East Broad Top Annual Reunion 2015

Columbus Day weekend the Friends of the East Broad Top (FEBT) gathered for their annual fall Reunion in Rockhill Furnace, Pennsylvania.  This was my first Reunion, and I was looking forward to spending a few days exploring the railroad and meeting some of the people who have worked hard to preserve this unique narrow gauge railroad.  I made arrangements to stay at Pogue Station, an old farmhouse and general store that once served as a flag stop for miners on their way to the coal mines on Broad Top Mountain.

Pogue was the first stop after Orbisonia Station and only a few minutes from the main shop complex in Rockhill.  Just north of Pogue Station, the EBT crossed Aughwick Creek on the longest bridge on the railroad.  Pogue Trestle hasn't seen a train since the early 1960's, but the steel span was still impressive.

After a grueling 10 hour trip from Cape Cod to south central Pennsylvania, I finally arrived and registered at Reunion central in the local elementary school, just across the tracks from the EBT shops and the Railways to Yesterday trolley museum.  Some eighty EBT supporters gathered for a presentation by Lee Rainey on the role of iron mining and smelting in the early history of the railroad.  Rainey, author of the definitive book on the East Broad Top, explained how the railroad was originally founded to serve the Rockhill iron furnaces and coke ovens, the ruins of which can still be found in Blacklog Narrows, just east of the shops.  

Saturday morning, I arrived early and spent an hour or so photographing the Rockhill yard in the bright but chilly morning light.  The Friends of the East Broad Top, led by President Lee Rainey, have worked long and hard to preserve the hundred year old shops and roundhouse.  Without the FEBT, many of the historic structures would have long since fallen down or collapsed.

One of the highlights of the weekend was a walking tour of the Rockhill restoration projects.  We met near the Blacksmith Shop, which has recently been stabilized and painted.  The building had been in danger of collapse prior to the restoration.

After an overview of recent restoration work, the group explored the interior of the foundry, where scrap iron was melted down and cast into parts for the railroad.  The foundry is dominated by a huge 360 degree crane.  While much work remains to be done on the interior, the exterior looks much as it did in 1956.

The group then walked to the south end of the engine shop, where Bill Adams showed the group some of the work continuing on restoration of the shop doors.  The FEBT is building exact reproductions of the existing doors, which were in very bad shape.

Right next to the door project, FEBT members could see the work that has been done on the car shop. One of the iconic photos of the shops shows a stack of locomotive tires leaning against the wall of the car shop.  Unfortunately, the weight of the tires had caused the entire wall of the building to lean as well!  Volunteers working by hand moved the tires away from the walls so they could be braced and strengthened.

Another major project involved the roof of the car shop.  Decades of rain, snow and neglect had rusted the corrugated panels and rotted the beams beneath, so that if a person stepped on the roof, he would go right through!  Standing next to piles of debris, we looked up at a shiny new metal roof that will continue to protect the car shop for years to come.

The restoration tour ended at the paint shop, which is used by the FEBT for a variety of projects. Currently it houses 1890's combine number 14, which was used as a caboose on coal trains in the last years of EBT common carrier operation.  The crews found the combine more comfortable than the two cabooses that are currently stored in the car shop.  Skilled FEBT craftsmen have removed rotted wood from the sides, the roof and the interior, and are hand crafting replacements.

Work is proceeding well, but the car may never roll again.  The wooden trucks that once supported the combine are in dire need of rebuilding, including replacement wheels.  Unfortunately, the cost of replacing the trucks is prohibitive, and neither the railroad nor the FEBT has the funds.  The FEBT will continue work on the car, but its future remains in doubt.

None of the six steam engines were operating for the weekend.  In fact, the EBT has not had a locomotive under steam since 2012.  The M-1 gas electric car is operational, but was not available for the Reunion.  Instead, FEBT members were invited to ride one of three speeders (sometimes called "put puts") from the yard complex to the southern end of useable track, about a twenty minute round trip.  The speeder rides were very popular.  My first ride was the M-3, a 1920's era Nash vehicle that was restored by the FEBT several years ago.

Speeders left the vicinity of the roundhouse and proceeded south past the machine shop, locomotive shop and sand tower, to where a three way stub switch offered access to the main line.  Passing the concrete coal dock and water column, the speeders passed two small sheds that were the first buildings restored by the FEBT.  More recently, the organization has done restoration dock on the coal dock and water supply.

In addition to the M-3, two other small open speeders, once used by track crews, carried passengers back and forth throughout the day.

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Saturday afternoon included an open house at the shops and roundhouse, with key members of the FEBT available for questions.  I opted to visit the roundhouse first, where the EBT's stable of Baldwin 2-8-2 Mikados are stored next to the M-1 gas electric.  The roundhouse has eight stalls.  The group was free to explore around the locomotives, some of which have not moved since 1956. The engine most recently under steam is #15, which lacks only an FRA inspection to operate.  Others that have operated in the tourist era include 12, 14 and 17.

FEBT President Lee Rainey was on hand to answer questions about the past, present and future of the railroad.

From the roundhouse, it was a short walk to the shops, where a small group wandered through the various work areas.  The afternoon sun filtering through dusty windows illuminated machines and tools still sitting exactly where they were when the railroad closed in 1956.

Everything was as if the employees expected to return in a few days and work would pick up where they left off.  But they never came back and today the shops are a perfectly preserved museum of the age of steam.

Huge lathes, drill presses and other machines were all drived by an elaborate network of belts and pulleys powered by twin boilers and a steam engine that has been restored to run on compressed air by the FEBT "boiler rats", as they like to call themselves.

Following the speeder rides and the tours, the group reassembled in the elementary school for a presentation by Peter and Jane Clarke on modeling the ganister rock and pig iron industries on their model railroad, featured in the latest issue of Great Model Railroads by Kalmbach Press.  We then proceeded to the trolley museum next door for a ham and green bean dinner to cap off the day. Following dinner winners of the photo and modeling contest were announced.  To my surprise (this was, after all, my very first reunion) I was awarded first prize for structures and a new category called "what if".  I had submitted several vehicles suggesting what the short-lived EBT Transit Company might have looked like if the company had continued into the 1950's.  There were many entries, many of them outstanding, so it was an honor to be included among those recognized for their modeling.

The evening wrapped up with a ride on a Metro Liner operated by Railways to Yesterday and a fund raiser auction back at the elementary school.  That concluded the organized events.  But the Reunion continued on Sunday with an open house at the FEBT museums in Robertsdale along with visits to various model railroads in the area.  I had scratch built the well-known structures in Robertsdale's "company square", but this was the first opportunity to see the prototype builds as they are today: the Robertsdale station, the old post office and the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company office building.  The fourth structure in company square -- the company store -- was torn down in the 1990's.

While touring the museum in the old post office building, I ran into two people who probably know more than anyone else about the coal mining operations on the Broad Top: Ron Pearson, who has published numerous articles in the FEBT journal, the Timber Transfer, and Ric Case, who together with Ron has explored the nine mines and surrounding area served by the East Broad Top Railroad.

Ron pointed out that from the Robertsdale station, one could see the remains of mine number 1.  He and Ric invited several of us to join them in exploring the ruins.  As we walked along the old EBT main line towards Woodvale (the end of the line) Ric pointed out the rotted posts that had supported the tipple for Mine Number 1.

Ron explained how the mines were operated by cables, powered by a steam winch, that pulled loaded coal cars from the mine while simultaneously lowering empties back into the mine to be filled again. Miners were expected to fill the dump cars with a minimum of 2100 pounds of coal; anything less than 2100 pounds and the miner would not be paid!  Each miner was expected to fill 16 cars a day; hence the song by Tennessee Ernie Ford: Sixteen Tons.

As we tramped through the brush and brambles, Ron and Ric pointed out traces of the now long-gone mines -- the foundations of the steam winches, the boilers for the stationary engines, the fences for the mule barn (underground carts were hauled by mules).

At one point we found the remains of a fan house that circulated air in the mine still standing.  The structure was the prototype for an identical fan house now available in HO scale!

Tramping through the woods and seeing the decaying remains of the railroad and mines, I began to realize more clearly how intertwined they were: the mines depended on the railroad, and the railroad would not exist were it not for the mines.  When the demand for Broad Top coal dwindled, the EBT's days were numbered.  Were it not for its surprising return as a tourist attraction, little would remain today.  As it is, by extraordinary good luck and the help of the Kovalchik family (who bought the entire railroad in 1956) all of this history would be lost in the mists of time.  We are so fortunate to have had the EBT for nearly 60 years after it ceased to operate as a common carrier.  Hopefully, a way will be found to preserve the railroad and its history for generations yet to come.

Converting the Blacklog Wye to Narrow Gauge

In my last post, I explained how the purchase of a used dual gauge wye on eBay led to years of frustration as I tried to integrate the wye into my dual gauge yard.  My first attempt at a solution was to leave the main line through the wye as dual gauge while changing the two legs and the tail track to Micro Engineering HOn3 flex track joined by a Shinohara #3 wye.  The result looked good, but keeping two of the original hand laid dual gauge turnouts made the entire wye operationally unusable.  I finally bit the bullet, ripped out the entire wye, and started over.

I decided that trying to rebuild the dual gauge wye was not practical.  Fabricating three rail switches from scratch is beyond my ability -- at least for now.  However, I had successfully constructed a narrow gauge wye at Robertsdale, on the southern end of my East Broad Top line, using commercial track and switches, and it worked fine.  So the die was cast.  I would replace the ancient dual gauge wye with a modern narrow gauge facility.  That left open the question of what to do about the dual gauge tracks that extend beyond the wye, including a dual gauge spur servicing the Altoona Brewery. More on that in a bit.

The first challenge was to plug the hole in the layout caused by cutting out the old wye.  My layout, as you may recall, is constructed on 2 inch extruded insulation, or what is known in the business as "pink foam".  I live on Cape Cod, where finding building supplies is a real challenge.  Transporting a 4 x 8 foot slab of insulation was another problem -- there was no way to fit it in my Prius!  Finally, a friend volunteered to secure the insulation and bring it to my layout in his pickup truck.  When the foam arrived, I was surprised to find it was blue, not pink.  No problem, I thought to myself.  Two inch foam is the same, pink or blue.  Wrong.  More on that later.

My first step was to make a template for the wye-shaped hole in my layout  I used a sheet of cardboard laid over the hole, and from under the layout I marked the outline of the opening with a Sharpie marking pen.  I then cut out the template and test fit it over the opening.  I used wooden skewers stuck in the foam to support the pattern.  Some cutting and fitting was necessary, but the result was surprisingly accurate.

Once I was satisfied with the fit, I removed the template from the layout, sprayed the back of it with Aileen's Tacky Spray glue, and set it on the block of blue foam.  The outline was traced with a marking pen and the cardboard removed.  I set the foam on saw horses, then used a jigsaw to cut out the base of the new wye.  The layout was constructed from blocks of extruded foam on a wooden grid of 1 x 4 lumber.  In the following photo you can see the supports where the old wye was removed. The plan was to set the new foam into the hole and glue it to the grid with adhesive caulk.

In the next photo you can see the blue foam wye in place on the wooden support grid.  The switches were placed to get an initial sense of how the track would be laid, and how sharp the curves would be.  The tightest curves on my layout are 18 inches, found only on the wyes.  Experience proved that my Hallmark brass 2-8-2 locomotives can safely pass over this tight a curve, as the center drivers are blind.

More problematic than a tight curvature was the discovery that all foam is not the same!  Look carefully at the above photo, and you will note that the blue foam is not level with the pink foam in which it rests.  It is about 1/8 inch higher!  I am not sure why this discrepancy exists.  Maybe the pink foam shrank over time. The layout is over six years old.  Or it may be that blue foam is simply slightly thicker than pink. Whatever the reason, I had a new dilemma to resolve.  The original dual gauge wye sat on a 1/8 inch cardboard roadbed.  When I installed the old wye, I used wooden risers to raise the plywood base, so the track was at the same height as the dual gauge yard (to the left of the photo).  I intended to dispense with risers, setting the new base directly on the wooden supports, like the foam around it.  The blue foam sits on the grid, but it is higher than the surrounding base.  That left me with no easy way to lay the track on cork roadbed, as I had intended.  I made the decision to lay the flextrack directly on the foam, reasoning that with ballast and scenery, no one would notice the lack of a raised roadbed.  I then applied adhesive caulk to the supporting grid and fixed the foam in place, weighting it down while it dried overnight.

After the caulk was thoroughly set, I began to play with the flextrack and switches.  Track was laid directly on the blue foam.  Two of the three legs of the wye were fixed by the tracks connecting with the dual gauge yard on one side, and the main line as it continued straight through.  There was some wiggle room with the tail track, and I ended up having to move it slightly in order to keep the curvature of the track at 18 inches.

Once I was satisfied with the placement of track and switches, I removed the tracks from the foam, and painted all the exposed areas (pink and blue) with a non-descript beige latex paint.  Track, ballast and scenery would be applied over the brown base.

When the paint was dry, I relaid the track and switches.  After some experimentation, I decided to use a #6 turnout at the top of the wye, and #3 wye switches for the other two legs.  All turnouts were Shinohara with code 70 rail.  The flextrack was Micro Engineering code 70 weathered track. The switches were put in place first, then the rails connecting them.  Cutting the rails while trying to curve the track turned out to be tricky, and several sections of flextrack were discarded when it turned out I had cut one rail too short!

After the track was in place, I ran a car over the wye a number of times, making adjustments where there were problems.  In some places it was necessary to shim the flex track to adjust for one side or the other being too high or too low.  The track was affixed to the foam with long steel pins to hold it in place.  I first tried gluing the track to the base with caulk, but found it easier to simple pin the track in place.  When the ballast was applied, it would cement the track to the foam anyway, and the pins would be removed..

Once the tracks were securely fastened down, Tortoise switch machines were installed from below the layout.  A number of tests were run to confirm that a locomotive could be reversed from either direction without derailing.  When I was satisfied that the new wye was operating properly, it was time to apply the scenery.  I decided that the wye would be located in a grassy meadow, created with static grass over matt medium.  The tracks were ballasted with the same color ballast used on the original wye.  A dirt service run runs along the through track.

At this point I had to deal with the fact that I had a narrow gauge wye connecting to the dual gauge yard at one end, and a long section of dual gauge track on the other, which was now cut off and unreachable by standard gauge trains.  Then I had a brainstorm.  I imagined that the original dual gauge wye was being rebuilt by the railroad to simplify track work and reduce cost.  There was little reason to maintain a dual gauge wye, since the standard gauge yard switchers could operate quite well without the need to turn the locomotives.  (In fact, this was exactly the case at Mount Union on the prototype, where the yard goats were never turned.)  As for the brewery on the far side of the wye, the occasional refrigerator car could be transferred to narrow gauge trucks on the EBT's Timber Transfer crane and pushed through the wye to the spur on the narrow gauge tracks.

To support this explanation, I placed piles of old, broken ties near each of the three turnouts, and sections of rusty rail along the right-of-way, as if left there for later pick-up by the crews removing the old third rail.  Beyond the wye, I painted the top of the third rail a rusty color as if it hadn't been used for some time.

When the scenery was finished and the railroad restored to its original form, no one would suspect the work that went into creating this quiet country scene.

Rebuilding the Blacklog Wye

Some years ago I acquired on eBay a beautiful hand laid wye, once part of an anonymous HOn3 layout. Perhaps the builder had passed away, or been forced to dismantle his model railroad for some reason. At the time I bought it, the wye didn't really fit on my standard gauge Blacklog Valley Railroad.  The ballast and scenery had a definite western character.  I had only begun to tinker with the idea of adding an HOn3 section based on the East Broad Top narrow gauge railroad, but the wye was so impressive I couldn't resist.  So for a number of years, while I did little more than add Tortoise switch machines, the wye sat gathering dust.

When we moved to Cape Cod, I found myself with an empty 20 x 17 room waiting for me to fill it with a model railroad.  Along the way, I also had purchased several brass models of EBT engines, as well as the gas-electric M-1 and a pile of narrow gauge rolling stock.  The model railroad that emerged was a combination HO/HOn3, with a dual gauge yard and space at one end to include -- you guessed it -- a dual gauge wye!  I inserted the wye at the end of the Blacklog yard, with the tail track wrapping around a mountain and quarry, and a brickyard on the opposite side.  Here you can see the wye with the mountain on the right and the refractory on the left, while a conveyor belt soars above.

Almost immediately, I began to encounter problems with the wye.  The hand laid trackwork, especially around the dual gauge turnouts, was beginning to show its age.  Rails came loose, and the original ties were so old they failed to hold new spikes.  The techniques used for constructing the switches were decades out of date.  The wye was built long before anyone thought of soldering rails to PC board ties.

There was frustration over keeping the rails in gauge.  A key problem area was the "draw track" on one leg of the wye, where the narrow gauge rail moved from left to right to allow the tracks to meet the switch correctly after turning.  Engines and cars derailed constantly.

Part of the problem was that the wye was constructed on a sheet of 1/2 inch plywood with cardboard under the ties.  The rest of the layout was built on 2 inch foam with cork roadbed.   The rails on the wye were not at the same height as the rails on the foam, and I was constantly fiddling with rail height.

As beautiful as the wye appeared, it was not particularly reliable for operating model trains.  I wanted the narrow gauge railroad to move cars prototypically, hauling empty hoppers from Blacklog to Robertsdale, turning the train on the narrow gauge wye there, then pulling strings of loaded hoppers back to Blacklog where the coal was cleaned and transfered to standard gauge hoppers.  The engines would then be turned on the Blacklog wye and the whole process would repeat.   Maintenance of the dual gauge wye soon became a constant problem, making operation less than enjoyable.  Something had to be done.

My first idea was to tear up the two legs of the wye leading to the wye switch and tail track, and replace them with Shinohara code 70 HOn3 track and a #3 Shinohara wye turnout.  I reasoned that the change would simplify the trackwork and replace the undependable hand laid track with commercial flex track.  I wanted to leave the main line dual gauge track since there was a long section of three rail trackage on the far side of the wye, including a dual gauge spur serving a brewery.  However, the rails between the switches would be removed and replaced with Micro Engineering weathered flex track.

Once the tracks were properly laid, wired, tested and ballasted, scenery was reapplied to the wye to disguise the damage caused by removal of the two dual gauge legs.  The result was pleasing to the eye, as can be seen in this photo of the altered wye.

Unfortunately, while the commercial components of the wye worked as expected, I had overlooked one little problem:  The entire wye still depended on two ancient, hand laid dual gauge turnouts.  The issues that confronted me with the original (all dual gauge) wye were still there, as soon as a locomotive encountered one of the hand laid switches.  Derailments were not eliminated; if anything, they were worse than before.  All the handling during the conversion had only made the switches more unreliable.

You might ask why I didn't simply replace the original hand laid turnouts by building new ones, using PC ties and modern methods.  The answer is two-fold.  First, the only remaining components of the original dual gauge wye were the turnouts.  There was a certain nostalgia in wanting to preserve some trace of the original track work.  Second, even though I am pursuing the NMRA achievement certificate in civil engineering, which includes building several switches, I wasn't prepared to take on anything as complex as a dual gauge turnout built to exactly fit the space on my layout.  At least, not at that point in time.

After having struggled with the same problems for years, I finally decided it was time for drastic action.  I would remove the entire wye -- the plywood base, the original turnouts, and the newly laid flex track, and replace the hole in my layout with a block of 2 inch foam on which I would lay a completely new, narrow gauge wye, using all commercial components.  Before I had a chance to change my mind, the deed was done.

In my next post, I will describe, step by step, how I built a replacement wye, some of the issues I encountered along the way, and what I did about the remaining dual gauge track extending beyond the wye.