The Lapeer shuffle…

It’s no coincidence that those of us interested in short small industrial or short lines stumble upon the same prototypes, and many of you will already be familiar with the Lapeer Industrial…

However, I gave the line some time over the Christmas holidays, scouring Flickr and YouTube after actually discovering it whilst looking for GE centre cab switchers still in use! One thing led to another and I considered a scheme based upon the prototype’s very simple operation - watching the video and understanding how the line was operated in real time really sung out to me - I offer you this as a study in small compact operation focused design.

The prototype operates under a mile and a half of former branch line in the town of Lapeer. Established in 1999 it initially served three customers. Today only Delta Faucet remains railserved and if reports are true, this last customer has finally abandoned rail as well. What the prototype lacks in complexity it makes up with character, the 1950 built GE centre cab switcher wears a faded C&NW inspired green and yellow and shuffles covered hoppers of plastic pellets for Delta Faucet. Previously tank cars served Lapeer Industries and covered hoppered to Lapeer grain… CN leaves cars for interchange at the end of the loop, Lapeer Industrial has running rights down to collect cars. If you straighten out the schematic it’s basically a loop with two ends… pull cars from one end, run round, push to the other… nothing more complicated than that, but introduce loads and empties, and under modellers licence some other traffic, and things get busy quickly…

Thinking on how this might work out in a typical study or workshop room a shelf layout springs to mind, and if you had the space, why not use a corner? However if space didn’t allow then gently straightening the plan, and angling the CN tracks at one end still gives a feel for the prototype, and in the illustration I’ve compressed the route from the loop to Delta Faucet to just one road crossing with Lapeer Industries mirrored to access via McCormick Drive instead of South Elm Street. If you have even less space I think the choreographed moves focus on the loop so a cameo of just this section may work, and it could even be cropped to just include half the loop if space was tight.

Using a Bachmann GE44t would allow you to model in N, H0 or even O scale (although I believe this Williams model is coarse O scale). I recently modified a H0 example to represent a more modern industrial, this would bring you closer to the look of the 65t. You could even fill in the end radiator grills and add a sliding hatch on the bonnet top. Rolling stock is a smattering of covered hoppers, potentially a tank car or two, and staging them by hand to mix up operation between sessions.

There is nothing ground breaking here, but it’s another example of the rich tapestry of industrial and short line railroading that seems to eke out an existence across North America in a way we can only dream off these day in the UK with our block freight trains feeling like Pendolinos of oil, cement, containers etc… no shunting required, just a parade of end to end moves. As British modellers we have a tendency to invent unlikely prototypes or instead move to the past to model wagon load freight. What I’m suggesting here, as I did recently with Ballard / Wantage , is that there is an alternative, a rich one, lying ready to be discovered, until next time, more soon…