Hi folks,
I'm at my desk "working" but while waiting for software to build or people to respond to emails, I sometimes drift into railroadiana and get parked in nostalgia like an old caboose pushed onto a weedy spur.
So here are two photos of a turntable in Tacoma, Washington, the first from 1940 and the second from 2021 (I mislabeled the file as 2019). The roundhouse was plainly visible in 1940. Between 1969 and 1980 it was demolished, but even today you can still see faint traces of the walls radiating out into the surrounding pavement from the center of the turntable, indicating where the individual stalls were for the locomotives.
1940 - (image lifted from NETR Historic Aerials online viewer):
2021: (stall traces visible to the right of the row of white pickup trucks)
You modelers of the contemporary era, do you ever model things like this, where the ghosts of former railroad infrastructure are visible? If so, show!
-Matt
Returning to model railroading after 40 years and taking unconscionable liberties with the SP&S, Northern Pacific and Great Northern roads in the '40s and '50s.
I added a siding to my tannery and had a few inches of leftover track, so I just kept going for another foot or so. The siding really ends at a road, so I "paved over" the track at the road, and removed some ties and painted the unused rails with a lot of rust. There's a water tower that straddles the unused track, enhancing the "no longer in service" status.
This is not a very good photo to show this, but it's all I've got. The abandoned siding is in the upper left corner, beyond the roadway. It's out of focus, but you get the idea.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
For my layouts I will work them in.
I have a half built train set. The yard portion has changed numerous times but I want it to have some history.
Inéz yard was a locomotive water stop for steam engines with a coaling tower and small classification yard. As the years passed diesel locomotives used this abandoned yard for emergency stops. (broken couplers, hot boxes, broken down locomotive, etc) Location in the middle of the desert.
Ellyson Yard was one of many commuter coach yards for the New York Central. It had a repairing facility, car shop, wash rack, etc. A decent size classification yard. When it was no longer needed half the yard was remodify into a freight yard. Later the yard slowly turned into a maintenance yard and local industry switching within the ConRail system.
Amtrak America, 1971-Present.
I have two ghost stations and a couple old sidings. Just wait until the city trackage is is complete. Good amount of ghost track planned
shane
A pessimist sees a dark tunnel
An optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel
A realist sees a frieght train
An engineer sees three idiots standing on the tracks stairing blankly in space
My next layout will have a "ghost line" where the unused rail line roadbed is still present, along with a bridge, but no ties or rails.
Ricky W.
HO scale Proto-freelancer.
My Railroad rules:
1: It's my railroad, my rules.
2: It's for having fun and enjoyment.
3: Any objections, consult above rules.
I'd say such small (or large) scenes have become common enough over the years, I had one such abandoned and half-sunk siding leading to a former brick-buildig warehouse (background building) repurposed as a self-storage place on a module I build in the 1990s. Heck, didn't Walthers release some kit of a factory repurposed as a office building decades ago.Another popular trope was to model an empty lot in a build-up block, with a sectiion of the (implied) torn down buildings wall, which is not uncommon in reality (I never modeled that though).I also never got into modeling abandoned structures like water tower foundations or elevated sidings to former coal dealers trestles and such, which was another trend -The LIRR had (and has) a number of these former elevated sidings along there eleveated routes into the 21st century - this GMap aerial link shows 2 of them along a section south of Liberty Ave in Jamaica, Queens.Of course, modelers have been modeling wrecked and/or abandoned equipment along since the first time someone dropped a prized freight car to the floor, and couldn't bear to toss it...
These white and "ghostly" structures are my Ghosts of Structures Future:
This is for the Walters Tannery kit, a sort-of modular design kit which is a bit hard to build other than mostly as designed, but that's OK. Because I had some flexibility to build each structure, I made cardstock mockups of each of them to get the right footprint and the right heights before I set glue to plastic.
I had a photo that I think "Bear" originally posted of a farmer loading grain into a boxcar where an elevator had not been built yet. The wagon was pulled up onto a raised platform level with the door in the boxcar. I plan to model the remnants of such a structure sticking out of the weeds just down the track from my grain elevator.
Brent
"All of the world's problems are the result of the difference between how we think and how the world works."
I've got a spot where I made my track look like it had been reduced from double track to an end of a passing siding on a now single-track line. This happened a lot in the CTC era.
IMG_8287_fix by Edmund, on Flickr
It gave me a chance to show a little "abandoned" trackage.
Track_joint by Edmund, on Flickr
Thank you, Ed
Great ideas! I especially love tracks that go nowhere (grew up in Seattle when several big highway overpass projects around the area were halted in mid-construction, so lanes that end in the sky or cantilevered over estuaries seem normal to me), and I love weedy forgotten structures. Well done, all.
Partly out of the picture, I had an abandoned interlocking tower on a part of my layout which has since been rebuilt
George In Midcoast Maine, 'bout halfway up the Rockland branch