by draw-bars. The DM&IR converted much of their fleet to this configuration in the 1970's, to reduce the number of failure points in an ore train (see MR February 1976, pp. 56&ff). They also added height extensions, as the newer taconite pellets are less dense than the raw iron ore originally carried. Also in the February 1976 MR is an article describing the modifications to off-the-shelf hoppers to bring them closer to this prototype. I decided to try this with a few of my DM&IR hoppers.

First, I needed to fabricate the draw-bars. The MR article scratch-built theirs out of styrene. However, someone at a train show gave me a better idea: every N-scale modeller has about a zillion discarded rapido-style couplers (at least, the ones who have converted to knuckle-couplers do). These things have a T-shaped end that nests in the coupler pocket. By cutting off the big square hook, and doing a little trimming and shaping, you can fabricate the other end into a similar "T". It goes like this:

The patient is ready for surgery:


A bit of work with cutters and a chisel-blade, and we have a candidate draw-bar:

Man-handle that back into the coupler pockets of two wheel-sets:

Repeat thrice, and we have a mini-quad:

Here it is, ready to haul ore:
(OK, I haven't added the extensions or the orange corner stripes. Yet. But even as it stands, it saves a lot of time coupling up the train!)

And here's a guy who's gone the whole way -- quads with extensions and an ore dock (scroll to the bottom -- it's worth it!):

http://www.grvs.com/missabe/nscale/index.htm
http://www.grvs.com/missabe/nscale/atlas_taconite1.jpg
http://www.grvs.com/missabe/nscale/Layout/dc_2.jpg