The Pere Marquette Chicago Division

During my high school years, I turned an early interest in microcomputers into an after-school job. As pretty much the go-to programmer for the Grand Rapids Urban League, I turned  that job over to my brother Bob when I went off to school. During those years I accepted a job at Stan’s Roundhouse where I sold model trains on weeknights and weekends.

A work-study position at the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching gave me early access to the Internet, about ten years before the general public got onto it. Most importantly, it introduced me to M-Net, a little BBS run by Mike Myers in the Ann Arbor area. Mike was working with a programmer, Marcus Watts, to try selling a Unix-based BBS-system to companies to use in-house and for technical support. I took a lrad in promoting his dial up BBS, including placing a notice in Model Railroader. We got a whopping two new members from that effort. Dial-up (only) access and long-distance bills were a big factor here.

Mike had gone through a model railroad phase, and still had a nicely-detailed HO model railroad on benchwork running around the living room of his condominium, the Petoskey, Boyne Falls and Gaylord.  Being familiar with the prototype Boyne City, Gaylord and Alpena, this road felt very familiar to me.  He regularly ran on a local model railroad known as the Ann Arbor Great Northern. The AAGN ran alternate Tuesday nights in the basement of its owner’s home. Its owner was local ear, nose and throat surgeon. Dr. Jerry Butler.

It was on the AAGN that I got my first taste of operation. Little did I know where that was to lead me.

One Tuesday night in what had to have been mid-November 1984, I accompanied Mike to one of the AAGN operating sessions. That session followed a soon-to-be familiar pattern- every attendee would take a position in one of about 9 towns spread around a 40 by 40-foot basement and switch out every outbound car into a road train drawn by road power. When the train was ready to depart, the local switching power would tie a caboose on an outbound train, and give it its road power. The local crew would notify the Dispatcher, then the Dispatcher would perform his computer-aided magic.

The central piece of the AAGN was its Apple ][, interfaced to a relay board which threw switches and engaged power on the “outbound” track of a selected town. This was ten years before digital command control began to make itself known, so any train that ran was controlled like any simple train set locomotive, by voltage applied to the rails from a rheostat at the Dispatcher’s side.

As Dispatcher, Dr. Butler would run the outbound freight to a six-track receiving yard at Northtown where a hump engine (generally a cow-and-calf set) would take the cars from the train and push them to the top of the hump. At the peak of the hump, the hump crew would select one of twelve tracks using a selector similar to the buttons on a car radio and sort the car onto a designated track. Slowing down the cars was by draggung the card card against the car’s roof to slow it down.

Once a track was full, the Departure Yardmaster would  pull the cars on the track to the Departure Yard where he’d restore the road power and caboose. After making certain that the train’s paperwork was all in order, he would call the Dispatcher to use the computer to take the train to where it would be delivered to be switched inbound by its local crews as its third part of the session. When each town has completed switching the inbound cars, the session ends.

After running on the AAGN for the first time, we struck up a conversation with Skip McDonald who had a regular position running the receiving yard that took incoming trains and prepared them to be sorted on the Northtown hump. After the session, Skip invited us to see his Mackinaw and Western layout. Skip was to play a big role in my hobby. More on that next time.

-fm

From a very early age, I’ve looked forward to being able to build a “lifetime layout”. This would be a big model railroad that would take decades to complete, the kind of grand, multi-operator basement-filler that has been the subject of so-many articles in the model railroad press over the past fifty years. To date I’ve worked on a number of other model railroading projects, but until now haven’t really started work on the “lifetime layout”.

My brother and I started our first HO layout when were in junior high school and worked on it, off and on, until we went off to college. This was a freelanced model of the Chesapeake & Ohio in a vaguely West Virginian setting built into a ten by fifteen foot space at one end of the basement playroom. We built it very much on the cheap, with scrap lumber, reclaimed wire and a lot of hand-laid track to keep the costs down. Bob became quite skilled at hand-laying turnouts. One that stands out was an impressively-long number 14 turnout that lead into the caboose track in our large stub-ended yard.

The track plan was pretty much that stub-ended yard feeding into a loop that circled an operator’s pit three times at various elevations before returning to the yard- very much a typical 1960s design built in the early 1980s. While there were a few customer spurs off the mainline, there wasn’t much to do other than run a single train in circles. We later added a branchline off of the mainline onto a stretch along one wall, but we were losing interest and didn’t develop it very much. We never got around to filling in any scenery around its open-grid benchwork.

After we each went off to college, it sat in our parents’ basement for a couple of years until we took it down, then our father built a Lionel layout in its place.