Railroad Model Craftsman 2008 08

Mention two-foot gauge to most readers and they immediately think of Maine and the legendary Sandy River & Rangeley Lakes or the Wiscasset, Wa-terville & Farmington, but there were a few railroads out west that chose 24-inch as even more economical than the three foot width most railfans associate with western narrow gauge lines. Colorado's two-foot Gilpin Tram has been described by a number of writers and modelers and now the Silver City, Pinos Altos & Mogollon will enjoy better notoriety thanks to Duane Ericson. Author Ericson grew up in Southern Arizona where he spent many weekends with his parents exploring the ghost towns and abandoned mines scattered throughout the desert, relics of America's early mining history. He now resides in Silver City where he has spent the last several years carefully gleaning material from local libraries, area mining historians and the remains of the railway itself to compose this authoritative account of the Silver City, Pinos Altos & Mogollon Railroad. Ericson devotes his opening chapter to an overview of the region, describing the early Spanish discoveries of copper deposits that were significant enough to warrant the long haul into Mexico where the ores could be refined. Once the threat of Apache attacks eased, miners exploited the area with better equipment and better transportation when they became available after the opening of the Silver City, Deming & Pacific Railroad in 1883.

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Railroad Model Craftsman 2008 09

In the forty-five or so years that I have seriously pursued this pastime, change has been voluminous, and readers of this magazine will notice that recently I have written about change quite frequently. I guess it is a factor of growing older. Looking over editions of RMC and Model Railroader from the 1950's and 1960's teaches one that at that time, this hobby was still essentially a craftsman's domain. There were ready to run locomotives and cars, pre-built structures and the like, but for the most part, kits of those buildings and of that rolling stock were the staple. Wood, die-cast metal and even cardstock, with a little brass thrown in for those who could afford, it were the primary construction materials. Track usually had brass rail, in HO; other scales were lucky to have ready to lay track. Power packs were primitive by today's measures, by which DCC and Quantum Sound are beginning to rule the roost. But with all of this, it was a fun time to be a model railroader, and I look back at some of my older efforts, even a "mere" fifteen or twenty years ago, and marvel at how I was able to come up with some pretty good results, even by modern standards. As a segue, this change is especially notable in model locomotives in HO scale, one of my primary interests.

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Railroad Model Craftsman 2008 11

With the headlight bracket in place I was able to determine that there was lots of room for the small LokSound decoder to fit just behind it and adequate space for all the decoder wires. The decoder was also held in place with a small piece of double-sided carpet tape. Now, if you're like me, one of the biggest problems with installing decoders in a small space is what to do with all those darn wires. Well, I decided to make a small circuit board that would fit between the speaker and decoder to which I could solder corresponding wires, thus eliminating a lot of space-consuming, shrink-wrapped wire joints and at the same time keeping the wires neat and organized. To do this I cut a small piece of blank copper-clad circuit board to fit the width of the styrene mounting blank and just long enough to allow room for soldering two or three wires. After determining the number of sets of wires that were to be soldered to the board, I evenly divided the board into that many strips and took a razor saw and cut slots the length of the board to isolate each strip. I attached the circuit board to the blank with thin double sided tape. Another advantage to this method is that it is much easier to remove wires from the board by touching a soldering iron to them rather than having to cut apart a shrink wrapped joint. Believe me, I know from firsthand experience.

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Railroad Model Craftsman 2008 12

Recently, while searching through the old Railroad Magazine files, I stumbled upon three photographs of the Waterville Railway. While they were not what I was looking for, they immediately caught my eye, so much so that I stopped what I was doing to share them with my colleagues. A lone steam engine, a few old, wooden boxcars and the wide open country dusted with freshly fallen snow-these captivating images of shortline railroading elicited a sense of nostalgia for a bygone era. How I wished I could have been there on that cold, snow-covered day. Digging deeper into the folder I hit upon a newspaper clipping dated Monday, September 29, 1941, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The above-the-fold story was on the front page of the second section. A typical "little railroad that could" feature, it was accompanied by four good-sized photos. There was a large shot of Ten-wheeler No.949 (a secondhand Baldwin classic built in 1896), one of the engineer in the cab, another of the local board of directors meeting in the town hardware store, and, finally, a shot featuring two women visitors from Wenatchee gleefully waving from the cab. Ten weeks before Pearl Harbor, it was obviously a slow news day in Seattle. That would soon change, but the slow pace of business on the railway would remain for at least a few more years.

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