Thawing Coal Shed and Customers

A lingering mystery about Harlem Station is the coal shed that used to stand near the loading ramp. This narrow and long structure would be quite easy to model, but photographic and graphical evidences clashes.

The thawing coal shed can be seen on the right side.

1951, Track Planning for Realistic Operation, 2nd edition, John Armstrong
Kalmbach Publishing

According to some maps (in fact, most of them), the coal shed – often identified by railfans as a thawing coal shed – was built on top of a track. It would mean coal hoppers we pushed under the structure. Photographs also show there was indeed two tracks leading to the ramps thought only one is visible on the Harlem River side of the shed.

My biggest concern is about the shed itself. If a track was under it, how the building structure was made. The pictures let me believe there was some kind of raised floor on each sides of the track, but it would make little sense to have one.... How would such a building be put in use?

Feel free to comment with your favorite theory, or to clarify my understanding of that neat structure in Harlem. I’m pretty sure someone got some knowledge of similar coal shed covering a track. Edit: While information abound about modern thawing sheds, older ones are less documented. According to several sources, the heating process was done by torching or with steam pipes. We can already exclude the later since Harlem Station didn't had any sizeable boiler room that could have supplied enough steam (except if something comes up).

By the way, as I’m planning to develop the operation concept for the layout, I’m searching for customers that used to be served by Erie’s Harlem Station back in the 1950s, more exactly in 1952. I already have on hand a list of names, but except for a few obvious ones in pictures (Gassman Coal, Jerome Fuel), but others are harder to locate since they didn’t have billboard on the property. Among them are, tentatively, Mirandi Coal (?), Victory Coal, Consumer’s Coal, Bay Transportation, National Carloading, Eastern Trucking and a company dealing with construction equipment (cranes in particular). Any glimpse of information would be appreciated. I have no knowledge about Erie’s archives, but under normal circumstances, papers and scale drawings of the property should survive with indications about tenants and their location.

Quick Update and Future Developments

Well, probably many readers wonder what happened to Harlem Station since last year. In fact, very little and it was never operated in a decent manner since last summer. However, as this blog can testify, this is often a summer project and I'm actually in the process of makinG some room in my basement to start working again on this great little layout.

Among the many tasks to accomplish in the future are some rolling stock upgrade (weight, wheels and couplers) and improving the boxcab performance (LokSound Full Throttle if possible, maybe try the Proto Throttle). Also, a few structures still need to be scratchbuilt and a scenery can be improved a lot. But all that is hardware and cake icing, it doesn't account that much to operation.

As we found out during our few operation sessions, this layout as a lot of potential, but can become a real nightmare to stage. There is something alway weird in deciding yourself which cars to pick up or set out. For this reason, I've studied last winter how to create switchlist with JMRI. Creating automated switchlist would boost greatly the impression you are handling freight at a busy terminal and make my life much easier.

Until then, we will have to figure out a way to split the layout in two halves again as originally designed. It will require cutting the tracks near the split joint and loosening some scenic material.

Meanwhile, I added a new link to Ralph Heiss' Lehigh Valley Harbor Terminal Railway blog in the recommended website list. Ralph has been a long time reader of my blog and our interest in railways somewhat overlap.

About The Author

I can't recall when trains entered my life. It seems they were already part of my life even when I was three years old and pestering my father to show me his Life-Like trainset. Combined with my passion with transportation, industrial settings, modelism and building, it became a life long obsession that permitted me to discover many new horizons.

Since 2007, I've started an informal club with friends Louis-Marie Huot and Jérôme Langlois-Lavoie in which we try to capture our childhood memories of Canadian National (or Canadien National as we say here in Québec) in Québec City area during the mid-80s.

I have also a limited yet enduring interest in Canadian Pacific decaying rural branchline network in Southern Quebec during the 70s and 80s, probably fuelled by the attractive Multimark era and Alco/MLW locomotives.

I also have an interest for interurban traction railways such as Quebec Railway Light & Power Company and have tried numerous time to model a steam era layout for many years. The Connors Branch is the answer to that obsession.

A barn I designed for my brother's farm.

I practice architecture on an everyday basis since 2007 with a focus on heritage buildings including academic studies of New France colonial architecture and its later developments. This passion lead me to purchase my grand-father's house built in 1875 and to restore it as it was at the turn of the century. I've also decicated my master grade paper on railways and their influence on Canadian urban and regional development. As you can see, my different passions are well linked together!

Among my other interests are astronomy, science, archeology, scale figure building and Japanese vinyl records collecting... and many others I probably forget!

Feel free to contact me via comments. It's always a pleasure to discuss this fascinating hobby with other enthusiasts!

Best regards,

Matthieu Lachance

First Time Here?

Welcome aboard!


Why a Small Layout?

Back in November 2010, I was starting to reshape completely my approach to this hobby and layout design thanks to Lance Mindheim and Trevor Marshall’s work. Their philosophy about achievable layouts rang a bell with my decade-long frustration. The lack of "space" seemed to spell the end of all my efforts. But still, some day I simply googled “mini train layout” and discovered Carl Arendt’s seminal Micro Layouts website.

While Carl’s website was full of cute layouts at first glance, his core message that small layout should have a purpose kept me reading. Among the more prototypical examples was a certain Jack Trollope’s attempt at reproducing a simplified version of Erie’s Harlem Station. In a matter of a few days, I was mocking up a full scale rendition of the station and Carl Arendt kindly published my project on his scrapbook page 103a on November 15th, 2010, which featured the now famous ChicagO Fork O scale layout by well-respected Australian modeller Prof Klyzlr. The rest was history… unfortunately, Carl left us before he could see the completed project.



Why Erie Railroad's 149th Street Harlem Station?

“Because it's small, easy to build and a great little prototype that begs to be modelled.“ I once used this sentence to describe Temiscouata Railway’s Connors Station.  I must admit it fits Harlem Station perfectly.

It should be noted the most interesting feature about Harlem Station is that it can be fully modelled in HO scale without any compression on a compact island layout (less than 5 feet x 7 feet) which is ideal for a house devoid of wall space for a shelf layout. While small, it can hold up to 55 cars and includes its own staging yard in the form of a carfloat. This idea has already been exploited by Tim Warris with his CNJ Bronx Terminal, however, Harlem Station is more achieveable for the casual modeller since it doesn’t require intricate trackwork. No wonder this particular prototype is now replicated by many other enthusiasts.


Why model 1952?

Harlem Station is the epitome of steam-diesel transition era; American railroading in a nutshell. Without freelancing, you have AGEIR boxcab locomotives, gantry crane, LCL traffic, carfloats, attractive 1950s vehicles and a vast selection of classic railcars from every parts of North America, from ATSF to B&O.

Back in 1952, rail traffic was still strong and Harlem Station was about to get expanded. Fortunately, the Erie Railroad Magazine ran an article about the terminal, giving us a precise picture of its
operations, employees and property at a given time in history, making the modeller’s life much easier. Needless to say Erie's officials were still extremely optimistic about the great railroad long term fate after celebrating its centennial. Little did they know their days were counted...


And the track plan?

Simple as can be… a prime example of real railroads pragmatism over modeller’s licence. Having had the occasion to operate the layout a few time, I can tell it can quickly become quite a feat to manage. Harlem Station isn’t about the extraordinary, but about the mundane… which makes it an exceptional prototype to model.

Enjoy!

More Weathered Boxcars

Slowly but surely, the fleet is nearing completion. I weathered a bunch of boxcars, mainly Roundhouse, Accurail, Athearn and Bachmann, including a custom painted PFE reefer.

I must say I'm almost jealous of Jérôme for running such a nice fleet. Weathered cars really bring life to operation in such a dramatic way!