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Descriptionby Cotton Bowen Wallace, New York is a small village on State Route 415 and I-390 about 10 miles northwest of Bath in picturesque Steuben County, New York. Wallace started when a local farmer, who had the foresight to know a good thing when he saw it, provided a free right of way to the Erie Railroad in the 1850's. The railroad was built through the valley of the Conhocton (also know as the Cohocton) River. George Wallace provided the land at no cost, in exchange for a siding being provided by the railroad. The result was the growth of a small village that has come to represent, to me, the prototypical small town of the late 1800's and early 1900's. Wallace depended on local farmers for its life and economic growth. In its hey-day in the early 1900's, Wallace could boast of several general merchandise stores, a grocery, a hardware, a ice cream parlor, a hotel, a milk processing plant, a pea vinery and a brick kiln. As horse and wagon transportation was supplanted by transportation based on the internal combustion engine, Wallace and many towns like it began to fade. People just did not need to have a town every five miles, the car and truck made longer trips to places of business possible. This module represents Wallace in the 1930's. During the 1930's, Wallace was probably about as robust as it would ever be, and just a few years later started its inexorable decline to a bedroom community for Avoca and Bath, NY. One by one businesses closed and buildings were torn down or converted to other purposes. The McGee Hotel became a potato warehouse and then succumbed to the wrecker in 1953. Several buildings burned down. Zina Bowen (the grandfather I never knew) died in 1936, years before I was born. His general merchandise store, a "dark emporium of the old style", eventually became an apartment house. Next door, Dygert's Ice Cream Parlor and Restaurant closed in the early 1950's and was left abandoned until it too, having been declared a public hazard, became a victim of the wrecker. Clymo's Red and White Food store eventually became Taf-Lor's antique shop and even that eventually closed in the late 1980's. The Erie Railroad ran through the center of town. I can remember seeing commuter trains bound for Bath and Corning, NY depart the station in front of my grandmother's house. Now the station and tracks are both gone. The Lackawanna Railroad ran behind Wallace, the line still exists in the form of the defunct Bath & Hammondsport Railroad ("The Champaign Trail") right-of-way; another fallen flag. At least the tracks and bridges still remain. With the exception of cottage industry, such as an automobile repair shop, Wallace has no viable businesses. The small town in the United States may still exist, but not in the form of the last two centuries. It remains to be seen what other changes a new century will bring to Wallace and other small towns U.S.A. Construction Wallace is a standard POFF with turnouts for changing from the Blue to Yellow and Red lines. Although Wallace had a "turnout/siding" I built these turnouts to accommodate line changes for trains emerging from Ken Allen's Kilgour stub yard. I used standard woodwork to construct a frame and laid a foundation for scenic material with pink foam insulating sheet. The pink foam was then covered with Woodland Scenics "Hydrocal Lite" and stained an earth brown. Macadam roads were "laid" on the wet Hydrocal by using a wet foam brush to form a road bed. Woodland Scenics blacktop was used to stain the roads to resemble a worn blacktop road so typical in rural areas. Road shoulders were made by running a bead of white glue along the right of way and then dribbling a mix of three colors of fine ballast on the glue. Paths and dirt roads were similarly constructed by using fine ballast in only one color. The back was built of a thin plywood sheet and more pink foam glued and cut to create steep hills. Bushes and foliage were hot glued in place. The basic lay out of buildings, roads, hills, railroads and the Cohocton River was based on a Geological Survey 1:50,000 scale map and photos, in period photos, taken in the area. Long time residents of the area were also interviewed and their memories were put to use. Some details like original building colors are somewhat vague and in some cases the artist's license to be creative was invoked to enhance visual interest and variety. I used an electric carving knife to work on the pink foam. A creek was created by using the knife to carve a trench. Water was created by pouring Envirotech into the trenches formed for the river after suitable coloring and gluing of talus in appropriate places. Buildings were constructed of DPM, Model Power and Bachman kits. One building, the McGee Hotel, was scratch built. The greatest technical challenge was hooking up remote control for the turnouts. I did not want to have operators reaching over the display to hand throw switches. I ended up using steel rod run underneath the surface of the module and hooked to the Peco switches. I soldered thin pieces of steel wire to the rod and bent to a 90 degree angle to provide for hookups to the switch machines. The other end of the rod emerged from the back of the module and was coupled to dipole slide switches by drilling a hole in the slide switch button and gluing the rod into the hole. With careful adjustment, the slide and switch button can be synchronized to move the turn out in coordination with power to the proper rails. Rather than depend on the vagaries of dirty rails to conduct continuous power, each switch was wired to the section of rail feeding power to the passing locomotives. The central connection of the switch should be connected to the live V of the turn-out, the other two connections should wired to the appropriate section of the turnout to be powered. Don't forget that the turn-out needs to be electrically isolated by using insulating connectors for any section that will have power being switched from one line to another. Continuous lines should not be insulated. |
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This website was last updated on 29 January 2004.
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