Recreating Washago interlocking
My pal Jeffrey Smith from Missouri (visit his excellent CNR Ontario railway history site here or click the link in the sidebar any time) visited for a few hours yesterday. Jeff and I graduated as Queen's University engineers about a year apart. The difference being that as a railway signal engineer, he is still applying his knowledge!
Anyway, said signal engineer Jeff has graciously volunteered to design and build (in HO scale) the manual interlocking plant, both the physical and the logical, which existed at Washago circa June 1954. As covered in Steam at Allandale and to be addressed in greater detail in Steam in Northern Ontario, Washago was a hotshot railway junction which rivalled the Toronto-Montreal mainline in traffic density. Indeed, only that double-tracked route and the Oakville and Dundas Subdivisions topped Washago for action. Essentially, the Northern Ontario District mainline (Bala Subdivision) and secondary mainline (Newmarket-Huntsville Subdivisions, a de facto extension of the Ontario Northland Railway) came together here for about 500 feet over a single track bridge. Guarding that bridge to the north and south were interlocking semaphores.
Throw in a 150-ton concrete coaling plant, a massive wooden water tank, a register station with a bay window for each subdivision, and you have a 1950s train watcher's dream location. Washago boasted some of the hottest traffic and certainly the best of mainline steam and diesel power, from Northerns, Mountains (semi-streamlined and otherwise) and Mikados to F-7s and GP-7s.
Anyway, I and talented friends such as Jeff are out to recreate the experience at Washago for all of us who were not fortunate enough to have been there in real life. It is a tall order. For the past few years, I have been systematically acquiring and producing a roster of HO scale locomotives and freight cars to accomplish this task. When the snow melts, I will visit the real life site (about 10 minutes drive from my home) and ascertain the nature of the topography. That will be replicated in styrofoam, then hand laid track will go down.
Back to yesterday: Jeff brought along his first creation, the "lever shack" for Washago. We headed for the garage and airbrushed the building (don't believe you can't airbrush in sub-zero weather; you can). With final assembly and Jeff's blessing in a day or two, I'll post pictures of it in place.
Anyway, said signal engineer Jeff has graciously volunteered to design and build (in HO scale) the manual interlocking plant, both the physical and the logical, which existed at Washago circa June 1954. As covered in Steam at Allandale and to be addressed in greater detail in Steam in Northern Ontario, Washago was a hotshot railway junction which rivalled the Toronto-Montreal mainline in traffic density. Indeed, only that double-tracked route and the Oakville and Dundas Subdivisions topped Washago for action. Essentially, the Northern Ontario District mainline (Bala Subdivision) and secondary mainline (Newmarket-Huntsville Subdivisions, a de facto extension of the Ontario Northland Railway) came together here for about 500 feet over a single track bridge. Guarding that bridge to the north and south were interlocking semaphores.
Throw in a 150-ton concrete coaling plant, a massive wooden water tank, a register station with a bay window for each subdivision, and you have a 1950s train watcher's dream location. Washago boasted some of the hottest traffic and certainly the best of mainline steam and diesel power, from Northerns, Mountains (semi-streamlined and otherwise) and Mikados to F-7s and GP-7s.
Anyway, I and talented friends such as Jeff are out to recreate the experience at Washago for all of us who were not fortunate enough to have been there in real life. It is a tall order. For the past few years, I have been systematically acquiring and producing a roster of HO scale locomotives and freight cars to accomplish this task. When the snow melts, I will visit the real life site (about 10 minutes drive from my home) and ascertain the nature of the topography. That will be replicated in styrofoam, then hand laid track will go down.
Back to yesterday: Jeff brought along his first creation, the "lever shack" for Washago. We headed for the garage and airbrushed the building (don't believe you can't airbrush in sub-zero weather; you can). With final assembly and Jeff's blessing in a day or two, I'll post pictures of it in place.
posted by Ian Wilson at 11:51 AM
1 Comments:
Sounds like a great concept for a layout. I dimmly remember having a simlilar dream until I let some guy from Orillia talk me into building the entire Huntsville Sub.
;-)>
Can't wait to see what you get built....
Tripper Dave in Newmarket
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