The Milwaukee Road Historical Association is meeting in Moscow, Idaho this summer, and will be looking at the Milwaukee’s operations in Idaho, especially the WI&M and the Elk River branch.
I’m going to be there. I expect that I’ll learn a lot about the line, and the chance to sit and chat with other WI&M fans will be invaluable.
I hope to see you there.
These days I’m working on a Bachmann Spectrum 4-6-0.
This engine is destined to become WI&M #1, and I have the decals ready for it. I’m not going to do the full work that I expect do someday do for this engine, which includes some new domes and reworking some of the plumbing and the valve gears to match the prototype. I am doing a few basic modifications, including removing some of the extra hardware attached to the domes and then converting the tender to oil rather than coal.
The power pickup on this engine is from the drivers and then on the tender (front truck for one rail, rear truck for the other). I’m adding pickup to both sides of the leading truck, and then making each tender truck pick up from each rail. Every wheel on this engine should pick up power under normal circumstances. That should help it a lot with general reliability.
Once that is done, I’ll add suitable wipers so that I can use wheel synchronized chuff on a sound decoder, rather than hoping the decoder will figure it out from wheel size. That system works well, but not great. It’s so much better looking when a wiper is installed on a driver, and this engine should permit this modification fairly easily. I will need to add one more wire between the engine and the tender, but that’s not too hard.
Lastly, I’ll install a Tsunami sound decoder and then spend a little while getting it just right. There is so much to program on one of those to get it working well.
WIM #1 tender in progress
Bachmann 4-6-0 with front truck pickup
The plan is to have a complete log train ready for the Milwaukee Road Historical Association convention in Moscow, Idaho this summer. #1, 10 or so log flats and a caboose.
Thanks to the following for some ideas:
Today, on the StPB&T I have a Freight Agent position during operating sessions. That person handles all of the carcards during the session, writing up switchlists to give to the crews to direct the work to be done. This has been a successful experiment over the years, and I intend to keep something similar for the new railroad.
The workload for the StPB&T is probably at the limit which one person can handle during a session. There are 8 local trains to deal with (around 70 cars total), and usually around 8 inbound transfer runs (@8-10 cars each), and anywhere from 6 to 8 outbound transfers (at 10 or 12 cars apiece). That’s 25ish trains and 250ish cars that move during a session. That can be a lot of work, but the agents with a little bit of experience manage to keep up. New agents (during a Minn-Rail invitational, for example) don’t usually get everything done, but the whole operation tends to slow down when when the entire crew is new to the railroad.
On the WI&M, because I’m aiming for fewer operators, I plan to run many fewer trains. Only 4-5 locals, and maybe about 5 interchange trains to worry about. So maybe 10 trains, and probably about 100 cars moving. That’s enough to warrant a freight agent, but perhaps not enough to keep them busy enough. So I’m looking for additional but yet prototypical work for the agent to do.
First of all, I think the RR will be a timetable & train order railroad. Just about every train will be on the schedule, so there shouldn’t be a lot of order writing. But a Dispatcher is needed, to issue clearances to the agent-operators in each town, if for nothing else. Those agent-operators will just be clips at the town where train crews can pick up their paperwork, but the Dispatcher function needs to exist.
But the main work that I’d like to accomplish will be in the area of car routing. StPB&T Agents don’t get to spend much time thinking about the traffic flows on the railroad, because they’re too busy to do anything more with a waybill than to read it for the next movement (which is preplanned). The StPB&T would have had a small squad of agents & clerks and I have to model all of them with one person.
However, the WI&M would not have had that size of a agent crew. There was probably one person who did 95% of the work, the agent at Potlatch. And that person had to deal with several issues, including efficient car routing and the allocation of cars to customers.
For example, if the connecting roads (NP, GN & MILW) did not deliver enough empty cars to meet the shipping needs of WI&M customers, there needs to be a fair division of cars between the different shippers. The mill is running at a reduced capacity (2 shifts), not because the demand for lumber is low but because they cannot get enough cars to ship out the finished product of three shifts. During grain shipment season (which is when I’ll be modeling), the different warehouses will be ordering empties for outbound loads.
Each of these car shipment requests is reflected as a waybill. Each waybill contains the shipper, the destination, the load type and perhaps a shipper designated routing. As these requests come in, the agent will have to match up these waybills to cars that are available. If not enough cars are available, the agent will call in to the agents for the connecting roads (NP & GN in Spokane, or MILW in St. Maries) and order some empty cars.
But when the NP tacks a dozen empty boxcars on the P&L Highball heading from Spokane to Lewiston, they’re billed to Agent, WI&M, Potlatch Idaho. There’s no further routing on them, because the NP doesn’t care which car goes to Potlatch Grain Warehouse in Princeton and which one goes to the mill for lumber loading. That’s the responsibility of the WI&M, and thus the WI&M freight agent.
When a WI&M train to Palouse picks up cars from the NP interchange track, their destination is Potlatch, and so the crew will take them to Potlatch and turn the paperwork over to the Freight Agent. A dozen empty boxcars are now available to use, and the agent might have 30 or waybills for outbound shipments. Matching the bills to a suitable car is part of the additional work I see for the WI&M agent.
What makes a car suitable for a specific load?
Well, first the car type has to match. Some requests will be for 50′ cars to the mill, and a 40′ car won’t do. This is a simple match of AAR car types.
If the agent is completely swamped and the session is getting bogged down, that’s all that’s needed to make the operations work.
But if there’s time, and I am designing this so that the time for this will be there, the agent can now pay attention to things like routing and the car owner. Being in the Pacific Northwest, pretty much everything is going to go south and eastwards, but some loads will be going to Seattle or Portland or even closer destinations like Lewiston, Pasco or Cle Elum. By AAR car usage rules, we cannot load a foreign road car with a load going away from its home area. So sending a load of lumber to Minot, No. Dak. is good for a Pennsylvania RR boxcar. But that same PRR box should not be used to send a load to Portland.
The agent also needs to balance out the demands of the mill (one of the largest in the world, and the operator of the mill owns of the WI&M, so it’s clearly our bread & butter) against the other shippers on the line. The grain warehouses have only so much storage capacity, and their operations will come to a halt if they don’t get cars when they’re called for. So while it would be nice to send every empty car to the mill, we cannot do that. But we can’t just fill all of the non-mill requests at the expense of the mill. If the mill stops shipping out finished lumber, they’ll stop bringing in logs, and the logs are what drives most of the local economy. So the agent has to perform some sort of allocation of available cars to match the requests.
Also, the agent gets to reward the railroads that meet our empty car requests. If the WI&M orders 15 empties from the NP in Spokane, and we get 10, that puts us in a bit of a bind. If the MILW gives us 10 when we ask for 10, and can do so consistently, we’re going to reward them. How does the WI&M reward a railroad for this type of co-operation?
Besides the Christmastime bottles of Scotch delivered to the agents in Spokane and St. Maries, the only other way we have to reward the railroads is to route cars their way, so they get a share of the cross country tariff for lumber and grain shipments. Many of the mill shipments will be specified only as to the destination of the consignee, but not the route. The WI&M is then responsible for determining a suitable route.
When the MILW consistently gives us the cars we ask for, we’ll be more than happy to route traffic through their connection. There’s nothing wrong with receiving an empty car from the NP, and sending it out loaded on the MILW. But it’s still an issue of balance. The NP is not under any obligation to give us empty cars. If we don’t route any traffic over the NP, or only give them the dregs, then they’ll only give us the bare minimum of cars they can spare. The same goes for the GN or the MILW.
The WI&M maintains independence and multiple connections explicitly to keep those much larger railroads on their toes. We cannot favor one over another too much. But we can and must reward them when they’re helpful partners in moving the shipments from the WI&M.
The Freight Agent can pay attention to these sort of additional factors when assigning cars to shipment requests, and filling out the routes when they’re not shipper specified. This will give them a chance to pay more attention to the contents of the paperwork (and forces me to flesh it out completely and reasonably). I hope this will give them more of a chance to feel like they’re part of the continental network of railroads, all working together to move freight from here to there, and not just someone scribbling switchlists as fast as they can.
… and many more to go.
I’ll call one of my flatcars complete. It’s built, painted, decalled, weathered, and is now carrying a load of logs.
Logs loaded onto WIM #106
Logs loaded onto WIM #106
These are lilac branches that have been dried out by sitting in a Minnesota basement for several months. I’m pretty happy with how they look. They’re removable, which is needed because these cars will be used operationally. Stacks of logs will not stay with particular cars, but can be loaded onto any suitable car as needed.
I expect to have some stacks of longer logs as well, suitable for large beams and/or poles, and these stacks will be as long as the car, instead of these shorter stacks that bundle 2 per car.
The cabling holding the stacks together is upholstery thread on one bundle, and buttonhole thread on the other. It’s just wrapped around a couple of times, and then glued on the bottom. The bundles themselves are also glued together (using Weldbond, one of my favorite all-purpose adhesives).
I figure that I need something like 40 of these cars, plus a bunch of additional cars. These other cars will mostly be Milwaukee Road or Northern Pacific flats, with a handful of other roads’ cars thrown in. I’m waiting for Chad Boas’ 43′ GN flatcars, and I’ll pick up a couple of those as well.
I’ve painted up three more cars yesterday, making a total of 5 that have been constructed so far. I’m getting the process down to something fairly straightforward, but not two of these cars are exactly alike yet. They’re definitely cars built for operation and not exacting detail — I’m skipping the brake lines & rigging, and some of the end beam detail is being ignored as well. Someday I’ll build one car that has everything, and in the meantime I’ll stick to this design.
I’ve been quiet here, spending time instead working on perfecting the flatcar design. I’ve got 4 cars underway, in various stages of progress from “mostly there” to a bare-bone shell. I’ve toyed with notions of how to build these en masse, and I think the easiest thing to do is just build them all as I built the first one. I don’t think the time spent on building a master and then casting many copies would make up any savings in the long run.
Four flatcars, in various stages of progress
The first car I started, #106, is now complete except for a suitable load. A friend has several pieces of twigs from his yard drying in his basement. We both think these will be pretty reasonable representations of white pine. A few more species will be tested this spring. That’s perhaps another project for this weekend yet. The loads will be 18-20′ logs, since most of the photos I’ve seen show 2 stacks of logs per car. Yes, some loads were longer logs, especially if larger, but many seemed to be the shorter logs. These will be removable, and probably interchangeable between cars, since I’ll be adding and removing them regularly as a part of the operating sessions.
In the meantime, I’m willing to stop working on this car for the time being:
WI&M log flat #106
The second car I started is the white frame (in the rear, above) since I forgot to insert the lead weight before I assembled the center beam and the needle beams. So for this car I need to get some weight powder and fill in the space where that lead sheet should have gone.
#110 just needs some more weathering and the log “bunks” seen on #106. I would like to find a good way to represent the upward cant found on the prototype, but I’m willing to live without it. Some of these cars should also see rails for the slide-ass loaders.
The last project for the weekend was caboose X-1. This started out as a Walthers DM&IR caboose.
Walthers DM&IR Caboose
First, I removed the lettering using Testors/Floquil ELO (Easy Lift Off). Then the letterboards got painted over (I didn’t have to remove that lettering quite so thoroughly as the other). The trucks were painted, as were the wheels. That part has been done for weeks now. Friday was a bonus day for me when the mail carrier delivered several packages, one of which contained the new decals I ordered. The first sheet is for WI&M cabooses, and I quickly got the bare yellow caboose lettered as X-1. Then some (mostly) steady handwork got the window frames painted in black. Lastly, some PanPastels were used to weather the caboose to a fairly clean but somewhat dusty and faded look (as I imagine it appeared after several years in the Idaho sun).
WI&M Caboose X-1
So it’s not a perfect representation of the prototype, but it’s good enough for me (for now). I could go into a full list of what I see as not (yet) correct: the letterboard should extend further out without the curve up at the overhang; the cupola roof should be peaked; the smoke jack and the ladders are on the wrong side; and the window arrangements (especially in the cupola) could be closer to the real thing. But I don’t think I will. Comparing this model against page 277 of The White Pine Route leaves me quite happy. This will be a perfectly good model for the first WI&M train on my layout.
Further cabooses will include X-3, to be built from a Mullet River Model Works Milwaukee Road caboose model, This kit needs to have the cupola shortened, but otherwise should be a good model for the secondhand X-3. X-4 and X-5 are former NP 1600 series cabooses, which can be nicely done from the AMB NP model. Tom Hillebrant placed a photo of his conversion in The White Pine Quarterly, #10.2. And I suppose X-2 will be another of these Walthers cabooses.
Anyone interested in caboose decals should drop me a line. One sheet should cover all 5 cabooses.
Earlier I mentioned a few of the reasons that my current railroad isn’t working as well for me as I’d like it to. So what does the WI&M have that the StPB&T doesn’t?
First of all, the scope and scale of the prototype is attractive. It’s not a little tiny 3 mile shortline, but neither is it a transcontinental mainline railroad.
The former is just too small, since I’d like to have some mainline running (more for a chance to have some nice scenery without having to switch in it). Also, the tiny shortline either runs with too few crew or ends up working with several crews very closely within a small area. That leaves me with too little operation, or too dense of an operation (one the problems I see with the current railroad).
The latter (a large mainline railroad) can make it very hard to select which portion to model. For example, from my days of interest in the Montana Rail Link, I have developed an affinity for the Northern Pacific. But any one portion of that railroad seems too limiting for my purposes. How many places are there that have a decent amount of online switching AND nice scenery? Perhaps some of the branch lines, but I don’t really know much about those (not that I cannot learn). Mullan Pass provides for nice helper/mainline operation, but how much switching is there nearby? Some in Helena, otherwise next to nothing within an area small enough to fit nicely in the basement without covering three divisions in 200′ of track.
So the WI&M seems a decent balance. The line is small enough that I can compress nearly the entire railroad in the basement, yet retain nearly all of the interesting spots along the line. I can also seriously consider building the entire primary fleet of locomotives and cabooses without going broke or crazy. Maybe I won’t build all of the freight cars (300 flat cars is just a few too many for me), but enough of them will be built to make the operations work.
It also gives me an excuse to get out to the mountains more often. I’ve always liked the Rockies, and getting there more often than every 10 years is probably a good idea for my own mental health. Alas, there’s an awful lot of the Great Plains betwixt here and there — 2 days worth of driving to get to the mountains, and then another day at the minimum to get to Idaho.
I’ve also been wanting to do more “modeling”. That’s in quotes, since what I’ve been doing to date is also modeling, but I’d like to do more prototype-directed models, including kitbashing and scratchbuilding as needed. I’ve not done as much of that as I’d like. Given that the StPB&T isn’t real, it’s hard to find specific prototypes to model. Much of the WI&M doesn’t exist anymore, but there are photos, so I have some basis upon which to build against the real thing.
And dang it, I guess I just like territory that has pine trees.
I’ve got artwork for a set of WI&M caboose decals almost ready. I’ve got fully spelled out WASHINGTON, IDAHO & MONTANA, along with WASH IDA & MONT. X1 through X5. All in both black and white. So one ought to be able to letter any caboose from any era that I’ve seen photos of, and perhaps a few that don’t exist (I’m not sure the white WASH IDA & MONT or X4/X5 is needed).
caboose decal artwork
Anyone with comments or suggestions on it, please speak up.
Anyone interested in a copy, please let me know.
I’ve received the decals I had made for the flatcars, and have now lettered up the first flatcar I built.
Decals as applied to WIM#106
The decals were printed up by Jerry Glow, and these are some of the nicest decals I’ve ever worked with. They’re very thin, and the film hides perfectly with a minimal layer of flat-coat. If you’re interested in decals, let me know and we’ll see what sort of arrangements we can come up with.
Now of course, this car looks much too clean for fifty years of service in the woods of north central Idaho, as it will be 1955 or ’56 on my forthcoming layout. So some real weathering is in the cards, along with the chain brackets and other assorted hardware on the deck for holding logs.
Lastly, I’ll be using some of the logs that are drying out for me now, courtesy of the Cumberland Northern Railway. Dave has found several species of local shrubbery that seem to dry out nicely and look pretty good. Lilac, pear and (something else I cannot recall at the moment) are all decent standins. Actual white pine doesn’t look right at the smaller scale, and the sap is also likely to be a problem.
So some log loads will be made, and made removable, since it wouldn’t be right to haul logs back into the woods.
Two large galleries here, with a lot of seemingly duplicated photos, because I’m trying to get good background shots.
The first is from Speeder Day, so there are shots from the depot area during loading & unloading times, and then a lot of pictures taken from the speeders themselves. More stills from the Princeton run, since I was handholding video during the Kennedy Ford & Palouse trips.
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| July 9, 2011 Potlatch Speeder Day |
The following day Dave and I toured the line as we could by car. Lots more photos. Dave swore there was a constant clicking sound everywhere we stopped in Idaho. I didn’t think the camera was that loud… but there are a lot of pictures.
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| July 10, 2011 WI&M Exploration |
Last summer I drove out to Potlatch for Speeder Day. I followed the NP line fairly closely from Saint Paul all the way to St. Regis, and then the Milwaukee Road’s line over Saint Paul Pass to Saint Maries, and then over to Potlatch for the weekend.
I had a blast riding on the speeders, and helping out the rest of the time. My video didn’t come out very well, but I took a lot of pictures as well. See the previous post for some video taken on the 2010 Speeder Rides.
An overview of the entire trip is now available, with photos ranging mostly between the railroad subjects we found interesting and the scenery across the mountain passes we travelled (Bozeman, Mullan, Saint Paul, Lookout, Homestake, Beartooth, Dead Indian and Granite Passes).
I hope you enjoy the photos.
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| Visiting the Washington, Idaho & Montana |
More photos to come, especially of the WI&M.
About the W I & M