The Premise

I've long been a fan of the East Broad Top Railroad, which runs through south-central Pennsylvania. This is a 3' gauge railroad which started out hauling coal and iron for the iron furnace, and later built itself as a major coal hauling railroad, supplying high-grade coal to the firebrick industry in Mt. Union as well as other customers across the region. Alas, when it comes to modeling this railroad, the choice of equipment is frighteningly scarce. Rolling stock (box cars, flat cars, etc.) are for me rather easy to kitbash or scratchbuild. Motive power, now that's a different story. I have done my share of scratchbuilding locomotives, but the simple truth was that I had no real desire to do so when I was starting the TRR. I wanted to get started using the commercial locomotives already on the market. That--really--was the driving force behind me chosing the TRR as a prototype instead of just doing the EBT. Had there been suitable EBT-esque locos, I would have gone that route.

As a result, I dug through the history books and found a "paper" railroad which would work very well for my purposes. While I like the EBT, the mundane coal traffic holds little appeal for me as an operating premise. I'm much more fond of the other commodities the railroad carried; primarily timber resources of various kinds, agricultural products, etc. This led me to look at the EBT's Shade Gap branch, which ran east out of Orbisonia to Neelyton. At one point, the EBT had grand visions of extending southward towards Burnt Cabins, even to the point of grading the right of way. Alas, rails were never laid. By coincidence, the neighboring Tuscarora Valley Railroad had similar southward visions, and surveyed and graded its own line down to Burnt Cabins, paralleling the EBT's grade. This southern extension was built as a separate entity, the Tuscarora Railroad. (The EBT's Shade Gap branch was built under similar practice, as a separate Shade Gap Railroad.) The TRR grade south from Blair's Mills to Burnt Cabins received about 1/4 mile of rail before the project was inexplicably dropped, the grade left to disappear into the woods with the EBT's grade. (The EBT would in later years purchase the TRR's grade for $1,000 to build a line north from Neelyton to a ganister rock quarry about a mile north.

This unbuilt, unrealized dream provided all the basis I needed. I could build my railroad around the premise that the TRR had actually come to fruition. Thus, the TRR lept off the history pages into my back yard. A history of the TRR can be found on my website. Note: as of this writing, my website is in dire need of updating, considering the railroad featured on it has been torn up for 4 years, replaced by the "real" TRR. (That's part of the reason for starting this blog--it's far easier to keep up.)

The Tuscarora Railroad operates from Blairs Mills and its connection with the Tuscarora Valley RR south to Burnt Cabins, with a western branch from Neelyton to Shade Gap, where it connects with the East Broad Top. The portion I'm modeling in the back yard is this western branch from Neelyton to Shade Gap, then over the EBT's rails to the town of Blacklog, which lies less than a mile from Orbisonia. I chose Blacklog because Orbisonia is a major facility for the EBT, and doing it justice in large scale would take up most of mine and my neighbor's back yard. Blacklog on the prototype was a flag stop with a siding for a small rock quarry, so I've breathed a bit more life into the town.

The Tuscarora Railroad has a small roster of locomotives, but gets all of its equipment through a revenue-sharing agreement with the East Broad Top. This allows me to use commercially available locomotives (though somewhat customized) and spend more time researching and building accurate models of the EBT's rolling stock. As time has progressed, I've started building models of some of the EBT's locomotives as well. More on those projects later...