Welcome aboard!

Welcome to Jim and Mona Duncan's GM&O Eastern Division, an HO model railroad depicting the GM&O in Illinois in the early 1960's. The railroad features an 800-foot mainline on a continuous-spiral design consisting of four decks.

The railroad is designed for prototype operations and uses ProTrak (
http://www.protrak.cc/) for car forwarding. The railroad operates under CTC authority over the middle half of the railroad with the adjoining sections running under timetable and train-order operation.

Operating sessions are generally held once each month, more frequently during the winter months. We welcome visitors and people new to operations at any time!

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Update on the GM&O... April, 2011

The past few months have been pretty busy doing a lot of little fixes, working on the CMRI signal system to troubleshoot an addressing issue, and one BIG project!

Having recently acquired the original map board from Ridgely Tower I set up to build a Saxby & Farmer lever bed. I located an excellent article on how to design the locking bed and have finished building it using Evergreen Scale Models strip styrene. I'm very pleased with the results all though some of my locking bar cuts aren't as "pretty" as I'd like them to be but it's going to be out of sight anyway so I'm not TOO worried. The locking bed will be connected to inputs on the CMRI to communicate lever position to JMRI/PanelPro which will handle the logic.

I reveresed-engineered the original Ridgely lever manipulation chart, eliminted the "spare" levers and ended up with a 22-lever frame. The locking bed will be operated using a set of Humpyard Purveyance (www.humpyard.com) which, amazingly enough, have EXACTLY the amount of throw necessary to move the locking bars!

The sad thing is that we just can't seem to get enough operators and with gas prices heading way beyond reasonable I'm not expecting this situation to improve any time soon. This has me seriously considering scaling back the railroad, dismantling and focusing on either the Chicago Terminal end or Springfield and developing more of a switching railroad which won't require nearly as many oeprators... Stay tuned!

This project has been a lot of fun so I will turn my sites toward equipping Iles, Wood River, and JO (S. Joliet) towers with these as well! It was a real challenge to build but, in the end, it has provided a good, learning experience!

Friday, October 29, 2010

Friday, Nov. 5th Session on the GM&O

We will be hosting a group of visiting operators from Peoria, IL on Friday, November 5th. The session will last about 3 hours, starting at 6 p.m. Please contact me by email (jdbandman@earthlink.net) to mark up. We need at least four additional operators for this session, preferably those with previous experience on the railroad but will be glad to have anyone willing to help out!

Please note that this session was previously announced as being November 12th. Be governed accordingtly!

Monday, October 04, 2010

Chasing the U.P. 3985, 1st Pass, 10/4/2010


Union Pacific Challenger #3985
Fall 2010 Run through Missouri.
All Photos/Video Copyright 2010, James Duncan.

I spent the morning of October 4th chasing the Challenger as it ran down the U.P. River Subdivision toward my hometown of Marshall where it was scheduled to make a service stop right next to the Municipal Park where I watched the MoPac fast freights as I played in the creek as a kid at church picnics.






About 10:35 #3985 swings around the curve into view and the shutterbugs started shooting from the Missouri Rte. 240 overpass. Note the little job north of the switch! I was hoping for a shot that might capture a little bit of the duplex motion...









AND I GOT IT!!! Look close and you'll see that the pilot is not exactly in line with the boiler...












Here's the whole 7-car consist. I didn't notice until the train pulled out by the U.P.'s "NMRA 75th Anniversary" car is in the consist today!








Here's one of those shots you look at and wish you could have shot it 10 seconds earlier... The conductor is in his full, traditional regalia visiting with a young family during the service stop at Marshall. The two kids were totally mesmerized by the conductor and he was clearly giving them quite a show! Two new railfans in the making here!!!





Finally.... 3985's engineer properly called in the rear flagman with four long blasts of the whistle. Then about 3 minutes in you'll hear two long blasts, the bell begins to ring and, almost imperceptably at first, 3985 gets a bite into the rail and a quick tug of the throttle sends a big plume of smoke and steam along with a blast of heavy chuffing sound... Watch close to catch the NMRA car which is the third car behind the tool car! Note the names of the cars pay tribute to famous rail photographers and artists including Howard Fogg!!!

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Latest GM&O News

The past month has seen a lot of work on the railroad and some much-needed attention.

Signals/CTC: Several days were spent reconfiguring port assignments for switches and signals on the Grapevine system in order to convert 3-aspect (R-Y-G) over to 4-aspect (R-Y-G-L) on those signals where lunar is available. PanelPro was recently upgraded to add such signalling which ultimately will make it easier to execute the "call-on" function of signals as OS blocks especially to allow trains to switch back and forth across on OS without having to have the dispatcher clear every movement. This meant a lot of rewriting of the Logix in PanelPro but, more importantly, we are now in the process of getting the marker lamps active on ALL signals to show route/speed. The operating session this past Saturday revealed some missed port reassignments and some bugs which have since been worked out both physicallg and within the software.

Trains: After a lot of reflection of the past several sessions and my desire to make traffic flow better I've been tweaking the trains on the railroad the past few days. The Meat/Banana train is now an every-other-day operation (south on M-W-F, north Tu-Th-Sat). I'm adding additional Burlington run-throughs where are being stocked with cars that are no longer "in service" in ProTrak. Since these trains did no interchange on the line it makes good sense to just make them fixed consists and run them as through trains.

Bob Lehnen (Indianapolis) is providing additional information on C&EI operations in the St. Louis area in the near future so I anticipate having some new interchange opportunities happening at Mitchell Yard soon.

The big push here is to get cars out of the online yards and get them into other routings which keep them moving without blocking the yards. This means cutting back on customer car orders, too. With a little luck the next couple of session will see several customer tracks getting cleaned out and a little more realistic supply of cars to/from them happening.

Equipment: Monday I managed to get four of the GP-30's back into operation. Discovered that the issue was related to advanced consisting still being programmed into the decoders. Now we have a set of 4 blackbirds ready to go into ComEd service at last WITH SOUND EVEN! Also recovered the operation of the E-8/E-7 lashup (same issue). Realizing that I've got some decoders that have gone bad, fortunately they're all DH-121's from Digitrax (the cheap ones) so I don't feel too bad dropping them into the trash since after the $15.00 warranty fee and postage I can just replace the decoder with a new one and not have to wait four weeks for it! Will have a couple of sidelined F-3's into operation later this week including an InterMountain unit I've had on the workbench for six months!

Website: As the weather turns colder I'm starting to spend some time shooting new photos of the railroad for the website so be looking for significantly upgraded and updated pages under the "Tour the Railroad" menu button.

That's it for now... Time to get back to work!!!

Monday, September 27, 2010

2010 Fall Season on the GM&O Eastern Division

Operatings sessions on the Eastern Division are scheduled about once every 4-5 weeks. If you are interested in visiting and operating, please contact me directly!

Upcoming Session and Work Dates for the Rest of the Fall 2010 Season are:

October 16 (Saturday) - Work Day
Prep the railroad for the next two weekends of operations. Physical plant work (rail/loco wheel cleaning, wiring/power issues, etc.)

October 24 (Sunday) - Tailgate n Trains!
Watch the Chiefs v. Jags game starting at noon then operate 3:15 - 6:30 p.m.

November 6 (Saturday) - Peoria Connection
Guest operators visiting from Peoria, IL - a GM&O town, of course!

November 26 (Friday) - Thank God for Trains Day!
Operate the GM&O Eastern Division all day starting at 10:00 a.m.

December 18 (Saturday) - Christmas Party and Mini-Session
Come join us for an evening of good food and drink PLUS trains!

Monday, April 17, 2006

Welcome Aboard!

Welcome aboard the Gulf Mobile and Ohio's Eastern Division. Modeled in HO scale, the railroad represents the GM&O along with New York Central between East St. Louis and Pontiac, Illinois. The track plan and track arrangements are based upon actual GM&O condensed track profiles generously provided by my good friend and fellow GM&O afficiando, Robert Schramm (Bob, to some!).

Towns modeled (north to south) are:
Pontiac (IC & Wabash crossing here)
Chenoa (TP&W)
Lexington/Ballard (a composite of the town of Lexington and the controlled siding at Ballard)
Normal (IC crossing)
Bloomington (yard and P&E/NKP crossings)
Shirley
Atlanta (PRR crossing)
Athol (IC & IT)
Lincoln (IC)
Ridgely (yard and C&IM crossing)
Springfield/Iles (B&O & Wabash)
Girard (CB&Q)
Godfrey (GM&O Roodhouse/KC line junction)
College Ave. Alton station
Wann (begin NYC/GM&O joint double track)
Wood River (yard and IT crossing)
Roxana (oil refineries)
Lenox (C&EI yard, Wabash, A&S)
Granite City (junction with TRRA Merchants Terminal line)
Venice (GM&O yard)

The railroad also feature a short Illinois Central branch line which is a composite of two IC secondary lines in Illinois. This segment runs between Normal and Pontiac on my railroad. Watch for photos of the railroad in the near future! We are currently working on installing rudimentary signalling with full-blown CTC and interlockings in place by the fall using Jim and Mike Moir's ProTrak and Grapevine system.

JBD