Lauthers' Perfect Pickles
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Martin Brechbiel Annandale, VA
I've been interested in trains most of my life since I grew up watching the mainline running behind my Grandparent's house in PA and the
switching operations right across the street in the 60's and 70's. I grew up with Lionel trains in the basement and garage, and college and
graduate schools put this interest on hiatus for many years.
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I got back into 3 rail trains in the late 80's and after exhausting this avenue,
switched to 2 rail O scale returning to the geographic area where this all started to model the Cumberland Valley Railroad.
My current focus is to create a reasonable version of the CVRR branch line that ran up to Richmond Furnace that also lets me be very
flexible running a broad variety of freight and passenger consists that survived on past adsorption by the PRR. To this end, I've been
scratch building a number of freight and passenger cars and have recently moved on to start building a selection of the structures that I
can insert into my layout in a modular / lift-out fashion.
The photos on this page show my most recent building, “Lauthers' Perfect Pickles”. I had built some pickle cars and a vinegar tank car, and there had
been a Heinz plant in nearby Chambersburg, so I extrapolated these into a local, more rural operation that might have been at the far end
of that same CVRR branch line.
The wooden components of the plant were nearly completely assembled board by board including the exterior clapboard and the board
and batten siding; the one concession was to make the floors from scribed siding. The sill plates, side sills, stud walls, floor joists,
rafters, porch & decking, etc are all individual boards. Windows and doors (modified and all glazed with glass) were Grandt Line.
A full interior on both floors was installed with a long list of details, including copper basins for the workers to process the cucumbers
(making O scale cucumbers is story unto itself…) with an elevator to take filled barrels to the 2nd floor for storage and aging, and
eventual transfer to a pickle tank car. The foundation and chimney were built-up from individual “stones”. The roof is metal roofing
cut to appropriate dimensions.
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