NEB&W Guide to Orwell, VT

Last Update: 2008-11-05

Probably that name goes back to some English village that grew up around "Or's Well". In 1763, King George III granted a charter for this land in the New World and it was named after Lord Orwell, who was a minister on the Board of Trade & Plantations at the time. On the topo, the town was labeled North Orwell and also it was called "Orwell Station" in some references.
- [Topographic map, c. 1900.]
- [Topographic map, c. 1951. (Note the waterway is not the same Lemon Fare as in Shoreham, but the Pepper Brook. If they flowed together, you'd had lemon pepper!)]
- [Satellite photo.]
- [Satellite photo rotated as per our layout and labeled.]
Map. We are rotating it 180 degrees to better fit the space. Also, in order to give the sense of a single track branch, we are cutting out one turnout on the runaround to make it just a spur.
- [Track schematic c. 1934 courtesy Bob Nimke.]
- [Track sketch courtesy Bob Nimke.]
- [Valuation map, courtesy Bob Nimke.]
- [Valuation map, rotated.]
- [Rotated valuation map, marked off in 6 real inches for planning purposes.]
Val map changes. The Whiting Milk creamery was added in 1921. There was a new stock yard which replaced a former one in 1934, and lasted until 1949. There was a water tower, which was retired in '34.
- [Table courtesy Bob Nimke.]

We have very little info on the creamery, a Whiting Milk one. According to the Val. map changes, a siding was built for it in 1927.
- [Photo courtesy Bob Nimke. The creamery is to the right.]
- [Photo courtesy Bob Nimke. More of the creamery shows.]
- [Chris Shing built a cardboard mock-up, Sept. '06.]
We don't really know what material the complex was made out of, possibly clapboard, but I sense concrete block. Was it one-story? (Because a large one-story creamery is odd.)
After much head scratching, we figured that any building wing perpendicular to the tracks has to be the ice house portion of the creamery. And maybe the processing part of the creamery might have had a flat roof, which is why we don't see any end gable. So we decided to sort of follow the creamery at Grand Isle, just rotating the ice house 90 degrees. (Note the siding at Orwell was built at about the same time as the second version of the Grand Isle one, 1927 vs. 1929, and both were Whiting facility.)
- [Grand Isle faciltity, c. 1930, courtesy of Bob Nimke's The Rutland, 60 Years of Trying, Vol. V, No. 1.]
- [Prototype view, c. 1973, most importantly showing the orange color of the blocks.]
- [Model view of the Grand Isle creamery.]
So we took the Walthers ice house and cut it down from three stories to two. And the concrete block section is being kitbashed from the City Classics kit.
- [Model under construction, Sept. 30, 2008.]
- [As of Oct. '08.]

Stockpen valuation notes. (Unfortunately, this stockpen was removed and a new one built in 1933.)
- [Val notes, courtesy Nimke.]
According to Nimke's notes, there were four pens a total of 38 feet wide by 88 feet long. The shed was 10 feet wide by 30 feet long by 8 feet high. This stockpen was retired in 1949.
Chris Singh is kitbashing the Walthers stock pens for this.
- [Stock pen model being weathered.]

The water tower was actually a pair of tanks. Very strange. It was retired in '34, but we probably will model it, if we can figure out what the heck it looked like. (I guess the tanks were enclosed with a peaked roof, and with windows and a door in the base.)
- [Val notes, courtesy Nimke.]

Views as of September, 2006, show almost no trace remaining of the railroad or related structures.
- [Background looking from about where the road intersects the front of the layout to the right.]