Wednesday, November 09, 2005

World's Largest Model Railroad Housed In Home Of LPIU Family - 4

INTRICATE HOBBY.
This maze of wires is the central operation that runs six trains, in the complex C & E Railroad in E. Carl Pieper's home. On the night that the Graphic Art's Unionist inspected the line, there was a malfunction in this "brain," but it was diagnosed and cor­rected by Pieper after a quick look. The com­plete railroad occupies a total of 2,100 square feet in the basement, which was specially constructed to house the collection and is large enough to con­tain four full size bowling alleys.
TRACING WIRING CIRCUIT. John Bunzick, son of Stamford local 90P cameraman G. leo Bunzick, a shopmate of E. Carl Pieper at Graphic Color Plate, works with Pieper while tracing the wiring circuit on a gate crossing signal to hook it up so that it will operate automatically. The complete wir­ing circuit can keep six trains running simultaneously on a half mile of track.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yep, that's me in the photo a good forty years ago or so. Some details are foggy after all these years, but the layout was quite impressive. All the track was laid individually, on rail at a time. The control system included many relays underneath the layout that would shut off the power to a trailing segment of track to prevent a following train from catching up. For a young teenager, it was fun to figure out the basic wiring required and getting it all to work. As you can see in the background of the photo, Piepers had a lot of rolling stock, most of
which stayed on the wall. His pride was a chrome-plated "modern" passenger train from the 1939 New York World's fair.

We met every Friday. Each member of the club was assigned a task that varied from scenery to layout to electrical. Different kids were better at different things, of course.

Standard Gauge Blogger said...

Wow! I am glad that you stopped by! I'd love to speak to you by phone and get some of your recollections. Do you still play with trains?

Marc