If the frame above isn't moving, the railroad is closed. The camera only runs when I'm down in the basement with the lights on. In between, this page keeps the last frame it got. Right now that's Saturday afternoon, September 25, at 4:58: the last coal train of the day, parked on the trestle where I always leave one, so there's something to look at until Tuesday.

My name is Glenn Thomas. I'm an electrician on the maintenance crew at one of the hospitals here in Altoona, and the Bear Hollow Branch is what I've been doing with my evenings since the fall of 1988. If you're from around here you know why. I grew up hearing the trains work up the grade to Horseshoe Curve, and my dad used to drive me up to the Curve on Sunday afternoons to watch the freights come around. Some kids grow out of that.

THE TRAINS, IN ORDER
A session runs like a day on the branch. First the Hessler local switches the mill and drops a car at the depot. Then the mine run takes empties up to the tipple at Bear Hollow and brings the loads down, over the trestle and through town. On Tuesdays and Thursdays the last ten minutes are night: I shut off the fluorescents and leave the town lights on. That's when the e-mail comes in. On Saturdays I end with loads on the trestle instead.

NIGHT IN HESSLER · THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 8:57 PM
48 grain-of-wheat bulbs, every one wired by hand.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN THE FRAME

• The tunnel portal in the rock on the left. Trains bound for Hessler come out of it.
• The trestle. Curved, 31 bents, built stick by stick from stained stripwood over the winter of 1993-94. I stopped counting the pieces at 2,000.
• The depot, just past the trestle, with its platform and its three passengers who have been waiting since 1995.
• The houses up the hill. Some have their window shades drawn and some don't. Look close at night.
• The mill on the right with the tall brick stack. That's where the coal goes.
• The backdrop: the hills and the sky are Linda's. She painted them in two weekends in 1998 and won't paint anything else for me until I fix the porch light.

THE BRANCH
The Bear Hollow Branch is made up, what modelers call freelanced. It's a Pennsylvania coal branch the way I picture one in about 1958, right after steam: a mine and a tipple at Bear Hollow, about 160 feet of single track down the valley (two and a half miles, in HO), the trestle, and the mill town of Hessler at the end. It runs around the walls of our basement, 22 by 30 feet, with one peninsula down the middle for the mine. The engines are painted my own way, dark green with a thin yellow stripe, so nobody can tell me I got the paint wrong.

HISTORY OF THE LINE

HOW THE CAM WORKS
A Color QuickCam is clamped to a floor joist over the aisle, looking across the trestle at the depot. Its cord runs to an old 486 on a shelf under the benchwork, running Windows 95 and a shareware webcam program that grabs a frame every 60 seconds and sends it up by FTP over our second phone line. The camera, the computer, the basement lights and the power packs all come on from one switch at the bottom of the stairs, which I wired myself, so when the railroad is open, so is the cam. The trains still run on plain DC with toggle switches and two throttles. The fellows at the Cimarron Valley Model Railroad Club have gone over to DCC. They run the Cimarron & Western, HO scale, western Oklahoma in the summer of 1956, in an old Rock Island depot, and if you like this page you'll like theirs.

MEANWHILE, ON THE REAL CURVE
Conrail was split up on the first of June, and the main line over the Curve belongs to Norfolk Southern now, though most of the engines coming around are still in Conrail blue. Some evenings I go up and watch the real thing first, then come home and run mine.

Questions, or you caught a train on the cam? Write the stationmaster: [email protected]