Category: Planning

After reading Jeff Wilson’s book Express, Mail & Merchandise Service, I wanted to include a mail train in my operations, but I didn’t think the P&LE had one (still not sure), and I figured if the B&O did, they probably ran it to their own station, not the P&LE terminal I’m planning to model. But while reading Harry Stegmaier’s 1997 book, Baltimore & Ohio Passenger Service, 1945-1971 – Volume 2: The Route of the Capitol Limited in March this year, I learned that the B&O did run a pair of steam-powered mail and express trains over the P&LE in 1949: Trains 31 and 32, operating every day except Mondays and days after holidays, starting in 1948. Prior to that, 31 and 32 used the B&O station across the river.

After reading about the trains in Stegmaier’s book, I looked them up in my October 1949 copy of the B&O Through Passenger Train Consist Book No. 12, a PDF I purchased from the B&O Railroad Historical Society in August 2021. Both trains would carry several baggage cars, an express reefer and a rider car. Train 31, which departed Washington at midnight, would arrive in Pittsburgh at 8:15 AM with …

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In September, a post in the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad Interest Group on Facebook featured a scan of a 1928 publication showing small photos of various P&LE stations, including one labeled “McKeesport”. It was hard to see any detail, but it certainly wasn’t the B&O station I was familiar with. That’s when it struck me: I had been so focused on B&O passenger trains serving the B&O station in McKeesport that I gave very little thought to the possibility of the P&LE having their own station in McKeesport. I just assumed the P&LE and B&O both used the B&O station I saw in so many photos. Considering the age of the photo, I wondered if the station was still in use in 1949. Google searches kept showing me the B&O station while trying to find a P&LE station.

Today, it occurred to me to search that Facebook group for the word McKeesport, which turned up a better photo of the P&LE station, from a postcard postmarked in 1910. Mixed among comments of people mis-identifying its location as that of the B&O station was one guy saying it was located …

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Although this layout will be primarily focused on passenger operations, I still intend to include some local and through freight operations, with switching in the terminal scene at least. It’s not hard to identify what types of freight would likely be delivered to or from industries along the P&LE in Pittsburgh in 1949, but I started down the path of accuracy when I came across a 1929 map on Historic Pittsburgh, identifying the names and rough locations of industries at that time. Later, I heard about Rails Unlimited, which sells reproductions of old railroad shipper’s guides. They have one for the P&LE (New York Central), which is, as the cover describes, a list of industries with private or individual side tracks, and list of team tracks, at common points on the NYC/P&LE, to which delivery can be made by the NYC/P&LE or its connections.

Only six of its 314 pages pertain to Pittsburgh, and it was published in 1963 (14 years too late), but it was worth the $50, because I was able to compare it to the 1929 industries map to compile a list of 36 that would have been in operation in 1949. The tables in …

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Until recently, the vision in my head of what a McKeesport scene might look like was pretty fuzzy, except that I knew what the train station looked like, and that it was situated on the B&O tracks that cut diagonally through busy downtown streets, where every stopped train would block car and streetcar traffic for blocks. I’ve recently gathered more historic photos of the area around the station and realized it had exactly the kinds of street scenes I want to model: shorter brick buildings housing a variety stores with big signs painted on the bricks or covered in lights. After studying the photos (some of which came from the book McKeesport (Images of America: Pennsylvania), I could start to see where the boundaries of a modeled McKeesport might land, space permitting.

In the purple boundary line shown above, the upper right corner (northwest) was chosen because that’s where the B&O tracks connect to the P&LE tracks. The main focal point would be the train station, which would have at least one block of town modeled on each side of it, hopefully two blocks to the south of the station, which would provide a …

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