Barry Bros.

In the 50s, the PRSL was loaded with coal and lumber traffic. Each town seemed to have 1 or 2 local coal (and lumber) dealers since most of the existing houses had those big octopus-like coal heaters in their dirt-floored, low-ceiling basements. I can remember my father and uncles going down and feeding their furnaces with shovel fulls of coal each winter day. The delivery trucks would pull up to your driveway and aim their chutes through an open basement window to keep the basement coal bin full.

I distinctly remember the coal trestle at Barry Bros. in Westville with a 2 hopper B&O hopper car perched high on top of it, to gravity feed the yard below. So the past few weeks have been spent filling the open hole set apart for the Barry Brothers fuel dealership. (They later added an oil tank for fuel oil but, like most of the other small dealers along the line, soon ceased to exist.)

Now all I need to find is a model of the movable coal shute used to move the coal around the yard and fill the delivery trucks. Bueller? Anyone?

Woodbury Track Plan

Here's the first pass at the Woodbury track plan:

It will not run straight but will go down to the right so that the Millville main can curve to the left as in the prototype. The yard tracks will also have a mild curve to the left. The icing track referenced in the Eddie Fell diagrams will also be there even though it has been gone for a long, long time.

If I can squeeze it in there was also a fuel supply (coal) siding on the opposite side of the yard (and a cement plant on the yard side).

It is also tempting to cheat on the other side of the station and put in Col. Green's miracle medicines (turn of the century) factory. It later became a piano company and finally a trunk company. Today it has been turned into apartments. It's building was unique.

RDCs

When the predecessors to the PRSL began operating in the mid-1800s they planned to be primarily passenger lines transporting folks to the Jersey Shore for recreational purposes. South Jersey was largely undeveloped except for farming communities and small businesses. Passenger service was a boom business for them until the 1930s when automobiles started eating into ridership. It was no longer profitable for both the Reading and Pennsy to be fighting for ridership. Basically the state forced a merger and the PRSL took over the dwindling passenger business. By post World War II, passenger business was a big cost drain to the railroad. They sought, with great difficulty, to get approval to abandon many branches.

In the area I’m modeling, Baldwin road switchers would usually handle 1-2 P70 coaches for commuter service (longer race track specials were also handled on other portions of the line).

Budd came out with their innovative RDCs (Rail Diesel Cars) to more cost effectively handle declining passenger service and the PRSL quickly snatched up 6 units in 1950 and another 6 in 1951. They certainly were a shiny, flashy replacement for the well-worn P70s. Budd built a total of 398 RDCs in 5 configurations. The PRSL ordered all RDC-1s.

I have 2 ConCor PRR RDCs and 2 Kato Budd demo RDCs (1 more than Budd had) available. Now I just have to get them re-lettered (when I figure out how).