Modeling the EBT Shops

Background

Located some ten miles south of its junction with the Pennsylvania Railroad in Mount Union, the EBT shop complex covers several acres in the borough of Rockhill Furnace.  Here can be found everything needed to support the little narrow gauge railroad: an 8 stall roundhouse; turntable; car shop; locomotive shop; machine shop; sand house and tower; foundry; blacksmith shop; paint, electrical and air brake shops.  Most of the buildings are of board and batten construction, with the exception of the roundhouse and paint shop.  The latter was a replacement built in the 1930's for an earlier wooden structure destroyed by fire.  The amazing thing about all these buildings is that they are still standing some 60 years after the end of common carrier operations.  An aerial view shows the layout of the shops as it is today.  (The buildings to the right of the tracks belong to the neighboring trolley museum and are not part of the East Broad Top Railroad.)

The EBT main line to Mount Union runs beside a large structure in the middle of the picture.  This building, with the offset roof, is the car shop, the largest building on the property.  Just beyond can be seen the twin smoke stacks of the powerhouse.  Above the power plant are the roofs of the foundry, the coal bin, the pattern storage building, and the electrical and air brake shops.  The L shaped building to the left of the car shop houses the locomotive and machine shops.  Just above them can be seen the roof of the blacksmith shop with its ventilated monitor roof.

To the left, along Jordan Creek, can be seen the sand house and tower.  Above are three small sheds.  Beyond are two large storage buildings for pipe and rod stock, with the stone farm house just below the turntable, used as a yard office and storage facility when the railroad was still hauling coal. The small brick building with a red roof to the left of the roundhouse is the paint shop.  

I had always planned to include the shops on my East Broad Top layout, and over the years I acquired some. but not all of the shop buildings.  A few structures I purchased on eBay already built.  Others were scratch built or assembled from kits.  But I still needed several key structures without which my Rockhill Shop scene would be incomplete.  These included the imposing blacksmith shop, the electrical and air brake shops, and the brick paint shop.  I was fortunate to have plenty of photographs from recent trips to the EBT and I had blueprints and plans to work from.  The blacksmith shop is documented in the Historical American Building Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record in the Library of Congress (HABS/HAER), a copy of which just happened to be in my files!  Plans for the electrical shop and the paint shop were available from the Friends of the East Broad Top (FEBT) Company Store and I promptly ordered a set of each.

The Electrical and Air Brake Shops

One of the most unusual structures on the property is the combined electrical and air brake shop building.  It has an odd collection of windows, including a line of small four pane windows just under the eaves.  Two sides of the building are constructed of novelty siding while the other two sides are board and batten.  A small shed is attached to the west side of the electrical shop (the side facing away from the tracks) and a short spur runs up to double doors in this lean-to addition.  Here is a three quarter view of the north-east corner.  The old stone farmhouse yard office can be seen in the background.

Below is a photo of the north side of the building showing the double door entrance to the lean-to air brake shop. The blacksmith shop is visible behind and to the right.  In recent years the FEBT has stored the rebuilt 1920's Nash track car (M-3) in the lean-to..  It is not clear what the railroad used the shed for in common carrier days.  It is known as the air brake shop, but the structure is too short for a car to be enclosed.  The purpose of the electrical shop is another mystery.  Was it a work area for servicing the power and lights?  A clue might be the large quantity of Western Electric telephone equipment inside, suggesting that it might have been used to maintain the EBT telephone lines from Mount Union to Robertsdale.

I began construction of the model by laying out the FEBT plans on my work bench.  The building was measured in 1986 but early photographs indicate it is relatively unchanged since the 1950's.

Although the plans are drawn in HO scale (1;87) I used an HO scale rule to measure the ends and sides, just to be safe.  I used Kappler scribed basswood sheet for the north and east sides of the electrical shop (scale 8" boards), and Mount Albert board and batten basswood siding (with scale 1 foot boards) for the south and west sides, as well as the sides of the air brake shop.  After a good deal of shopping around for windows, I found some Tichy and Grandt Line windows in my scrap box that were close to the correct size and type.  The four pane window over the north door was unusual, and I used a window by Laser-Art.  I then used a sharp chisel blade in a hobby knife to cut and knock out the window and door openings.

I decided to paint the sides oxide red before assembling the building, to avoid painting over any glue residue.  Since the drawings were HO scale, I could lay out the entire building before assembly.  In cutting the two ends of the electric shop I was careful to allow for the thickness of the long side walls.

I assembled the walls on a sheet of glass, with a grid under the glass to help square the structure. The grid was purchased in a sewing store and was designed (I think) for quilting.  Brass clamps were used to keep the sides square while the glue dried.

The interior walls were braced with  1/8" stripwood  to prevent warping.

Here is a three quarter view of the north and west sides showing the air brake shop.  The windows were spray painted with Krylon white primer before installing them.  Wooden board doors were cut from scribed styrene.  A piece of thin balsa wood was glued to the back of the door opening, so that the styrene boards would fit flush with the frame.  The double doors of the air brake shop were made the same way.

The sub-roofs for the two adjoining structures were cut from heavy mat board and test fit on the building.  The roofs were not glued in place yet.

The roof of the electrical shop is made of weathered corrugated iron sheets.  The air brake shop roof is covered with tar paper.  I cut the corrugated panels from Campbell corrugated aluminum strips.  I made a simple measuring device by drawing verticle lines 2 scale feet apart and laying out the aluminum strips so that I could quickly cut roof panels with a #11 hobby knife blade.

To attach the corrugated panels to the mat board roof I used 1/2" strips of Bron doubled sided tape.  Bron makes a wide variety of tapes for special purposes; they can be found by googling Bron on the internet.  The 1/2" size tape is narrow enough to fit two strips side by side to secure the roof panels.

Roof panels were placed side by side with a slight overlap.  The second layer of panels run from the peak of the roof and overlap the lower panels.  Another strip of Bron double sided tape ran across the top of the lower level to keep the panels flat.

When all the panels were taped to the sub-roof, a line of panels was used across the roof peak.  Here is the finished roof before the ridge panels were installed.

The metal roof was given a base coat of Tamiya TS-63 NATO Black spray paint.  This was as close as I could come to the now defunct Floquil "Weathered Black" color.  I used a "rattle can" to apply the spray paint.  Once the roof was dry, I prepared a work space and different sizes of soft brushes to apply a variety of weathering powders from Micro Mark.

For weathering I used grimy black, dirty brown and rusty brown colors.  To apply the weathering, I dipped a brush in the powder, picking up enough to sprinkle across the top of the roof.  Then I used a wide soft brush to streak down the roof panels.

When using this technique, don't be afraid to mix the powders or apply them successively over each other.  You want the roof to look weather beaten, slightly rusty, and sooty,  I was pleased with the results I achieved.  Here is the electrical shop set on the layout.

The roof of the air brake shop lean-to was covered with a new product I discovered at the National Narrow Gauge Convention in Augusta, Maine: Stoney Creek Designs Rolled Roofing.  I opted to use the black paper, which has a granular coating on one side to represent asphalt roofing.  The paper was aged by gently dragging each sheet across 340 grit sandpaper before gluing it to the roof.

Here is a view of the southwest corner of the finished structure.  The south side is seldom seen or photographed, as it is only a few feet from the adjoining building.

This concludes my step-by-step explanation of how I scratch built the EBT electrical and air brake shops.  This unique little building not often modeled, but is a interesting addition to the shop complex.  In my next post I will describe how I scratch built another rarely modeled structure: the brick paint shop next to the roundhouse.

The EBT Locomotive and Machine Shops

On my last visit to the East Broad Top Railroad, I spent several hours exploring the locomotive and machine shops in Rockhill, Pennsylvania.  The shops were in daily use up to the abandonment of the railroad as a common carrier in 1956.  When the EBT was reborn as a tourist railroad in 1960, the shops were occasionally open for tour, and were used by the railroad for maintenance and repairs of their fleet of 2-8-2 Baldwins.

When I entered the shops, I found myself transfixed by the museum-like character of the place. Everything was just as it was when the shop crew went home 60 years ago and never came back.  A layer of dust covered tools and machines, while shafts of sunlight fell across the wooden floor boards.  

Among the most iconic images of the EBT shop complex are the towering twin smoke stacks that rise from the centrally located boiler shop.

The stacks are located directly over two massive boilers which provided power to the machine shops and other buildings in the complex.

Power was provided by several stationary steam engines located next to the boilers.  One engine, which had not operated for more than half a century, was recently restored by members of the Friends of the East Broad Top.  Since steam was no longer available, they modified the stationary engine to run on compressed air.  

The stationary engine was connected  to a system of shafts and pulleys that powered the various machines throughout the shop.  Shafts also ran to nearby buildings.  Steam from the boilers was used for heat and power in nearby buildings, such as the blacksmith shop, where steam was used to drive an enormous steam hammer.  The belts now hang limp and useless from the overhead shafts.

The visitor is struck by the sheer size of the machine tools used to service and repair the locomotives, which weighed as much as 80 tons!  The FEBT has placed lables on many of these devices, such as the locomotive wheel lathe shown here.  The EBT rotated their engines, so that one of them was in the shop at any given time.  The locomotives were parked over a service pit, allowing the 48 inch drivers to be dropped, then moved to the lathe for turning.

Servicing a steam locomotive required a lot of tools, many quite large.  Here is a rack of various wrenches, levers and other unexplained implements used by the railroad..

Here are some of the other shop machines found throughout the building.  Many a weekend handyman may have tools with similar names, but not in this size!  Here, for example, is a brake cylinder machine.

Nearby is an axle lathe.

And here is a more conventional lathe.  Notice the belt drive on the left, which took power from the overhead pulleys and shafts.  Working in a shop like this must have been incredibly noisy!

And here is an oversize drill press.

Workmen in the days of steam had to make make many of the things they used on the railroad.  On the EBT scrap metal was cast and forged into wheels for the rolling stock.  In order to mount the wheels on axles, a hole had to be bored in the casting.  Here is a horizontal boring machine.

And here is an enormous hole punch.

The shop machines, most of which have not been used for more than sixty years, are impressive.  But I was also fascinated by little scenes scattered throughout the shop, that gave a sense of what workers did in those days.  Here, for example, is a steam generator from a locomotive.  It has been sitting on a work bench for half a century, waiting for the worker to come back and finish whatever he was doing.

Walking through an open door, I came upon what seems like the main electrical panel for the shops. If this were today, I suspect OSHA would cite them for all those exposed knife switches.

On a nearby table was a pile of pick-ax blades.  What do you suppose they were going to do with all those pick-axes?

Everywhere you look there are bins filled with bolts, drill bits, and other small parts.  Here is a small sample of what I found, everything covered with a half century of dust.

As I turned to leave, I couldn't help but notice little signs of the people who made their living working on the railroad, so many years ago.  A couple of outsize wrenches, a brace and bit.  All reminders of a time when coal was king and the EBT was the lifeblood of southern Huntingdon County.  

I hope you enjoyed this brief tour of a world that time has forgotten, the locomotive and machine shops of the East Broad Top.  Special thanks to the Friends of the East Broad Top, whose efforts have maintained and protected this wonderful place for more than fifty years.

Switch Control with Touch Toggles

My layout incorporates a couple of dozen turnouts, which I have been slowly mechanizing with Tortoise switch machines from Circuitron.  Retrofitting that many switches is challenging enough, but building the controls and signals for them is a task I have been avoiding.  I did build a panel to operate the wye for my dual gauge yard, using DPDT toggle switches and red/green LEDs.  I wasn't really happy with the result.

Then, a year ago I attended the Amherst Train Show in Springfield, Massachusetts, where among hundreds of vendors, I ran across a display of electronic modular controls by Berrett Hill.  (Use this link for more information: http://www.berretthill.com/controls/ )  The system is based on small devices called Touch Toggles, which have a red/green LED and a touch activated switch in a small square plastic unit.  These Touch Toggles can be plugged into base units, running on 12 volts DC, which in turn power a Tortoise or similar switch machine.  Base units come in 2, 4 and 8 switch options.

I thought about the Touch Toggles for a year, but put off doing anything until recently, when I attended the National Narrow Gauge Convention in Augusta, Maine, and discovered Berrett Hill among the vendors.  After a long conversation, I decided to buy several base units and toggles and try them out on my East Broad Top Railroad.

The system is simple and easy to install.  Here I have a 4-input base unit not yet connected to switch machines.  The blue terminal blocks on the left side of the base unit are where you connect the wires to the switch machines.  At the bottom of the base is a plug from a "wall wart" baseboard transformer.

The neat thing about the Touch Toggles is that they switch polarity and color simply by touch.  Berrett Hill suggests several ways of mounting the components to make a simple and easy to use control panel.  At their suggestion I bought several 6x8 picture frames from a nearby craft store.  The frames are about 1 1/2 inches deep.  Using Windows Power point, I made a simple track diagram roughly the same size as the picture frame.  After printing the diagram, I took the glass from the picture frame as a guide and used a hobby knife to cut out the track diagram, which I then placed in the frame.

Above you see the Robertsdale interlocking plant in the picture frame.  In this photo the Touch Toggle switches have already been installed and powered up.  The toggles are installed on the back of the track diagram using double sided Scotch Magic Tape to hold them in place.  The 1 1/2 inch frame is deep enough for everything to fit neatly.  I cut a piece out of the bottom of the frame for the wires. Here is the back of a panel with the toggles taped in place.  The black and white wires attached to the blue terminal blocks go to four switch machines.

After the electronics are in place, I needed something to hold everything in position and press the toggles against the back of the track diagram and picture glass.  I opted for polyester batting, used in making quilts.  I picked up a large roll from a fabric store for less than $10.  Batting is easy to work with and you can simply stuff it into place and close up the panel with a piece of cardboard.  Here I have covered the toggles on the left with batting.  I haven't yet stuffed the side with the base unit.

Once the batting was in place, I covered the back of the assembly with the cardboard that came with the picture frame, and pressed it down.

My layout has a Masonite fascia to which I planned to mount the control panel.  I bored a hole in the fascia with a hole saw, and secured the back to the picture frame with double sided carpet tape.

After testing to make sure everything was working properly (and that the switch positions corresponded correctly to the panel lights) I simply pressed the doubled sided tape onto the fascia. Here is a similar four switch panel for the Robertsdale wye and the upper end of the yard.

Touch Toggles are a simple and elegant way to install fingertip control for your Tortoiose and similar switch machines.  Berrett Hill has a complete line of supporting devices for the system.  It is not particularly cheap.  The cost works out to about $10 per toggle, assuming you provide your own 12 volt power supply.  A large yard would cost close to $100 to convert.  But I like the touch control and indicator lighting.  I have two panels in place and a third one ready to mount, which will control four turnouts for a double crossover.  

The 2016 National Narrow Gauge Convention, Part V

This was my very first national convention -- of any kind!  I have attended a couple of large model railroad events, but nothing like the NNGC,  Other gatherings, like the Amherst Train Show in Springfield, Massachusetts, may be larger, but the 1400 folks who came together in Augusta are a unique breed.  For one thing, they are narrow gaugers.  Narrow gauge modeling is a kind of niche hobby within the larger model railroad community.  There is a real sense of community among us, whether we love the winding railroads of the West, clinging to the side of enormous mountains, or the two foot puffer billies of Maine, or the mining and logging railroads of Pennsylvania, Ohio and the Southeast.  What else could have brought together a couple of Cape Cod model railroaders and a Pacific coast modeler from Oregon.

It's just that we all enjoy watching little narrow gauge engines chuffing along on light weight rail, wherever it might be.  Ross Ames' PC&N is a long way from Dave Trimble's Colorado based layout or my own East Broad Top, but to us it was perfectly natural.

Don't get me wrong.  I enjoyed every aspect of the national convention, from the modular layouts to the contests, the field trips, the clinics, and the wonderful tables of modeling stuff to spend my money on.  But I think what I will remember most was the people I met -- the opportunity to meet narrow gauge modelers from all over the country and around the world.

Sometimes it was sharing an adventure together, whether that was riding in an open Ford inspection car or pumping an old time track car.  People from different backgrounds and different parts of the country became instant friends.  That old slogan from the NMRA certainly seems to hold true: Model railroading is fun!

Conversations sprang up spontaneously, the instant we spotted someone with a convention name badge or a railroad shirt or hat.  Breakfast at the motel was fun, because it was an occasion to chat with someone from South Carolina or California, or even Australia.  Instant acquantances sprang up over a cup of coffee.  And every modeler had a story to tell.  On Wednesday, when I rode on the WW&F, I got to know many of the folks in the lead coach as we snapped pictures and enjoyed the ride together.  By the end of the ride, we were like old friends.

Whether it was exploring the slate quarreys of the Monson Railroad or following the long abandoned right of way of the Kennebec Central, you were constantly meeting and sharing with people who had only one thing in common: We all loved narrow gauge railroads.

Of course, there were social events deliberately programmed into the convention agenda.  Over 200 of us gathered at Pine Tree Camp some 30 miles from Augusta, for a huge lobster bake.

As folks arrived, we were greeted by the sight of lobsters, corn, potatos and seaweed baking over open fires.  That was a lot of lobstah!

Just imagine, hundreds of narrow gauge modelers lining up under a crystal blue Maine sky to have their plates filled to overflowing with lobster, corn, potatos, corn bread, salad, and blueberry cobbler with whipped cream for dessert.  It was certainly a meal to remember.

I sat with Ross and his wife, who graciously posed for a photo.  Notice that everyone else in the place was too busy eating to take pictures.....

The convention finally came to a close on Saturday evening, with a concluding cocktail party and closing event.  The meeting was conducted by Lee Rainey, the 2016 chairman.  Awards were presented to the winners of the model and photo contests.  I was pleased to note that Ross won first prize for his HOn3 Neskowin.   Here he is with his first place award.

Our last official action was to vote on a location for the 2021 convention.  Planning is five years out, and the sites  of the 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 conventions have already been set.  Chairman Rainey asked for proposals, and received a formal bid from Hickory, North Carolina.  The last convention in that State was several years ago.  The North Carolina contingent presented a video about their site and its attractions.  Then Chairman Rainey asked if there were any other bids.  Two gentlemen stood up and invited us to Dallas, Texas.  The assembly was then asked to vote between the two sites, and the vote went to North Carolina.  (But I suspect the Texans will be back next year to try again!)

This concludes my summary of the 2016 Narrow Gauge Convention.  Next year's convention will be in Denver,Colorado, home to many narrow gauge railroads, several of which continue to operate today: The Cumbres and Toltec, the Durango and Silverton, the Georgetown Loop and more.  I invite you to consider making Denver your destination for next year's gathering.  It will certainly be a convention to remember!

Russ Norris on the Kennebec Central