Ken - Your Hallmark Frisco cab looks great! I have three of the Overlands, which also look good, but I don't think they are as dimensionally correct as are the Hallmarks. I've never measured them - need to do that sometime. I do have the Hallmark side-door cab, but it is still unpainted. K
Judging by the location of that whistle, I was wondering that had to be loud for the person pulling that lever! Whaaaatduesay! John
To complete the tour of the North Birmingham section of the layout, which is territory serviced by the Seaboard Air Line Railway, here are a few shots of the SAL engine house and industrial switching area. Enjoy. Ken McElreath
Ken - Fascinating stuff, as usual. Unless one's modeling a very small slide of Friscoland, I always enjoy seeing interchange power - the SBD switcher and caboose go a long way towards establishing a sense of place. In this case, "we're definitely in the SE of Friscoland, not SW or elsewhere." Best Regards,
Something that I tried that was very different from our old Birmingham Terminal Division layout was to use "hidden storage" or staging tracks that were actually visible, but partially obscured in the background. For this project I chose the Southern Railway's 37th Street Yard in East Birmingham. My yard has six staging tracks, and it sits behind the Birmingham Southern's scene in the foreground, separated by scenic elements to set it apart and not call attention to itself. This part of the layout is on a long peninsula, and the staging yard has a scenic double-sided backdrop separating it from the Seaboard Air Line and Vulcan Pipe and Foundry scene on the back side. I am so pleased with the results, much more so than the actual hidden storage/staging trackage that I have at the west end of the layout. Here are some photos that I hope will enable you to visualize the setting and encourage you to try this "non-hidden" approach to "hidden staging" tracks on your layout. The two tracks with light colored ballast that pass beneath the signal bridge are nominally the eastbound and westbound main lines. The last photo shows the end of track of these mainline tracks at the edge of the layout, with the Birmingham Southern's industrial track to Vulcan Pipe crossing. Enjoy. Ken McElreath
My most humble apologies; I took several of the photos in a portrait format and had them rotated correctly in my computer folder, but for some reason I don't understand, they reverted to the sideways format when I loaded them to this post. I don't know how to fix them here now. Ken McElreath
Watching a transfer run from East Thomas to the Ninth Avenue Yard, coming down Billy Goat Hill into Birmingham, I thought, "What a pretty engine is 1342, customized by Don Wirth for the Alabama assignment." So I photographed it and its train curving past FY tower and into the yard. Enjoy. Ken McElreath past
In 1983 I had work assignments in the Dallas TX area for several months. One Saturday I was railfanning the Dallas Union Terminal watching the Amtrak, Santa Fe, MoPac, Katy and BN operations, when a short cut of stone hopper cars appeared from the northwest with a Katy switcher as power. It pulled into the station trackage, the engine ran around to the other end of the cut, and the thing took off to the west to an out-of-town rock quarry. Rather than using trucks, the quarry used the rail cars to avoid the congestion and messiness of having many dump trucks to deliver stone to downtown Dallas building projects. Then I discovered that right here in Cedar Rapids IA, the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City Railroad (called the Crandic) had and continues to have to this day a very similar operation between a suburban rock quarry and a downtown delivery track. Both of these movements are quite interesting to watch. So I thought I would incorporate a similar operation in our Birmingham AL area layout with the Southern Stone Company (an actual prototype in the Birmingham area with its own locomotives) as the focus. The concept is that crushed stone is loaded onto the company's hopper cars from dump trucks, then it is transported to downtown Camellia Park near the passenger station for municipal road and other building projects. I have both loaded and empty hoppers, and the operation swaps them in a lull in the operating session between passenger trains. The whole thing is really cute but interesting, a good way to break in new operators without overloading them with complexity. It says, "Take these loaded cars from A to B, and bring back the empties from B to A." The hopper cars are customized MDC covered hoppers and the locomotive is an MDC (I think) Plymouth Model 80 industrial switcher. Here are some photos for you to enjoy. Ken McElreath
February 1953 was the last full month of steam operations on the Southern Railway (and the Frisco), and Birmingham was the last place they operated in March of that year. The Southern had recently taken ownership of the old Frisco Ninth Avenue Yard (in my model version of history) as part of the consolidation of several yards on the Southern, since all major classification activity had moved out of town to the brand-new Norris Yard hump operation at Irondale. So I took some final shots of Southern steam at Ninth Avenue for the record, along with the old wooden cabooses that were about to be retired. There was also a Warrior River Terminal Alco switcher in the Ninth Avenue roundhouse. Ken McElreath
