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The Wabash Railroad
in Southern Ontario, circa 1951
ABOUT MY RAILROAD... Until the Autumn of 2008 I was building a layout based on the Canadian National Railway’s branch line hub in Palmerston, Ontario. Then, I had the opportunity to visit Bill Darnaby’s well-known HO scale model railroad, The Maumee Route. The experience had a profound effect on me and caused me to rethink everything I was attempting to do in my train room. After some careful thinking about options for the space, I settled upon modeling something that was in my own backyard. The Wabash Railroad had a significant operation across Southern Ontario that just begs to be modeled. The Buffalo Division was primarily a single-track bridge line established to reduce shipping times between Buffalo, New York, and Detroit, Michigan.I am building a double-decked layout featuring selected towns and signature scenes on the Wabash Railroad’s 240-mile Buffalo Division. My layout models the segment between Aylmer and Cayuga, Ontario. This 60-mile stretch of the Wabash includes a number of online customers typical of small-town Ontario, as well as a section of the mainline shared with the Canadian National Railways’s Hagersville Sub. Since I am modeling 1951 it will be neat to see the little CNR 2-6-0s sharing the rails with the paired F7A units used on the Wabash Red Ball freights. I’ll be posting regular updates and photos of my progress on this blog.Please visit often. |
THE LATEST BLOG POST...
Freight Car LaddersMay 11th, 2012  I currently have 4 Sunshine #64.53 Wabash rebuilds on the bench. These are representative of some of the many rebuilds that the Wabash undertook during the 40's to help bolster the fleet and get usage out of perfectly good frames and trucks. The 85000-85199 series were a variant from the other rebuilds in that they retained their 50 ton Andrews trucks and they had different ladders than the other rebuilds. Based upon the photo above I took the rung spacing to be 14", rather than the usual 16" or 18". The supplied stock Tichy ladders were definitely not the right rung spacing. I have been enamored with the ladder building technique from the Speedwitch Wabash AAR cars. A photo-etched pair of stiles that you bend to create the angle and then insert commercial straight grabs once the legs are clipped. Solder or glue and they're ready for mounting.  However the rung spacing on these ladders were wrong for this project. I posted an impromptu survey on STMFC, and among other things, got a suggestion from Tom Madden how how to create my own ladders. A really simple, but very effective technique. http://www.pullmanproject.com/Ladders.pdf. I spent most of the morning creating the 16 required ladders and mounted 4 on one of the cars.  Having said that I'm still going to pursue other options for oddball ladders. With the hopes of making them commercially available. Stay tuned!  |