Juggling two full-time modeling hobbies is a real challenge, so I spent the last year attempting to manage that by splitting the year between the two - hence the long absence from this blog. But the time away from this site has been most productive for the railroad. The layout is operating now, after several operating sessions last year. And the depot is being modeled in earnest.
My freelanced city, Cascadia, is a miniature railroading hub set somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, inspired primarily by Portland, Seattle and Spokane, and drawing topographical, architectural and railroading elements from throughout the region. My greatest influence on model railroading still being George Sellios and his incredible Franklin & South Manchester, the layout aims to create a miniature world of prototype-grounded railroading brought to life through meticulous modeling and richly-detailed scenes for operators and visitors alike to enjoy. As a miniature world of railroading, Cascadia will have its own look and feel, distinctly from the Pacific Northwest to avoid being a copy of any one place, but recreates the railroading - particularly its passenger operations - of the region in the mid-50s.
Let's take a brief tour of what's happening at Cascadia Union Station and Downtown Cascadia.
New Facilities Modeled for Cascadia
Expanded Express Terminal
Being a major railroading hub in a major city, Cascadia is a freelance conglomeration of everything exciting about the Cascade region. As such, its major facilities include the Depot itself, along with major terminals for the US Mail, Railway Express Agency and Coach Yards for the many trains that originate and terminate here. Recently, having laid its track, the Railway Express Agency terminal is starting to come together.
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| A major city hub for express traffic requires a major Railway Express Agency terminal. Cascadia's Express Terminal, immediately south of the main depot, is over 500' long. In the foreground is the new coach yard, and towering above it is beautiful Mt. Hood, beautifully painted by Rob Spangler. |
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| Another view of the Express Terminal from the north shows a foreign road baggage express car here by virtue of peak holiday demand and its partnership with Western Pacific bringing mail and express from Denver via the Inside Gateway. The structure is under construction awaiting final details and weathering. |
This large terminal has ample capacity for the high volume of peak express traffic - both standard baggage and box freight and refrigerated perishables for the city and region's holiday food demands. In addition to the dedicated tracks at the terminal, all-purpose tracks in the depot handle the overflow with ease. From a modeling perspective, this structure, based on the Railway Express Agency terminal in Jersey City, reminds me why I hate decal work. It's too much treat, wait, treat again. I don't have the patience for it, but the signage gives the building its necessary 1950s aesthetic, as this closeup shows:
Coach Yards
Currently underway is the expansion of coach yard facilities in Downtown Cascadia. As a hub of passenger traffic, serving trains that originate and terminate here, as well as through trains setting out and picking up equipment, Cascadia needs a coach yard to handle these activities. Although the railroads maintained their own coach yards, since much of the equipment belonged to the railroad, sleeper service for most railroads was operated by the Pullman Company. Space limitations make it unfeasible to model 7+ coach yards, so Cascadia now has two main coach yards, one for the Herriman Lines (SP, UP, MILW as guest) connecting to the depot's ladder, the other for the Hill Lines (NP principally, but also GN and SP&S) at Powell Street.
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| View of the two coach yards intersecting in Downtown Cascadia. To the left is the SP/UP/Milwaukee Coach Yard on the Depot property. At right is the Hill Lines Coach Yard. Shared facilities include the Pullman Building, shops (mechanical and electrical) and commissary, as shown here. |
Most recent construction is the new Powell Street Yard, a 5-track multi-use freight and passenger facility in Downtown Cascadia. Accessed off of the depot's balloon track, this new yard begins underneath Powell Street (hence the name) and stubs out at 90 degrees to the depot.
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| View of the new Powell Street Yard from its lead on the balloon track. Its 5 tracks hold up to 35 passenger cars. Incorporating some existing track, there needs to be a realignment of track off the first switch, as the kink makes amply clear. Tracklaying is an art and requires patience for adjustments. |
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| Here the colorful variety that makes up the beauty of a good coach yard becomes immediately evident. A mix of streamlined and heavyweight equipment fills this busy yard in busy Downtown Cascadia with round-the-clock action. The passenger cars integrate visually into the architecture of this major mid-century city, creating a focal point for its operator and the surrounding city's architecture. Yard facilities and the city's skyline begin to rise in the background. |
Pullman Operations and Facilities
The long-gone Pullman Company is a fascinating, yet under-appreciated opportunity for operating and modeling a railroad in HO Scale. Having vanished from the American scene by 1968, the Pullman company operated American sleeping cars for a century and became a household name for train travel. Worth its own essay, which I will provide in the near future, the Pullman Company operated sleeping car service on most American railroads up until its demise in 1968. Although the railroads owned most sleeping cars, they were leased back to Pullman to operate. That included maintaining, provisioning, staffing, repairing and booking their use on railroads.
Accordingly, the Pullman Company was a shared service for railroads, and yards had facilities dedicated to this fleet regardless of the railroads using these cars. Pullman operations add a whole new dimension to passenger operations, one too good to pass up on my layout. In addition to the modern streamlined and heavyweight cars belonging to the railroads, Pullman maintained a large fleet of heavyweight 'Pool' cars that could be called into service to handle all of the special, extra or unscheduled sleeping car service needs of the 1950s. Cascadia serves as a hub for this sleeping car activity, requiring facilities for holding and servicing this fleet. The principal facility for Cascadia's Pullman pool is Powell Street Yard.
Pullman operation deserves a dedicated treatment, which will be the subject of the next post. For Cascadia's needs, Powell Street Yard will offer full services, including provisioning (laundry and commissary), staffing (at a Pullman section house and nearby hotel), repairs at its shops, and holding tracks for its pooled and railroad-owned cars.
One Place, Eight Railroads
To this day I still cannot explain the power with which the layout's current concept hit me, but it has given its modeling and operation a truly exciting center of gravity - a purpose, a passion and a mission for its completion. I wanted a central hub with the greatest opportunity for bringing together as many railroads as realistically possible with some basis in historical reality. Portland and the Pacific Northwest certainly fit the bill. The middle 1950s provide the best possible lens through which to appreciate the colorful variety of passenger equipment (everything from the colorful streamlined and dome-equipped name trains to the vast fleets of heavyweight cars that made up the backbone of passenger trains of the era) in a visually-rich setting that will be fun to model.
In the epicenter year of 1955, the Portland area had at least 10 railroads serving it, much of it on shared track through trackage rights agreements. Accordingly, my Cascadia Union Station serves the following roads every day as modeled through its operating sessions:
- Southern Pacific (SP) as the main railroad coming from California, and owner of this mainline connecting the two levels of the layout. SP's northern terminus is Cascadia.
- Northern Pacific (NP) as the main railroad coming from the North and East via Washington (Spokane, Pasco, Seattle), and principal owner of the shared mainline from the North (other roads operate via shared trackage rights similar to the Seattle-Portland Corridor.
- Union Pacific (UP) as a through road from Washington to Portland on the main level (it runs east-west and, at this writing, does not directly travel between California and Cascadia.
- Western Pacific (WP) comes into Cascadia via the Inside Gateway. Sharing the SP Mainline via trackage rights from Bradley (last railroad town in California on the lower level at the base of the grade), WP, along with its partners ATSF, GN, SP&S, brings a freelanced passenger train and freight into Cascadia. The partnership has a power-sharing agreement with its other roads, creating a very interesting variety of equipment on its trains.
- Great Northern (GN) comes in via the NP mainline, being a major carrier of passenger, mail and express traffic through its many trains, including the Pacific Fast Mail+Western Star, Empire Builder and unnamed locals.
- Spokane Portland & Seattle (SP&S) operates local service between Cascadia, Portland and Washington, including smaller unnamed heavyweight trains shuttling passengers, mail and express between Cascadia and the local towns to the north and west.
- Milwaukee Road (MILW) is the colorful outsider fighting to keep its grip on the Pacific Northwest market. Its colorful trains, the Columbian and Cascadian Hiawatha (a freelanced interpretation of Milwaukee's planned, but never implemented, Hiawatha to Portland). MILW connects with SP, UP and, occasionally, WP for local mail and express connections in the Washington area with both its name trains and an unnamed local or two in the timetable.
- Santa Fe (ATSF) operates principally in California (lower level), but its Inside Gateway partnership has its equipment showing up on the partnership's trains.
All of these railroads bringing passengers, mail and express into the busy hub of Cascadia makes for a fun operation. Passenger trains as the premier part of railroads' image and operation vanished more than half a century ago, making a great case for modeling as a way of recreating this fascinating part of railroading. Indeed, the complex timetables, intricate interchanges of sleepers and passengers between roads, together with all of the mail and express, along with terminating/originating trains and cars all make for uniquely fun operations.
My operators make a few consistent comments, including the fact that passenger operation is quite different from the freight operations that are the mainstay of local layouts and, accordingly, that it has quite a learning curve. Operators have to work as a team, coordinating their movements, and the depot has expanded to require up to 5 operators to run it properly. Good modeling seeks to recreate a part of history that is gone. Passenger and its supporting operations are well worth the effort. Anyone can attempt to recapture the nostalgia of diesel-powered freight they admired as children, but recreating something of the distant past requires being historian, archaeologist, cultural anthropologist and modeler too, and it is worth the effort.
There's a New Railroad in Town
This layout is officially called the Overland Terminal Railway (OTR). Due to the evolution of its operation and modeling into two major hubs separated by hundreds of miles, a second terminal railway has become necessary. While the OTR continues to operate the California end of the railroad (its hub being the fictional town of Monte Vista somewhere in Central California), its main hub is managed by the Cascadia Depot and Railway Company (CDR). Owned jointly by the 7 roads serving Cascadia Depot and its city, the CDR is independently operated with switchers and other essential equipment leased from its tenant railroads.
As a busy and contentious hub of railroading, Downtown Cascadia is operated under the jurisdiction of the CDR. The seven tenant roads provide equipment in the form of switchers and cabeese, making for a colorful variety of power on any given day. In Cascadia on any given day, one can see UP, SP, WP, Milwaukee, NP, SP&S, and GN switchers freely mixed in handling this city's busy freight and passenger business. As a modeler, a terminal railway, as they are commonly known in railroading, is an exciting concept to model and operate. Freed of the burden of providing dedicated tracks and operating schemes, the terminal railway freely mixes the variety that any modeler loves - all in a prototype-grounded realism for operations. My layout has just barely enough mainline to feed its busy terminal operation and no more.
The three mainlines (SP from the south, NP from the north and east, UP from the west) coming into Cascadia enter the throat tracks at the Cascadia Depot and its railway keep the operation busy with passenger and freight traffic. Modeling the peak holiday season of November through January 1955-57, this new, prototype-grounded freelance model has proven to be a lot of fun to build and operated. It engages my passion for historical research, modeling and engaging other modelers in a truly unique model railroad for operators. I'm often told that mine is the only passenger-centric operation in the state of Utah, a distinction I've come to embrace and enjoy.
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