This weekend my wife's sister took our one year old for the day (!!!) freeing me and Deb to head up to Vermont. I wanted to take some research photos and my wife wanted to hit the King Arthur Flour shop.

My trip to Vermont included some stops of interest to model railroaders. At an antique mall called

Queechee Gorge Village

my wife wanted to visit I discovered a fair sized HO layout. I only found it because I happened to look down the steps to the basement and saw a sign that said "to the model trains". I had no idea what was lurking in the basement as we browsed endless shelves. A sign on the layout indicated it was built by none other then Dave Frary and one other person whose name eludes me. It had all four seasons with typical vermont scenes. It was behind some fairly poor plexiglass and was getting a little ratty, but I did get a nice pic of this quarry scene

If there is interest, I can post a few more in the comments but this was by far the best.

 After the Antique Mall we visited Queechee Gorge, site of the famous Queechee Gorge Bridge. This bridge once served the Woodstock Railroad, now long gone. You can still see the footings for the original wooden truss bridge. As cool as this bridge is, I can only imagine how cool the wood bridge looked!

A short trail leads one to the bottom of the canyon. Definitely a nice day little hike.

Maybe someday a model of this bridge will find its way onto my layout..

Finally, we drove up to St Johnsbury to take some pictures for my layout research. I am planning to model the Lyndonville Subdivision of the Canadian Pacific, probably in the 70s, which stretched from Wells River to Newport Vermont. I will do a blog post with more on my design, but one feature that will definitely be present is the yard at St. Johnsbury where the CP interchanged with the StJ&LC and the MEC. Also of note was the pool trains run with B&M allowing me to run my beloved B&M power.

Below is a picture of the Yard throat. In my time there would have been more tracks still in existance.

 This is a picture of a landmark second only, perhaps, to the famous brick depot of the ET & HK IDE feed mill.

 Just under the road in the background is where the MEC comes into the yard. That bridge will serve as view break allowing my to put a backdrop on the other side and move the trains to the next scene.. or to staging. I don't want to get ahead of myself. I have a lot of great photos and continue to work on the design. Down the road I will post some more pics and talk about my ideas for my "full size" layout.

Regards,

Chris