Dakota bound

 

I've made no secret of my interest in all-things from the high prairie of the central Dakotas and western Minnesota, especially those former Milwaukee Road granger mainline and branches between Ortonville, MN and where the former MILW alignment now ends east of Terry, MT. I've also been captured by the erstwhile regional Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern railroad, as they inherited quite a bit of former Milwaukee locomotives and rolling stock over the years. Case in point, the MILW SD40-2 EMD road-switchers.

While the former Milwaukee lines that radiate out from the Hub City terminal in Aberdeen, S. Dak. are now operated by BNSF Railway the DM&E does have trackage rights up from its former C&NW mainline at Wolsey, SD into Aberdeen. I do like the BN and was exposed to it quite a bit after the Burlington Northern took over the northern mainline from the Milwaukee Road in 1982 - the latter retrenching further east from Miles City, MT all the way to Ortonville, MN. However, the DM&E became a bastion of former MILW power at its inception in 1986.

Besides a bunch of rebuilt former Milwaukee SD10 diesels a good number of the Road's fleet of SD40-2 units migrated to the DM&E. Easily identified by the Milwaukee's short fuel tanks leaving a gap between the front truck and the tank, these units roamed all over the DM&E, IC&E and later - after merger - the CP all over again. To me, there is nothing like the sound of a brace of these turbocharged EMDs reverberating over the prairie when throttled up on a long train. So much, I have five of them on my HO scale roster.

All of them are from Scale Trains - pictured in the top photo - with three in DM&E's SDSU blue and yellow colors, and two as EMDX "bandits" still showing the harvest orange and black of their alma mater, albeit a bit faded, worn and weathered. While I'm still thinning the herd as far as locomotives (keep an eye out for the various HO sale groups for the DM&M "estate sale") and rolling stock I may keep a few CP Rail GMD SD40-2 Bowser models and perhaps a small group of custom GE ES44AC road units on the roster, the latter now owned by my present employer.

Fleet rationalization work continues as I've scaled-down significantly the complexity of the in-progress layout, and likewise am in the process of backdating the collection to something more appropriate for the 1990s through the early 2000s - the era before graffiti really took over. I've never been a fan of this type of "art" (more like criminal vandalism in my mind) so the early aughts are a good bookend to set a boundary against when establishing the DM&M in a particular time and place.

The DM&M? Wait, I thought you said you were modeling the DM&E? Yes, the DM&M initials and SCAC code will live on, just a bit west of the old locale. This will be the Dakota, Minnesota and Michigan Railroad Company - AAR reporting mark DMM - and will be operating a secondary mainline that was former Milwaukee Road before the early '80s retrenchment. A bit of protofreelancing will allow this, while honoring family roots in all three locations - the latter my present domicile.

I'm headed back "home" to visit family coming up in June, and looking forward to soaking up the high plains, watch a few trains and do some field research and shoot photos along the right of way. Meanwhile, the DM&M continues to take shape in the basement. I hope to post more on the layout in the near future on this blog and elsewhere, so please continue to watch this space. Highball, and clear signals!

Diverging Clear

Sometimes in life we must (or, should) take a different path than we had anticipated, even a short time earlier. This hobby can be no different, and the pull of granger railroading across the verdant fields and prairie of the upper Midwest has drawn me my entire life. Growing up, I spent numerous summers on my late fraternal grandparent's farm - and later, visited their new home town, after they retired. The little 'burg of Bowdle, South Dakota, population 400-and-something, hard along US-12 and the Milwaukee Road's mainline to the Pacific coast - 763.9 rail miles west of Chicago's Union Station.

I watched the last gasps of this erstwhile transcontinental in the mid-to-late 1970s and - after 1982 - when Burlington Northern took over from Terry, Montana eastward. Even into the BNSF era long cuts of outbound grain flowed from these rich lands of my forefathers - hard-working descendants of immigrant Germans that fled czarist Russia, from small communities near Odesa and Strasburg, Ukraine. The current struggles there against (again) imperialist designs of the Kremlin has reinvigorated my passionate feelings towards my heritage, and the land - there, and in the new world here.

My father and his dad - his namesake - both hail from "Lawrence Welk-country," this area of north-central SD and south-central ND largely populated by German farmers from the Black Sea region of the former Russian Empire. Towns like Bowdle where my dad grew up, Roscoe and Java, Hosmer and Eureka, South Dakota, and those slightly to the north like Zeeland (my grandfather's birthplace) and Welk's Strasburg, North Dakota. All of these townsites were founded by the CMSt.P&P railroad in the 1880s and 1890s as the St. Paul (as the Milwaukee was known by back then) pushed westward from the Minneapolis grain milling district.

Thousands of carloads of grain were shipped east over the years from elevators along these lines - boxcars (and later, covered hoppers) full of wheat, oats, sunflowers, corn, soybeans and, yes, barley - the bounty of the northern Great Plains carried away in freight cars lettered MILW for railroad whose namesake was better known as the Beer City. I can imagine many a bottle of Milwaukee's finest had originated from the family farm north of town, or perhaps from a cousin on the Geier side. I spent many a hour trackside pondering that very question, as the empty cars were shuffled in place to load during harvest.

This pull of heritage, coupled with some engineering challenges inherent to the design of my previous, still-born freelance attempt, has led to a change in direction on the 1:87 scale basement empire. I may re-attempt the DM&M theme later down the road, but for right now it will be western Minnesota or the east-central Dakota farm belt on my HO scale layout. Chosen era is a bit in-flux, as I have power and equipment ranging from MILW EMD SDL39 road-switchers to DM&E ex-Milwaukee SD40-2's and the latest GE power in both CP and Amtrak.

Regardless of era, tall wooden-sheathed grain elevators, concrete and corrugated metal grain silos and bins, feed mills and Co-op fertilizer and oil dealers will dominate the towns lineside, along with a local railroad depot (or station sign) and the proverbial municipal water tower proudly bearing the little town's name (and, sometimes, the school colors) will be present. Branchline or mainline (or both) will have long trains of grain cars being pulled from house tracks and sidings by local freights, while the high-iron is polished by manifests and a first-class passenger train or two.

Layout design and track planning is ongoing. More to come here soon, but in the meantime - Highball west!

Back on track

 The good news is I pretty much have the critical, non-railroad distractions behind me now, having just completed several rounds of cancer surgery and treatment over the past year. Not a day too soon from my perspective, as with this and the seemingly never-ending pandemic, growing inflation, domestic political disfunction and international geopolitical tensions in eastern Europe and central and east Asia drives one towards hobbies, drink (or both) in a vain attempt to maintain one’s sanity.

Losing myself in my basement train room is as good a tonic as any, where life’s problems can be left at the doorstep, and where everything in my HO scale world “just works” and I’m back to the simplicity of youth (or is it blissful ignorance?). Either way, I can escape bedeviling problems like unreasonable clients, demanding bosses, bills, taxes, leaking plumbing and other seemingly unsurmountable problems in life by immersing myself in DM&M territory. Downstairs… it is always early Autumn in mid-Michigan, and CP and Amtrak trains are on the move.

As I revert this blog back “on-topic” and document the continued journey of construction and operation of the Detroit, Mackinac and Marquette Railroad’s Saginaw Sub to refresh everyone’s recollection and to ground any newcomers to this blog below are the key foundational posts that outline my layout theme. If you haven’t yet read through the opening chapters and history of my proto-freelanced HO scale railroad I recommend you reach back to the above links and catch up. If anything, it will allow the reader to better understand the reasons and rationale behind this alternate world I’m creating in miniature.

The Marquette Route

A great east-west route through Michigan

Today's DM&M

In my next blog post I’ll expand a bit more on the operations and design of the DM&M - for 1:87 scale construction details consider visiting my model railroading blog at Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine. There I am blogging the actual building and modeling journey in more detail, whereas this site will focus more on the freelanced prototype, as if the DM&M was an actual operating railroad in the real world. (Well, it is - at least in my mind. Otherwise, why would we all bother with all this enjoyable fantasy, anyway?)

Update

 I should have written another entry but after finally getting past the first round of radio-Iodine treatment it honestly took me some time to regain my energy to get on top of work, let alone a hobby. Then, I've had to put all my energy in digging out of the hole my project at work fell into during my recovery time. I'm still nowhere out of the woods there (yet) but at least I'm somewhat back to my old strength, at least until the next round. My endocrinologist was concerned a certain cancer marker remains elevated in my bloodwork, and in consulting with the nuclear medicine physician they both want to re-scan me next month.

I've got some other screening tests coming up in a week or so but should at least be able to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday, before having to go on the infamous low-iodine diet starting December 1st. The week of December 13th I start the whole daily shuffle to the hospital for injections of Thyrogen, a lower-level dose of radioactive Iodine-131, IVs with contrast dye, and lots of radiology scans to see if any errant, assumed-malignant thyroid cells "light up" on the scans. Hopefully nothing will show, and I won't have to go through the high-dose treatment again, which would be early next year.

I'm honestly "sick-of-being-sick" at this point, and want to get my old life back. Besides a challenging project with a difficult client the added headwinds of illness and treatment is something I can ill-afford as a project manager in this business. Add to that repeated turnover in resources (read: the Great Resignation) and a customer whose expectations are far from aligning to reality I'm sort of living the perfect storm of misery when it comes to life outside the hobby. I know the hobby will always be there but I find myself sometimes - between Zoom calls - looking wistfully into the layout room, where literally nothing has moved or progressed since last report. Frustrating, to say the least, and burned-out at worst.

So, here I am on a Sunday evening getting ready to start the workweek with approving my team's timesheets and expense reports from the week prior, and scheduling meetings into the next week - before my hyper-active client starts sending out nasty-grams about our "poor communication" and "lack of engagement." Maddening... the politics of this client, but albeit, typical of large, corporate behemoths too heavy on bureaucracy. If I had a time machine I think I'd pick a different profession, but at age 51 with a professional certification it's a bit late to start over. Just make it to retirement, I keep telling myself.

At least the trains will still be there should I make it to that magic date. That is what keeps me going some days.

Derailed

 

I sort of saw this coming, and - operating under Restricted Speed rules and all - pretty much got my train stopped in time. Either way the track ahead is temporarily blocked for a bit, and it's not COVID-19. Late last year I was at an annual check-up with my primary physician, and she noticed a small bump on my right thyroid. It wasn't bothering me, and my labs were normal but we had it checked out regardless. Three ultrasounds, two biopsies and a genetic marker test later and I'm diagnosed with Stage III thyroid cancer, and a total thyroidectomy scheduled.

I'm now two weeks post-op and the results from pathology just came in. Besides a 6.7 cm malignant mass on the right side several of my lymph nodes were compromised on both the left and right side of my neck. I'm scheduled for radioactive iodine-131 therapy in a couple of weeks, and will be starting a (rather tough) low-iodine diet after this coming weekend. The good news is this type of cancer is highly treatable with this sort of radiation so my prognosis is positive. Still, never, ever ignore a bump that doesn't belong there historically, even if you think maybe I just pulled a muscle or strained something. If it doesn't go away in a couple of weeks see someone.

What has been derailed is the first half of my summer plans while I attend to this temporary health setback, and my active modeling has been largely put on the back burner until I get through the treatments, and on thyroid medicine. Losing a thyroid causes all sorts of issues with your metabolism, energy level and ability to concentrate and focus. As the hormones fade the more days past my surgery I'm told it's going to be a bit of a slog until my radiation is complete and I can go on the synthroid drug. I'll just keep plugging along the best I can in the meantime.

Since I'm largely stuck at home - especially during the week-plus of radiation therapy - I plan on continuing to organize the layout room and get things prepared for modeling again. I still have those light bars to hang and wire into the ceiling, and perhaps paint and seal the Homasote subroadbed should I have enough energy. I still have my day job as a project manager with a fairly intense and rather complex warehouse implementation project to lead. However, I have a good team and a strong co-lead helping me so the goal here is to pace myself better on this one. Keeping the inevitable stress managed is key to restoring (and keeping) my health.

Thank goodness we have a hobby that helps during tough times like these.

Roadmaps and Restricted Speed

It's been almost a year now since my last post and COVID is still with us and raging eleven months later. I've thankfully been off the road since that time, which one would think might allow for more time in the basement working on the railroad. Alas... the bold, new, highly-connected post-pandemic world of 24/7 video Zoom meetings seem to keep one's behind firmly planted in his home office desk chair. This especially became the case after management figured out that since us (formerly road-warrior) consultants are no longer wedded physically to a client site we can theoretically juggle multiple customers (e.g. 5+) and their associated projects simultaneously, or so the bosses believe. While I don't miss the weekly o'dark-thirty drive to the airport, then the 'fly-change planes-fly again-rent car-hotel check-in shuffle' I do miss only have one or maybe two client projects to oversee at any one time. Sometimes "being careful what you wish for" is a truism, especially when one longed for home while on the umpteenth business trip that year.

So needless to say, despite being grounded due to the pandemic I really didn't make much progress on the layout, other than solving a vexing engineering problem with the overhead LED light bars that had been bedeviling me for a long while. I still have to solve the rear and low-profile front backdrop design - will likely go the aluminum trim coil route there - so it may be some additional period of time until tracklaying begins in earnest. Meanwhile, I try to make some incremental progress on the basement empire while operating at the current restricted speed as dictated by workload and my boss by fait accompli,  as in "No hobby time for you... TWO YEARS!" (with apologies to Seinfeld's Yev Kassem character). Not sure if I'm going to rebrand myself as "the Resistance" but perhaps a little leisure-time insurgency is indeed warranted in these odd times.

Performing the delicate balance of freelancing while maintaining reasonable plausibility takes a lot of homework, often historical in nature. While I have my favorite prototype roads from the upper midwest like the Soo Line, Milwaukee and the North Western I've always wanted to be the captain of my own ship - my own James J. Hill, albeit in miniature form. This is where developing your own road and alternate history comes into play, sort of the model railroad equivalent of fantasy football where - armed with your modeler's license - you can do what is necessary to bend history to serve your own purpose. It is a good thing I'm a bit of an amature cartagrapher and student of industrial history and archeology, which can become a hobby in and of itself at times. It was in the course of another round of 'desk-bound' research that I came across a trove of old Penn Central ZTS maps for the Saginaw Sub.

ZTS, or 'zone-track-spot' maps are the railroad Operating Department equivalent of the aforementioned Engineering Dept. station maps. However, where the focus on the latter is turnout size, track curvature and other civil engineering minutiae the operating folks are more concerned with the car capacities of each track, industry names, spotting locations and the like. Railroad crews are usually issued ZTS maps for their territory and use them to learn where certain tracks are that may be identified on their switchlist, and how exactly to spot them at a customer for loading or unloading of cargo. This new tranche of information has provided a lot of answers on old industries that used to be customers on the old Michigan Central, especially on those tracks that have long ceased to exist.

 In the map above you see the ZTS drawing for the Carrollton-Zilwaukee area just north of Saginaw Yard, which is figured prominently on the top part of my layout drawing featured in the previous post. While I had planned on modeling the large Saginaw Grain terminal and adjacent Huron Cement facility I hadn't yet identified what industry would be featured on the far, upper left-hand side of this switching district. The newly discovered ZTS for the "snake track" (my name for this extended industrial spur) shows a couple possibilities - either Schaefer Chemical or Kretschmer Wheat Germ. Both companies are surprisingly still in operation at new locations, and you can find the latter product on your local grocery store shelves as a so-called "super-food." I still need to find out what types of rail cars served both businesses, however for the time being this riddle has been solved.

I also have ZTS maps for the Midland branch and the Wenona terminal area in N. Bay City so analysis of these wonderful maps are ongoing to firm up the industries and supporting trackage in those respective areas. While not much has been accomplished this year in physical form the design refinements supported by the newly uncovered documents ensures the layout will be both accurate and engaging for visiting operating crews and spectators alike. As the general manager of this proto-freelanced road I'll also have the satisfaction in "owning" the fictitious company - something not available to pure prototype modelers that are copying a section of actual railroad from its 1:1 scale reality, warts and all. Creating a fact-ional alternate history can combine the best of both worlds, but it takes diligence and work to pull it off in a convincing manner. I hope the DM&M will measure up well to roads like Allen McClelland's V&O and Eric Brooman's Utah Belt. Achieving that milestone down the line is what keeps me focused and on-task, albeit apparently from my desktop for the time being.

Today's DM&M

The current-day - well, 2000's anyway - Saginaw Division comprises of DM&M trackage around the Tri-Cities area of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. This includes Meredith Street (MX) in Saginaw, Carrollton and Zilwaukee, Bay City - including Wenona yard - and the branch to Midland, Mich. with Dow Chemical's large facility on the SE side of town. In reality this is the mid-Michigan former Penn Central trackage that continues to thrive today, with a diverse amount of traffic bolstered by large blocks of traffic for Dow. So too in my proto-freelanced world these lines provide the railroad with many revenue carloads to fill out the otherwise bridge-route nature of this secondary trunk on the CP Rail System.

The layout plan - courtesy of Bob Sprague -  fills a good portion of my (roughly) 13 foot by 27 foot basement train room. This dedicated space will someday in the future host monthly operating sessions, but in the interim I have many months - if not, years - of construction ahead of me. No matter, just as the original DM&M's surveying and construction crews battled the forests, wetlands, and weather (not to mention swarms of ravenous mosquitos and black flies) while they graded and placed track across the U.P. will I too make sure and steady progress in 1:87th scale. With the benchwork all up and Homasote subroadbed all down I've got a good head start, at least on the grading part.

The design is a twice-around, round-the-room schematic using the surround-staging concept as promoted by the LDSIG folks over the years. Having lots of hidden trackage can be problematic but access shouldn't be too much of an issue with a low foreground backdrop merely high-enough to block view of the trains parked behind. The four-track staging represents both Detroit to the south and Mackinaw City (and points west) to the north. There is also a provision to add a wye leading to additional staging track under the basement stairwell at a later point. The Midland Branch consists of two, six-foot by 24" sections making up a center peninsula - both double as FREEMO modules so part of the layout can "go on the road" to events.

The track plan was carefully developed using original 1971 Penn Central Detroit Division engineering department station maps and drawings for the area, as well as aerial and satellite photos of the current physical plant. Field trips to the area were also conducted to ensure accuracy, with some modeler's license applied to fit the various LDE's into the space as shown. Bob had to flip the industrial trackage to Gavilon Grain (former Peavey elevator) and the Lafarge cement terminal in Zilwaukee, as well as swap sides of Wenona yard's engine terminal but otherwise the plan is an accurate reflection of the prototype.

Operations will be largely based out of Wenona yard on Bay City's far north side, with locals to Midland and Saginaw operating daily from this mid-sized terminal. Road freights will swap blocks here, and a daily Detroit-Bay City manifest will round out the traffic into this facility. Interchange with foreign roads such as the Huron and Eastern, Lake State Railway and Canadian National will provide additional traffic, as well as seasonal unit grain moves and all-rail ore trains heading south. The Amtrak trains I noted in an earlier post will likewise require track time as they traverse the mainline.

Contemporary CP diesel power will be featured with GE ES44AC, EMD and GMD SD40-2, and GP38-2 locomotives, Union Pacific engines in pooled service, Amtrak GE P42 Genesis units on the varnish, and the occasional HESR and CN motors on transfer runs. On rare occasion, the famous Milwaukee Road #261 has been known to dust the right-of-way with her cinders pulling excursions to and from the scenic vacation areas in the northern areas of the Great Lakes. Quite a bit of variety to keep guests and operators entertained that is for certain.

My next installment will get into more details about the railroad, and hopefully show some in-progress photos as I go along with construction. In the meantime keep 'em upright and on the rails!