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I have been
modeling since I was a teenager, first with airplanes, then boats, and then
trains, that being a standard Lionel "O" gauge around the
Christmas tree. It was moved to a
spare room after Christmas.
My first real
layout was on the reverse side of a ping-pong table and powered by a car
battery. Tin strips passed current under the roadbed to a control
panel fastened inside the track loop and wires ran under a grass mat to
switches and accessories. Everything went fine until the strips
accidentally touched and completely melted the wires, filling the basement
with smoke. Equipment was mostly Athern and Varney for rolling stock
and Revel or Faller for structures.
We moved to Connecticut and I my
dad helped build my first real layout. Tracks were mostly flex-track
and as a teen-ager I managed to build my first transistor throttle and a
relay-controlled block system with signals. By the time I went off
to college I had started building wooden kits including several of the
Ambroid "1 of 5000" series. There were a number of us in a
club under the guidance of a mentor who drove us to Hartford to buy parts and to show us how
to do weathering as well as scale operation of trains. At school I
continued to build models in my dorm room. Soon after I married,
moved to an apartment and built a small switching layout. This was
my first attempt at hand laying track, and while it didn't look like much
it served as a prototype for future trackwork construction.
The apartment
became too confining so after a year we moved out to the county in Coventry where a
two-level dogbone took form over the next couple of years. I was
always reminded that my scenery was more like the surface of the moon than
earth, but at least the trains ran. Trackwork featured a double
crossing, a three-way switch into the roundhouse and a CTC board for
four-cab control. There was a section of about thirty-five feet of
track in a tunnel that yielded seventeen cars that had disappeared when the
railroad was dismantled and moved to its current location less than half a
mile away.
Today the North river occupies one side of the basement and
features Hand laid track including a slip-switch, computer control and
several prize-winning models. The tracks are mostly at the same
elevation with no tunnels, spirals or obstructions; the scenery goes up and
down instead of the tracks.
There are
over fifty locations to spot cars with four trains per day where operations
are via a colored tag system. The track from Lee Interchange to the
main yard at Harrietta connects the North River
to the outside world. Harrietta is a large single ended yard that
services a stockyard, the repair shops and several tiny local industries.
Peddler freights begin at Harrietta and pass through Charleston, Boxton, Union
and Bobston where a double-ended yard provides some interesting operation
problems. A long spur extends from Bobston to the lumber camp where
a scale logging camp is under construction. Charleston
and Union both contain run-around tracks
and serve about a dozen industries in a wide variety of configurations.
A dedicated
computer detects the position of trains, controls the block and signaling
as well as the turntable.
I am also the
Connecticut
representative of the NMRA Achievement
program. and webmaster for the Nutmeg
Division website.
Here are a
few shots of my Current
Projects
For those
interested in the technical aspects of this site click here Site Notes
Visitors are welcome. For those who
insist on sending snail mail, please send to:
Bob Van Cleef, 46 Broadway, Coventry,
CT 06238
Otherwise, send email to: ravancleef@msn.com
- phone: (860) 742-1889
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