The Story of the Birmingham District Model Railroad By John Stewart
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A semi-retired Civil Engineer, who always loved trains, tells us his story.
As youngest of three boys, I had a
Lionel layout on the floor of the finished
attic bedroom shared with my brother in the 1950’s. They say I used to fall asleep
watching the trains go round. Like many,
I migrated to HO when I traded my Aurora Slot Cars to a
friend for a Tyco train set with assorted add-ons. And, like
many, there was a hiatus as I grew older. (The Lionel trains
were given away when we didn’t use them.) My first serious
layout was built in Nashville in the 1980’s with the help of two longtime friends. It was a donut with
operating pit, three times around with a branch line in about 8 x 12 feet. It was DC Cab Control and
actually a pretty nice little layout, with scenery and everything.
That layout was sawed up in 1992, when I moved to Birmingham, AL from Nashville, on a company transfer. I found two things in Birmingham, AL: One was the steel industry and the other was the Southern Ry’s Steam Program operating out of Norris Yards. I apparently have “steel” genes as my family is from Pittsburgh; I never lived there but visited many times. I have memories of my Daddy taking us out at night to watch the lights from the mills, likely Bessemer Converters, in the mid 1950’s. Apparently that vision stayed with me. I also obtained a wonderful 1935 Map of the Birmingham- Bessemer Terminal Area that became the reason for the starting the Birmingham Rails website.
As you may know, Birmingham was the center of the Southern steel industry, superseding Chattanooga in the 1880’s. Birmingham had all three of the key raw materials for making iron on one location, and very close together. This was equaled nowhere else in the world. We still have one USS steel mill.
So, my first Birmingham layout had a blast furnace in the
basement, so to speak. And it featured Digitrax DCC from about
1994 or so. That layout was never close to completed, although
it was operational. We moved in 2007, to a new basement. I
immediately began planning a new layout and fairly quickly decided that it would do two things: it
would be designed for operations (whatever that was) and it would feature the steel industry as a
theme. My friend Craig Gardner and I began construction,
Sept. 28, 2008 after about a year of planning and design of the
railroad. That included having the basement finished for two
railroad rooms and a large den (crew lounge). I designed the
railroad using 3rd PlanIt software from El Dorado, and I
recommend this product.
We intended to build the railroad with “running trains” as a first priority. Scenery was a distant second to be developed as time/interest allowed. I wanted to have an operating railroad that “worked” before dedicating a lot of energy to uildingsand scenery. I am a big believer in “play as you go” and in “mock up” buildings. I was still working at the time and didn’t want to devote time to anything that wasn’t about running trains. I “got retired” in 2010 and that changed my point of view in some ways. The first thing I did was to become an over the road Truck Driver, since it was something I had always thought would be interesting. It was, but I didn’t realize the impact of never being at home – both on personal life and on railroading. So, as my wife said I “got that out of my system” in about 6 months. Subsequent post retirement “careers” have been close to home but I did learn something about the freight industry.
In 2011, or so, Craig and I were planning to implement operations on our respective RR’s and were looking at Card Cards and Waybill paper systems. During a LOT of research we discovered computer operating systems, and then one day discovered JMRI Operations software. This is a small part of the JMRI system, and many folks don’t know about it. It is free, and it is a great tool with great support on line and a good user group on Yahoo. I recommend JMRI Operations as a great tool to use.
In the meantime friend Craig decided that his
layout was not operational material and he tore
it down – just made the decision and did it!
That was in the summer of 2011. We designed
and built him a new layout and then both
focused on implementing JMRI Ops on both
layouts. We continue to learn and play
successfully with regular monthly operating
sessions. He has a wonderful Birmingham
Southern RR.
Now, back to the layout - since there ain’t much scenery, a thousand words is taking the place of pictures. The Birmingham District Model RR (BDMRR) takes its name for the industrial area that was Birmingham – so named in the iron/steel trade – Pittsburgh District, etc. The railroad has a steel works as its focus, loosely modeled upon the Tennessee Coal and Iron Division of US Steel in Birmingham, at Fairfield and Ensley Works. Fairfield developed during WWI and continued to grow. I pick up the development about 1930. Skip the Depression – it’s depressing. So, I guess the RR represents the 1940’s in Birmingham when the iron and steel industry was booming -- officially we’re 1925 to 1955.
Remember the “run trains as a first priority”? That turned out to be a good thing as several parts of the
railroad have been redesigned and rebuilt based on “lessons learned” from operations activity. For
example, we figure that our active “continuous” staging needed a proper engine terminal since we are
mostly steam and these needed to be turned. We found that two mainline single crossovers needed to
be double. We rebuilt the “downtown switching district” from a double ended to stub ended yard and
we reworked the grades of the “1930 grade separation” to better represent real geography. I would
have been less likely to do this had the scenery been finished! And we have added and rearranged parts
of the steel works to better serve the “market” (and generate more play value).
The railroad provides freight and passenger operations of a general nature as well as providing raw
materials to the steel works and shipping finished products. By 1907 Birmingham had 9 “trunk line”
railroads plus industrial RR’s. We represent the L&N as the home road, as it was very instrumental in
the earliest development of the city in the 1870’s through the 1890’s. The other 8 trunk lines are
represented with “active interchange” tracks – 6 interchange tracks representing 8 RR’s with a couple of logical combinations, same as the rail yards that we
don’t have room for. For example, the IC/Frisco
shared a yard, as did AGS/Southern. Passenger trains
are served by the L&N’s station – a separate joint use
Terminal Station opened in 1909, but L&N with sister
AB&C/ACL didn’t “join” with the others.
The railroad uses what I call “open, continuous staging” without any hidden tracks per a lesson learned on the previous railroad. The yard represents L&N’s Boyles Yard, south end only, which is the end of the yard “aimed” at the Birmingham District (north went to Nashville). Trains departing SB from Boyles literally could make a loop around the District in several different ways. At least one passenger local actually did make a closed loop with one connection – so there is a prototype for everything. The trains that originate from main yard are L&N freights, through passenger trains and all of the “interchange” trains. The main line is “L&N and everybody else” via trackage rights. (Makes sense to me.)
There are two smaller yards – one is the Downtown Yard (L&N) which represents a number of pocket yards that the various railroads had all around downtown Birmingham. Trains originate here for coal and limestone and industrial switching that is not the steel mill.
Fairfield Yard belongs to the TCI (industrial) RR and serves to
originate iron ore trains and well as classification of raw
material cars going to the mill, particularly the two blast
furnaces. Fairfield Yard also serves to interchange other raw
materials and products shipped out of the Steel Works.
With this overall system, our shippers and consignees must use the L&N. A car headed to Kansas City will be handled by the L&N before leaving the part of town that we model. It will eventually get to the Frisco and then “leave town” – i.e., go to staging. The reverse move is true for foreign road traffic headed into Birmingham. Our mines and mills generate “for market” as well as in-plant products.
As you can tell, the railroad is very switching oriented.
The mainline is about 200’ long and about half of that is
single track. The rest of the railroad, about 800 feet
total footage, is branch lines, switching districts and
spurs including the Steel Works.
The branch lines include the Red Mtn. Branch (iron ore mines, TCI RR), the Downtown lead (L&N industrial district), the Coal Br (L&N to the mines), and the Steel Works lead (TCI, like Fairfield Yard). The staging/main yard is also a branch line.
So, we have the ability to have continuous running, although that doesn’t really happen so much. The layout mainline is essentially a folded dog bone with 5 branches, noted above. There are two double crossovers, located about 12 feet apart. This provides the ability to reverse trains and the ability to run SB or NB out of the main yard - one is clockwise and the other is CCW.
The Terminal Area is a busy place, including the L&N
Station, freight house, post office and express
terminal. In addition, all 6 interchange tracks extend
away from this area a short distance – each track
holds 5-8 cars. The Terminal Area straddles the main
line with puzzle track at each end and features an
elevated/grade separated station that was built about
1930 in order to solve street/railroad traffic
congestion. This area represents the entire “Railroad
Reservation” which was the heart of the original city,
where the L&N and the AGS crossed and ran together
for about a mile or so. This area became the “Grade
Separation” area from about 14th street to about 28th Street in the 1930 project.
We operate with a Dispatcher (in the adjacent room) and walkie-talkies for each train crew, since none of us know Morse code and I am not smart enough to build a telephone system. The Dispatcher has two main tools, a magnetic train location board using a schematic of the RR, plus a computer screen.
The computer screen provides two things: one is a schematic that enables 8 key mainline turnout
locations to be controlled remotely by the dispatcher with a mouse click – enough to control the
mainline passing tracks, yard lead and reverse loop opportunities if needed. This divides the mainline
into 5 segments, driven by need for “train order” & OS station locations. In other words, a train going
past this point can’t get around an opposing train. All other turnouts, including mainline, are hand
controlled by the train crews, very much by the Superintendent’s intention. (Remember, play with
trains!)
Also on the computer are the various
windows for JMRI operations – the most
important one is the “TRAINS” window
which shows the trains to be built and
terminated in the database that is JMRI
Ops. “Building” a train in JMRI assigns
cars to a train to be moved to a new
location. “Terminating” a train in JMRI
tells the database that the car may be
“moved” to that new location. JMRI’s
database keeps up with car locations and
load status. This enables two types of
movements – somewhat random car
movement for general freight traffic and
specific “loads” for raw materials and
finished products relating to the mines
and mills of the District.
For operations, the Train Master evaluates the raw material logistics on the railroad – whatever it happens to be at the time (real world, so to speak). This is done with a standard Company Form filled out which provides an indication of “who needs what”. This relates mostly to the steel works supply chain.
The 6 interchange trains and the two L&N local freights are run in a sequence, alternating NB and SB: An L&N, 2/6 interchange trains, an L&N and so on until we get back to the start, which works out to a sequence of 18 trains before actually starting again.
To this sequence we add two through L&N passenger trains the Pan American and the South Wind, and all the required raw materials and industrial switching trains based on the needed logistics of the day. On a given three hour session we might get a dozen trains run, but we are aiming to improve on that. Again, it is an urban industrial switching theme RR in the steam era. Switching’s takes “real time”.
Whatever trains are left over after a session are run informally and more trains are “built” as needed until the next session rolls around. The staged trains simply leave and return with whatever cars they picked up and run again – “continuous staging”. We have learned that it is a big help if we block these before the formal sessions to save terminal time for switching. This could be done by 0-8-0 or by hand (0-5-0) depending on the mood of the setup crew.
As operations have evolved, we have added 3 dedicated yard master jobs: Main Yard, Downtown Yard and Terminal Area Masters. Our operators were burning up too much time doing all their own switching so we had to do this to move more trains.
On the other hand, train crews must switch the coal branch and the Red Mountain Branch. These are pretty challenging with a runaround track and wye on each branch and multiple mines and processing plant to be worked. The Downtown YM tends to like to run the Downtown Switcher himself in between calls by the two L&N freights, one NB and one SB. Train crews do their own switching for the steel works yard, and there is an opportunity for nearly continual switching in the steel works itself, which is currently being worked out.
So, that is the story and folks seem to enjoy running on the RR. We don’t use timetables or written train orders. That way there is less paper and less pressure on the operators. Maybe we’ll get to timetables, maybe not – remember, “Playing with Trains”. Operations start at 7 p.m. tonight…
Link to the Birmingham District Model Railroad
John R. Stewart's e-mail
Updated 05/15/14
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