A Look Back at 2017 on the Kings Port Division

Happy New Year Train Fans!

Its been a good year for the fictional Kings Port Division of the Penn Central Railroad and the freelanced Kings Port & Western!   I thought I'd provide a quickie summary of the highlights.

Acquisitions

A combination of generous gifts from fellow modelers and purchases I made myself increased the K.P.D. roster!  Most are duplicate or even triplicate cars that each of us involved in the virtual ops between John's New York Central Train Layout and more recently Neal's Atlantic Pacific Railroad now own.

Gifts over the last year include:

Atlantic Pacific RR hopper #9416 and RBL #60358:   These gifts from Neal painted and lettered for his freelanced railroad by John increase the virtual ops options between his layout, John's and mine.

Hoschton Railway RBL #913001:  Another model railroad buddy, Engineer Ed generously made this excellent Hocthon Railway RBL for me based on his freelanced line.  We're looking forward to including him in some virtual ops next yer!

P&LE drop mill gon and PC Depressed Well Flat:   These cars for heavy loads were gifts from John and are increasing interesting moves in the virtual ops with the N.Y.C.T.L.

PC corrugated gondola  #576104:   A recent Christmas gift that is a match for those owned by John and Neal for three way ops.

Purchases increasing the roster include:

PC Boxcar #3600063:  Found for a good price on MB Klein!  I bought three of these hyper accurate Walthers cars and sent one each to John and Neal for future ops.

PC boxcar #266360: a good price on eBay made it hard for me to resist adding this car to the K.P.D. roster! 

PC GP38-2:  This new-in-the-box Bachmann loco had a great "Buy it now" price so I pulled the trigger just before Christmas and bought it as a present fo myself!  It runs smoothly and quietly with Athearn dummy GP38-2 #8046 behind it in consist on a coal train.

Morton Salt covered hopper:  John and Neal both own one of these and run it in virtual ops between their layouts.  Neal installed the Menards Morton Salt company on his layout as a virtual ops shipper between him and John.  As they send the car back and forth (with my layout located in between their supposed locations) I thought it would be fun to have one of these cars seen passing through West Mill on its way to either of the other two layouts.  I scored this vintage Tyco car on eBay and surprised the guys by including a pic of it in a passing train during one of our Penn Central Car Movement series. 

Rolling stock projects

I increased my active roster by painting and decaling several coal hoppers I already had, using commercially-made Kings Port & Western white lettering decals. 

Neal made an offer I couldn't refuse.  He sent me five undecorated ribbed boxcars and told me to keep two if I'd paint them all in my freelanced road scheme.   The ribbed sides made applying the usual NY state logo with full Kings Port & Western letting impossible so I opted for a revised scheme that seemed to turn out well.

When John and I started the virtual ops we only had a few cars that matched so we used every car that we owned in common to make the ops between out layouts possible, including new looking NYC Early Bird and Pacemaker cars that seemed outdated for the PC era.   Research revealed that some cars like this continued into the PC era but time and miles had taken their toll.  Prototype photos of an Early Bird with the PC green door and comments made by a former PC employee about seeing heavily weathered Pacemakers at Selkirk prompted these two projects that brought both cars back into the virtual ops.  

Layout improvements!

One of the first accomplishments of 2017 on the K.P.D. was the construction of locomotive facilities at West Mill including the scratch built sand tower...

and fueling facilities.

Shortly after that I added a separate power block on my DC layout to cut power to trains coming in to West Mill Yard so switchers could work that track and remove the caboose and pull cars.  The two locos below are temporarily sitting unpowered thanks to this small block. 

One of the notable elements that helps identify the PC era are ACI labels and scanners.  I added ACI labels to a few dozen cars and constructed some facsimile scanners to detect car movements on the KPD.

Ops!

The Kings Port Division was involved in 13 series of virtual ops (what we refer to as Penn Central Car Movements or P.C.C.M.s) with the New York Central Train Layout and also happily included Neal's Atlantic Pacific R.R. in some three layout operations this year!  Its very cool to arrange ops such as having a car we all own leave Neal's layout, get cut off at my West Mill Yard, be assigned to a local to serve an industry, and then get forwarded to Terminal Yard on John's layout!

Clarification of routes

Without changing any actual track on the layout, I re-imagined the routes of my Kings Port Division in a way that enhanced operations.    These mental gymnastics included making this tunnel the South end of town instead of the north so trains entering it would be heading toward Weehawken.   This way the river on my layout was actually on the correct side of the tracks to help suggest the PC River Line my layout is loosely (very loosely) modeled after.   Trains entering the tunnel might also take a cut off West toward Salamanca, NY (a great idea John came up with to help us make a connection to Rochester and the Genesee coal docks).  

A little re-imagining also created the KP&W's Mountain Branch out of one of the two staging tracks show here (How about a New Year's Resolution to ballast this track!?)  They both originally were intended to suggest the route to the fictional KP&W Mayfield Branch but now I have two destinations for freelanced ops here! 

More facades

Readers familiar with my use of facade structures to represent off-layout industries for our virtual ops observed the creation several additional facades this year.  The development of the Mountain Branch and the route to Salamanca motivated these.

Corning Glass

VanWinkle Canning

 AGWAY

International Paper

IBM

Quality Fabrications

Another New Year's Resolution could be to add more detail to these scenes...and also to find some way to make them actually part of the layout instead of just a diorama I set up on a coffee table to photograph.

Dispatch sheet and RTMF

As our virtual ops became more complex we realized we needed some sort of way of creating traffic patterns instead of simply thinking, "Hmmmmm which industry on John's layout should I send this New York Central boxcar to this time?"  We came up with the Rail Traffic Management Form which lists four or more cycles of car movements for each car we have in common.   We have enough cars and enough scenarios now that a fixed pattern like this remains interesting.  Some of the car movements are INTRA-Layout, meaning we'll move them to more than one location on our own layouts before sending them off to each others' layouts.   So far the system seems to be work well! 

FUN!!!!

Really what it all comes down to is enjoying the hobby and I have to say that enjoyment has been enhanced a thousand fold by sharing it with friends.   

Thanks guys and Happy New Year!!!