TM&P modeling
This article, when I first read it a couple of years ago sold me on taking a crack at modeling the TM&P. 11 months ago we moved into our retirement home which has, among it's many attractive features, a separate 11'x23' basement room that the Wife has agreed to let me use for a model room. Here is my current plan:
I have, in my accumulated war chest, two PFM HOn3 RGS #20 4-6-0 locomotives in brass. They aren't terribly far off from the TM&P Baldwins. I plan to replace the cabs, stacks, smokebox fronts, sand domes and a few other things with items from the Precision Scale line of parts. While I have the engines apart I'll be installing new can motors and DCC. I figure that adding a second equal section to the smokebox in place of the half section currently ahead of the stack will bring the front end profile out to where it needs to be. The valve gear is the big switch- I may have a set from a donor mech that will do.
I'll replicate a few pieces of the original freight and passenger equipment, but in keeping with my new backstory for the railroad I'll be adding a hodgepodge of other equipment. MY TM&P will differ from the original in that the B&O did take over the line in 1918 when the holders of some coal leases approached them and they cooked up a plan to extend the line up to Scherr at the foot of the Alleghany Front, just beyond the Greenland Gap, beginning from the point where the original line turned up Elliber Run to Russelldale. The B&O also did away with the Knobley Mtn- Liller Run switchbacks by bringing the line a bit further South for a passage through the Grayson Gap with a nice manageable run that doesn't need switchbacks. The business plan is for coal mined on the slopes of the Front or just at the top to be chuted down to a loader operation, be loaded in hoppers and transported down to a washer/sorter plant near Keyser, in the area of Limestone.
The TM&P will be dual gauged from Keyser Jct to the coal plant, as well as parts of the existing yard operation. The newly expanded TM&P will feature seasonal fruit traffic from the farms along the way, carloads of logs loaded here and there for a sawmill near Keyser, and year round coal traffic from Scherr to the plant at Limestone. I envision a railroad that functions much like a WV cousin of the East Broad Top, albeit somewhat smaller and having a WV back country, B&O flavor. (TM&P lettering and logo, but B&O paint and fonts on the equipment, cabooses that look quite a bit like scaled down B&O cabin cars, etc) I'll even have one dual gauge track into Keyser's B&O station, so that a true connection for passengers and mail can be made at the town, rather than passengers and mail having to make their way out to the cornfield yard halfway to Limestone that was the original terminus of the TM&P. This will allow me to model just a bit of Keyser proper, including the station and the stately Mineral County Courthouse, which can still be seen just a block from the mainline through town.
I plan on operating two 4-6-0s that represent the two original TM&P engines, as well as some older moguls to switch the Scherr and Keyser yard areas and a consolidation that the B&O purchased on the second hand market, along with used freight cars from a number of different roads and builders. My vision is to build a TM&P that became a B&O narrow gauge subsidiary made suddenly profitable by tapping into WV coal as a primary payload commodity, but that still managed to keep the back country narrow gauge shortline flavor, at least in part.
(BTW- After going over topo maps and mineral charts, I'm convinced that a real opportunity was missed here, and the TM&P could have lived through the 20's and 30's hauling coal from the Scherr area down to Keyser- The coal is there, and it is being mined today. It's a very plausible what-if)
