Weekend Photo Fun 2-10-23-??

The Boston & Albany Railroad used 2-6-6T and 4-6-6T double-ended locomotives in commuter service between South Station in Boston and the city’s western suburbs. Commuter trains ran a circuit - outbound along the railroad’s main line 12.25 miles to Riverside (in Newton, MA) and inbound on its Highland branch. They also ran the circuit in the opposite direction. These double-ended suburban type locomotives operated equally well in both forward and reverse, and therefore it was unnecessary to turn them when they completed a circuit. After the B&A terminated suburban passenger service, the Highland branch was purchased by the Metropolitan Transit Authority in 1958 and the branch was reopened as the MTA Riverside Line with light-rail electric cars in 1959.

The 2-6-6T locomotives were built by ALCO Schenectady in 1906 and ’07. Five 4-6-6Ts (Class D - #400 to #404) were built by ALCO in 1928 and remained in Boston commuter service until 1951. They ran on 63-inch driving wheels, weighed 352,000 pounds and produced 41,600 pounds of tractive force at 215 pounds-per-square-inch boiler pressure. They were designed for rapid acceleration and could pull up to 20 passenger cars.

The O gauge models of the 4-6-6Ts were first produced by K-Line and more recently by Lionel – from the same tooling. My model of D-1a #400 (Lionel SKU 2031010) was offered in 2020 at an MSRP of $1099.99. The photos and videos show it in operation on my 12’-by-8’ model railroad. I believe that the 4-6-6T locomotives hauled steel passenger cars when they began service. In later years they pulled New York Central round-roofed passenger cars. Since I don’t own the correct passenger cars for this engine, I run MTH Premier unlettered wood-sided passenger coaches behind this locomotive.

MELGAR

It is, as always, a cold morning in 1949 and the photographer tried to get a photo of the yard's new 44-tonner.  Unfortunately, it was busy moving cars and she never got a clear shot.

A 2022 Christmas Layout memory

Another mini-scene in the back right quarter of the layout.  I bought this pharmacy when it first came out because my daughter is a pharmacist.  The dental sign is because my DIL is a hygienist.  I had Marcie, for those that remember her and her business, "create" a pharmacy and hygienist figure to add to the building.

- walt

I wish I was at this playground when I was a kid:

@MELGAR posted:

The Boston & Albany Railroad used 2-6-6T and 4-6-6T double-ended locomotives in commuter service between South Station in Boston and the city’s western suburbs. Commuter trains ran a circuit - outbound along the railroad’s main line 12.25 miles to Riverside (in Newton, MA) and inbound on its Highland branch. They also ran the circuit in the opposite direction. These double-ended suburban type locomotives operated equally well in both forward and reverse, and therefore it was unnecessary to turn them when they completed a circuit. After the B&A terminated suburban passenger service, the Highland branch was purchased by the Metropolitan Transit Authority in 1958 and the branch was reopened as the MTA Riverside Line with light-rail electric cars in 1959.

The 2-6-6T locomotives were built by ALCO Schenectady in 1906 and ’07. Five 4-6-6Ts (Class D - #400 to #404) were built by ALCO in 1928 and remained in Boston commuter service until 1951. They ran on 63-inch driving wheels, weighed 352,000 pounds and produced 41,600 pounds of tractive force at 215 pounds-per-square-inch boiler pressure. They were designed for rapid acceleration and could pull up to 20 passenger cars.

The O gauge models of the 4-6-6Ts were first produced by K-Line and more recently by Lionel – from the same tooling. My model of D-1a #400 (Lionel SKU 2031010) was offered in 2020 at an MSRP of $1099.99. The photos and videos show it in operation on my 12’-by-8’ model railroad. I believe that the 4-6-6T locomotives hauled steel passenger cars when they began service. In later years they pulled New York Central round-roofed passenger cars. Since I don’t own the correct passenger cars for this engine, I run MTH Premier unlettered wood-sided passenger coaches behind this locomotive.

MELGAR

I always enjoy your pictures and narrative.

Working with 3d printer, developed new scene. It's Abandoned!!

Stuck in a garage....somewhere near the swamps of Jersey.    

Bidding a lukewarm farewell to the cold drafty garage that's been home for the last 17 years are this week's roster: a Rail King Louisville & Nashville SW1500, Lionel's Canadian National ES44AC and Canadian National GP-9, and MTH NYS&W SD70s.  Asked what they'd miss about the old barn the crew on the highlines said the smell of cooking French fries as they passed over the McDonald's below...and not much else.  

Off to a really good start today, thanks Scott for doing this again, I always look forward to the thread each Friday.  I love the shot on the side of the building, that's really cool, I'm glad to see it looking so well and not all messed up by graffiti.
Melgar, I love your layout and this week you're running one of my favorite locomotives even though I'm an SP man to the hilt, I love those little locos, there's just something about them that makes them so attractive.  I have the Legacy NYC 4-6-6 and I use it to pull a mail train and sometimes a Troop train with an Atlas passenger cars on the back end.  Those little suckers can really pull and have the best sound to them, I just love em.
Stangtrain,  I agree, that would have been a blast to be playing on the playground and see one of those or any train come by.  To this day, if I see a train going along and I have a place to pull over, I'll do it and watch the train go by, a favorite pastime of mine.
CAPPilot, don't you just love those little 44 Toner's, they've always had a home in my meager collection but I like to run them every once in a while, I have 3 of them and the WBB 70 Ton in SP and one of the 44's is in SP also, the other two are D&RGW.  They make great little switch engines.
Pennsyfan, I totally agree with you about Melgar's posts and I love his two layouts, I'd love to have room to be able to build 2 layouts.  One would be strictly SP and the other would be all of the rest of the roads I like and have locomotives from.  Best of both worlds.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.

Thanks Scott for getting us rolling!    Here's my photos of the fun kind for this fine weekend!

A Pennsy A5 looms large as her engineer Floyd Smoot  and conductor Charlie Evans talk over the switch list for today.  According to the list, this crew will have an extraordinaryly busy day.

With steam hissing, air pump thumping, and the high pitched wine of the dynamo, fireman Zeke Lunsford sits on the left seat box in the cab as his eyes scan the gauges.   Meanwhile Charlie and Floyd have finished discussing the switch list and are now exchanging a few jokes.

O'l number 94 , a well worn weather beaten tea pot, still has a bit of shine as it picks up some rays of the morning sun.  A reliable veteran of the rails for the last 50 plus years o'l 94 has no end in sight.  The chief mechanical officer, Flange Wheeler, says " as long as she can be fired o'l 94 will be hired." ... just another day on the railroad!

Last weekend, there was a baby shower for my daughter who is expecting. Consequently, I cleaned up the layout room for visitors and positioned some of my buildings.....

Have a great and safe weekend, folks!

Peter

@MELGAR posted:

The Boston & Albany Railroad used 2-6-6T and 4-6-6T double-ended locomotives in commuter service between South Station in Boston and the city’s western suburbs. Commuter trains ran a circuit - outbound along the railroad’s main line 12.25 miles to Riverside (in Newton, MA) and inbound on its Highland branch. They also ran the circuit in the opposite direction. These double-ended suburban type locomotives operated equally well in both forward and reverse, and therefore it was unnecessary to turn them when they completed a circuit. After the B&A terminated suburban passenger service, the Highland branch was purchased by the Metropolitan Transit Authority in 1958 and the branch was reopened as the MTA Riverside Line with light-rail electric cars in 1959.

The 2-6-6T locomotives were built by ALCO Schenectady in 1906 and ’07. Five 4-6-6Ts (Class D - #400 to #404) were built by ALCO in 1928 and remained in Boston commuter service until 1951. They ran on 63-inch driving wheels, weighed 352,000 pounds and produced 41,600 pounds of tractive force at 215 pounds-per-square-inch boiler pressure. They were designed for rapid acceleration and could pull up to 20 passenger cars.

The O gauge models of the 4-6-6Ts were first produced by K-Line and more recently by Lionel – from the same tooling. My model of D-1a #400 (Lionel SKU 2031010) was offered in 2020 at an MSRP of $1099.99. The photos and videos show it in operation on my 12’-by-8’ model railroad. I believe that the 4-6-6T locomotives hauled steel passenger cars when they began service. In later years they pulled New York Central round-roofed passenger cars. Since I don’t own the correct passenger cars for this engine, I run MTH Premier unlettered wood-sided passenger coaches behind this locomotive.

MELGAR

Mel, nice addition to your B&A fleet.  I always liked those 4-6-6Ts since K-Line put them out.

Good to see everyone's great photos each week.

I have my main layout spread out over 2 rooms of the basement. This is the slot car room - a wooden 4 lane 16x8 track built in 1960 by a local club that I refurbished and installed many years later,  the room built around it, with 3 loops of train tracks underneath, one loop around it, and 2 loops near the ceiling above it.  All tracks run into the other room where the main railway is with a lot more track and yards. Here are some interesting slot cars running around the track.

On one of the ceiling loop tracks through the 2 rooms I currently have this bright MTH GN blue engine pulling a long GN freight - I like this engine in Big Sky Blue and it is a strong puller (a Lionel GP7 dummy behind), I really like this new Menards auto rack I got recently looks good though of course not scale length.

Was a nice sunny day with the spring flowers starting to open, the perfect day for painting outside. Repainting some used passenger cars and doodlebug. A little sanding of the old lettering, wash, 2 coats of Tamiya for plastics red primer, followed by air brushing of 3 coats of Vallejo custom mix of paint for my local railway color match, then 2 coats of clear for decaling. Some masking and respraying the roofs black. I actually have a total of 18 passenger cars waiting for a custom decal order to arrive. Lots of work to do this week to now decal all of these, then a coat of clear coat but the big job is reassembling them all getting all the windows in takes time.

The grandsons love the trains, this week I set up all my Fastrak around the living room and down the hallways. Thomas was running on the LionChief remote figure 8. The 4 other trains I have the motors gutted for the boys to push around.

This week I have some photos of the town of Port Royal which is located about 45 miles up the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers from Harrisburg, PA. It’s concrete arch bridge which carries PA Route 75 over the former PRR Middle Division is one of the signature items for railfans of the railroad….and is now in the process of being torn down and replaced with a generic steel I beam stringer bridge! Anyhow, here are some pictures of my rendition of the railroad as it passes through Port Royal.

First, here we see a westbound freight led by a PRR Decapod as it approaches the bridge. Passenger service to the station ended around the time of this image in the late 1940’s:

Now here’s a shot of the same train a few seconds later after it has passed under the bridge:

And here is a view of the town and station unobstructed by the train:

Now here we are about two decades later in the early years of the Penn Central. Notice the consist is built not only of engines painted for PC, but some that still remain in PRR lettering. The station would be torn down shortly thereafter in 1969.

For comparison, here is an image of the prototype bridge just a few years ago in the Norfolk Southern era that I took during a railfan trip. The model was scratchbuilt of industrial size sheets of styrene (4’ X 8’ in size) then painted in various shades of khaki (not gray!) and then weathered with chalks  to recreate the look of weathered concrete, including cracks with efflorescence (draining lime deposits):

And last but not least, an unrelated photo I took a few days ago at “Railfan Heaven” which is the bridge over the east end of Conway Yard near Pittsburgh and my house. See the three stopped NS trains? That’s due to the huge train wreck and fire about 20 miles to the west at East Palestine Ohio. The trains were backed up since the Ft. Wayne mainline was shut down, and trains had to be detoured which was causing all kinds of delays:

That’s it for this week. Enjoy!

@corsair29 posted:

Hey, nice video, and I like your RMT tank cars. I have them in the same paint schemes, and at $30 a car, you can't beat them!

@PRRMiddleDivision posted:

Hey, nice video, and I like your RMT tank cars. I have them in the same paint schemes, and at $30 a car, you can't beat them!

Neal,

Any issues with the couplers on the RMT tank cars?

@BradFish1 posted:

Neal,

Any issues with the couplers on the RMT tank cars?

Two had a broken off brake hose, but they sent me replacements. No other issues.

Came home with these a couple weeks ago from a train show in Lancaster, NY. All for $100. Worthwhile trip for me.

Enjoying a cold soda while out bike riding with the gang.

@MELGAR posted:

The Boston & Albany Railroad used 2-6-6T and 4-6-6T double-ended locomotives in commuter service between South Station in Boston and the city’s western suburbs. Commuter trains ran a circuit - outbound along the railroad’s main line 12.25 miles to Riverside (in Newton, MA) and inbound on its Highland branch. They also ran the circuit in the opposite direction. These double-ended suburban type locomotives operated equally well in both forward and reverse, and therefore it was unnecessary to turn them when they completed a circuit. After the B&A terminated suburban passenger service, the Highland branch was purchased by the Metropolitan Transit Authority in 1958 and the branch was reopened as the MTA Riverside Line with light-rail electric cars in 1959.

Thanks for your very nice post, Mel.  Not only is your B&A commuter train engaging, the short paragraphs of background information about the prototype were very interesting.

As a boy, I subscribed to Railroad Magazine, and remember an article about the new MTA Riverside Line, which stated that it was an ex-Boston & Albany branch line and showed the most modern (1951) PCC cars running there, painted green rather than orange.  In an ancient issue of Trains, I found photos of B&A 4-6-6T engines, but, though informative, they were not first hand knowledge.  I lived about as far from Boston as one could, so until adulthood allowed me to visit the northeast, all my knowledge of railroading there was obtained from reading magazines.  Later I learned about how the B&A had a bidirectional oval over its main and a branch.  But I never had put the branch part of it together with the Riverside Line.  You lighted that bulb, so to speak, and I am grateful for the clarity you provided.  Thanks, again.

Very great start to WFF...All I can say for my post is "OH NO!"

Dave

@trumpettrain

Patrick,

I can't speak for anyone else but the images you posted do not appear on my Firefox browser. In place of the images, it says "Image Not Found" in three places.

MELGAR

@MELGAR posted:

@trumpettrain

Patrick,

I can't speak for anyone else but the images you posted do not appear on my Firefox browser. In place of the images, it says "Image Not Found" in three places.

MELGAR

DITTO!

Ron

The new Atlas O Great Northern and Illinois Terminal ACF CENTER FLOW 6-bay cylindrical covered hoppers are the types of freight cars that used to be around frequently up to 1999, then were gradually replaced by new covered hoppers.

Andrew

Falcon Service

Train room going to the Darkside?  Red 5 standing by.

Patrick......I'm not seeing them, either.

Peter

THE ROCK PS-2-CD 4427 low-side 3-bay covered hoppers from Atlas O in a scheme that used to be common on the Soo Line and Grand Trunk Western.

An adjustment in the camera settings changed the intensity of the blue.

Andrew

Falcon Service

@MartyE posted:

Train room going to the Darkside?  Red 5 standing by.

Man, that is a great cabinet! Prepandemic, my local retro gaming bar had a machine, I think one of the originals, and boy was it a fun game to play. Got pretty good at it, Asteroids, and Centipede... then 2020 happened.

Added this SP Heritage boxcar to the UP consist.  Thank you @Alex M.

Freight cars that I have not seen for years on real railroad are the Chessie System B&O PS-2 2-bay covered hoppers.

Lionel had a 3 car set of Chessie System PS-2 hoppers made years ago.

I have not photographed them until now.

Andrew

Falcon Service

@falconservice posted:

THE ROCK PS-2-CD 4427 low-side 3-bay covered hoppers from Atlas O in a scheme that used to be common on the Soo Line and Grand Trunk Western.

An adjustment in the camera settings changed the intensity of the blue.

Andrew

Falcon Service

I saw one of these on a real train last week. It was the first one I've seen, and I wasn't ready for a photo. It was slightly weathered with a little graffiti but great for its age.

The Yard Cop checking on these railfans.

Finished my Korber Building Flat extended kit from Mr. Muffins this weekend!

@Redshirt214 posted:

Man, that is a great cabinet! Prepandemic, my local retro gaming bar had a machine, I think one of the originals, and boy was it a fun game to play. Got pretty good at it, Asteroids, and Centipede... then 2020 happened.

Well back in the 80s at Beto's Pizza, after work I could put a quarter in this machine and have to walk away from it because I couldn't lose.  Not so much initially today but funny thing is I'm starting to recognize the patterns again.  Might have to get some cuts and put a counter next to the machine to bring back the "Force".