4.1. Augustine Passenger Station
The original White River Junction passenger station was scratchbuilt circa 1972 from balsa wood, hand-cut Plastruct window and door frames, and paper shingles. The sign (visible in the second image below) was cut from a road map. The design may have been freelanced—I don't exactly recall.
When it came to the Greystone & Rock Bottom, I wanted to capture the essence of the original. I started with a kit, but wound up bashing it beyond recognition, yet never finished it. And this unfinished project, curiously, became the catalyst for the Mountain Vista Railroad. With the addition of the platform and roof, the station was at last finished—more than three years after starting it.
I'm using this station as-is for the last WR&N, complete with working train order signals, even though a railroad such as this wouldn't have any signals at all. I worked hard to make the signals function, and I wanted to be able to enjoy them.
Plug and Play
I was uncomfortable permanently installing the station base: this would prevent me from performing any maintenance on the train order signal mechanism. When I came across some modular micro-connectors on 6 June 2021, I devised a plug arrangement for the station base. Below left are the sockets attached to a plate glued to the layout; below right are the corresponding plugs, just left and right of center. One plug/socket carries the signal control circuits; the other is for lighting.
Above left is a detail shot of the plug wiring for the signals; above right is the station base plugged into the layout. The rectangle of black styrene sticking up in the middle of the base is a handle to pull the base off of the layout—it takes a fair bit of effort to disengage it.
Reference
The above reference image was my starting point for the Greystone version. When I began the Mountain Vista Railroad, I chose a more New England style source: East Andover (same as the freight station), below.
Other inspiration:
Named For
For this new layout, I was going to revert back to White River Junction, but then decided to keep the name from the Mountain Vista layout, in honor of a very close friend who committed suicide several years ago.