July 2007 Newsletter

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NEWS FLASH!!!! 
26 July 2007 
 
A DOMINION CAR UPDATE 
 

THE CAR THE BURLINGTON NORTHERN – SANTA FE COULDN’T KILL! 
 

    We have just received word from BN-SF’s salvage contractor that the four-slide mold for the Dominion Car body has been found! How it was located has not yet been learned but I am told it was found buried at the site of the Lake Park, MN derailment near where the remains of the container it was being shipped in had been found over a month ago. Charlie and Dick FitzSimmons, the two brothers who own FitzSimmons Service Co., Inc. of Montrose, MN have been thanked for doing a superb job in locating this mold after the other debris from this major derailment had been carted off. FitzSimmons Service Co. is the salvage contractor hired by the railroad to clean up the derailment site once another contractor had restored service on the line. The mold is being returned to our Vermont based molding shop to be thoroughly cleaned, have any necessary repairs made, be lubricated, reinspected and test shot again before we try once again to ship it to the West Coast toolmaker who has contracted to complete the tooling for the Canadian National version of the Dominion Car. Given the time lost on this project to date, which can be measured in years rather than weeks, no estimate will be made as to when it might be completed. But barring something wholly unexpected when the four-slid mold is received and inspected we at least have a chance of seeing this model completed. That is far more than we expected based on the BN-SF’s original reports to us of the amount of damage created by this derailment. So we will see what the next problem is to be overcome! 
 
 

CLOSURE DURING AUGUST 
 

    Please note that New England Rail will be closed during the entire month of August. It is time to enjoy some real railroading for a few weeks, which for me means Russian National and Ukrainian National Railways. A brief report of the changes noted in Russian National Rwys. since my wife and I last visited our Russian home will be provided in September. I understand that a lot of passenger equipment has been refurbished and upgraded since my last trip and am interested to experience it again. The service has always been superb and reminded me of what we had during the immediate postwar years in North America. E-mails will still be read periodically while away but no orders will be filled until the week following the Labor Day holiday. All shipments received to date have now been made. Thank you for your continued support during a year in which things have not gone smoothly given the difficulties of locating some packaging materials owing to our partially completed move.

It’s a helluva way to run a railroad! 

    And that, to quote the Boston & Maine’s advertisements of the mid-1940’s when something went wrong with their commuter service, is exactly the same way things have been around here for the past fourteen months. Our service has gone to pieces in that time and I don’t believe it will improve much until mid-year next year at best. The problem is that my lovely wife decided to go back to university to earn a doctorate. The 85 mile commute this would have required from our Newbury home to Burlington being out of the question, we took graduate student housing at the university and have both been living there since her program commenced. That required me to go home each weekend to pack orders and take care of anything else needing to be done while there.  This became just too much last year when by June I found myself working fifty-five to sixty-five hours a week and still trying to get home, pack orders, mow the lawns and such. And there is another point. Some folks have apparently thought that New England Rail is a full time business. Rest assured that the hobby business is strictly a labor of love begun to get many of the things that a lot of us wanted for our modeling efforts. Given the constraints of time, my home of nearly twenty-five years was sold in December and everything was put into storage pending the wife’s graduation next May. Though we thought everything had been accounted for, some packaging materials have not been located to date and there is still the inconvenience of having to drive to the storage space and get what is needed to package the parts needed to fill orders. Thus, if you feel there has been a delay in receipt of parts you have ordered there probably has been! Please excuse us until we get into new and more permanent quarters next year. Hopefully things will then get back to near normal….if anyone can define normal these days! In the meantime we are shipping only once or twice per month. There will be no orders shipped during August while my wife and I are at our place in Russia, nor during the first three weeks in November when we are getting her set up for a three month medical residency out of state. She will have one more three month residency in the spring, after which we hope to return to normal living….and a normal way of operating a business. In the meantime, thank you all for your patience. 

Parts Supply

  In our last Newsletter the loss of longtime friend and our primary molder Gordon Cannon was noted. Cannon & Company was sold some two months after Gordon’s death and its new owner is only now beginning to catch up on molding for the Cannon line, let alone our parts. The good news is that a shipment of our long out of stock #210 Pullman Interior Vestibule Walls has just arrived. When molding such parts we usually have enough run at one time to last a year or two. It has been a bit longer than that for some parts now and some costs are beginning to increase as a result of the passage of time. So we will see how things go with the new batch of the #210 Vestibule Walls and hold our prices just as long as we can.  

   The other part that vexes me is our #211 5 ft. 6 in. Baggage Car Door. This part, like the #210 as originally offered, was molded in a larger base with several other parts. Sales of both #210 and #211 both proved very quickly that they needed to be molded in molds dedicated to them alone. Thus a new mold was cut to mold the #210 in multiples about three years ago. Gordon was just about to begin machining a new mold dedicated exclusively to the #211 Baggage Car when he was diagnosed with cancer. Thus things have been on hold for nearly two years. More recently, however, another of our toolmakers has expressed interest in picking up some of this work. Thus I am hopeful that we can have a new mold machined for the Baggage Car Doors by the end of the year. This will enable us to offer our #301 Combination Car Conversion Kit again as well as the Baggage Car Doors. At the same time we hope to add an 8 ft. double baggage door and frame as used by so many of our New England roads in both wood and steel sheathed baggage cars over the years. Indeed, scratchbuilding wood sheathed baggage cars is an easy task if injection molded doors and frames in the required sizes are readily available! There are other projects in the wings as well but given my luck in bringing such projects to market over the past three years nothing more will be mentioned until all machine work required for their introduction is completed. 

Dominion Cars – A Sad End? 
 

    After four years of effort during which two major problems were encountered and overcome the end of the line may have been reached for the Dominion Car project. The first major issue was the discovery when test molding the original tooling that the toolmaker made a mathematical error in converting things to scale. This resulted in the original tooling being undersized.  The  financial loss from correcting his error then prompted the toolmaker to abrogate his contract and refuse to complete the project once the error had been corrected, compounded the problems. The roof, underframe and details were never completed. Some months ago another toolmaker was finally found who was willing to complete the project. It is not easy to find someone who will step in and finish such a project dropped by someone else but we were finally successful in doing so. Thus, on 20 June the four-slide mold frame, with the completed inserts for the CNR version of the carbody, were shipped to a West Coast toolmaker who was to complete the work. Unfortunately the tooling never reached him. On 29 June the carrier advised me that our tooling was in a containerized shipment that was totally destroyed in a major derailment of BN-SF R.R. Train No. Z-CHC-SSE 2-20 at Lake Park, MN. Apparently there were both caustic and corrosive hazardous materials involved in the derailment in addition to piggybacked trailers and containers that were destroyed to the point where it was difficult even to determine which trailer or container was which. I have been advised that clearing the wreckage and sorting through the debris will take some weeks and there is no guarantee that this tooling will even be found. That is all that has been learned to date. Frankly, that is enough. Every effort that could be made to overcome the difficulties encountered in bringing this project to a successful completion has been made. It has involved a considerable investment in both money and time, not to mention aggravation. If the tooling can be found, it SHOULD have survived even such a serious derailment. BN-SF ‘s top claims man, Rick Lysen, asked me if the tooling could survive being “run over by a Cat”. My response was that a D-8 or D-9 should be able to run over it several times and might score it up badly externally but that it should still be salvageable. Both our toolmaker and molder agree with that opinion. So BN-SF’s salvage people are now searching for a roughly 16 in. cube of steel weighing some 385 lbs. If the tooling can be found the CNR version of he Dominion car WILL BE COMPLETED. I have made that commitment having put enough of myself into this project to want to see it completed. So we will see over the next week or so whether the tooling is found in the mess resulting from this derailment. This shipment is small potatoes compared to the other thirty shipments in the same container, however, not to mention the USPS, UPS and other trailers in addition to the other containers involved. One of the other shipments siad to have been in the in the same container was government shipment of a new $5,000,000 weapons systems that was totally destroyed. It took somewhat better than two days to restore traffic on the old No. Pac. mainline and the debris is going to take some weeks to clean up. From what has been related to me this is one of the most expensive derailments the BN-SF has yet faced. So we will see how things turn out and hope the mold might yet be found.

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