GETTING REAL: Sea Trials for the SNE Adventures in Prototype Modeling
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Taking the SNE through its paces...
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Marty McGuirk is an avid Central Vermont fan, modeling the “Southern New England” – an HO scale proto-freelanced railroad set in the 1950s and based in part on the real Central Vermont Ry. Click here to learn more about Marty. Photos by Norm Wolf unless otherwise credited.
fter 14 months of design, construction, a little redesign (and the corresponding reconstruction), I felt it was time to put my HO scale home layout, the Southern New England Railway, through its paces. While I knew the railroad and I weren’t ready for a full-fledged “operating session,” I felt things were far enough along to try and uncover any issues at this early stage and to allow potential members of my future operating crew to get to know the railroad. Since it wasn’t an operating session I opted to call it a “sea trial,” a salute to my Navy background. (Without getting into an overly complicated explanation, sea trials are a series of tests a new ship undergoes before it’s accepted into the fleet). So, back in early January I looked at the calendar, and thinking “six weeks would be more than enough time to get ready,” I tentatively set a date “sometime in mid-February. Was I ready? Well, read on and you’ll see.
Page 134 • Issue 7 • May/Jun 2010 • Getting Real column, page 1
Figure 1: I held a test session on my HO scale Southern New England Railway on February 19, 2010. Eight fellow modelers participated. Their help is much appreciated and they’ve already made the layout better. From left to right they are: Mat, Pete, Don, MRH N scale columnist John Drye, former MRH N scale columnist Bernie Kempinski, yours truly, Rich, and Fred. Norm Wolf was also present but he’s behind the camera!
Meet the SNE My Southern New England, (which everybody, including me, calls the “Snee”) is an HO scale prototype-freelanced railroad with its roots firmly planted in the prototype Central Vermont in southeastern Connecticut and central Massachusetts. The layout is set in October, 1952. At that time the CV was a subsidiary of the
Canadian National Railway, a fact that significantly impacts the traffic patterns and motive power. With the exception of a few Alco yard switchers, the CV was an all-steam railroad with the largest engines on the modeled portion 2-8-0s. The major through freights, trains 490 and 491 between Chicago (via the Grand Trunk Western and CN) and the main terminal in New London have been
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