Ya Really Know You Have Freelance-ites when...

1) You start a thread to ballence the "prototype-itest" thread:
http://www.trainboard.com/grapevine/showthread.php?t=91771

2) You overtly snicker and laugh at them all the way through their thread, feel sorta sorry and slightly envious of them.

3) Unballasted Kato track looks great to you

4) The most famous picture of your layout is of a 2-6-0 nose to nose with a bullet train.

//Drats, I have to go...

 

1. You try to figure out an explanation for an Elesco feedwater heater on the short hood of a torpedo boat GP-9

2. You bash JNR and Euro steam into North-American appearing steam.

3. You bash Asiatic prototype center cabs into North American appearing power

4. You try to figure out a way to bash LL FA B units into boxcab switchers

5. You cut up two B-mann doodlebug shells to make a trailer coach for the doodlebug and use the fronts to make a boxcab switcher.

6. You convert C-C hudsons to oil burners

7. You make JNR electrically live cabooses into industrial hacks to keep your switcher from stalling on plastic frog switches as it operates at ten SMPH.

8. You run modern (1940s) steel cabooses behind a mogul obviously built in the nineteenth century but has been rebuilt and updated over the years and is still in service because it has given good service for so many years.

9. You buy several hulks of cylindrical covered hoppers, even though they are out of your era, because you want the hatches for oil bunkers and the roofwalks for various uses.

10. Considering 'freelance' to be a misnomer, as a 'free lance' is really a mercenary, you refer to it as a 'fictitious' or 'non-historic' railroad.

 

Let's see.

You run dome passenger cars on the PRR because someone convinced you, when you were just starting out, that the PRR ran dome cars.

You convert said dome cars to baggage cars that are way too long for the PRR.

You believe the PRR would acquire the B&M in 1955 to gain access to New England.

You run PRR engines without Train Fones.

You run Beercan tankers in 1957 because they are cute.

You can't be bothered to research what actually ran during your era.

One bridge, built in 1888 and abandoned in 1897, has been beefed up to carry the 200-ton monsters of the mid-1950s.

And so forth . . .

 

Howdy,

This is all really interesting and useful information for a new comer to the hobby.


Regards,
Jim

 

Jim - Welcome to the hobby and Trainboard,

Well, yes, tongue - in - cheak humor always is useful.

More:
1) (for personal political reasons), You want to create your own history so in your history the Great Northern took over the Union Pacific and you have paid people to patch or repaint your UP locos to GN.


2) You decide to model a fictitious short-line:

to justify a wide variety of locos, eras, and road names such as: GN, CP, ATSF, BNSF, BN, ETC (Extra Terrestrial Critters).


3) You can have management on your short line negotiate deals with lots of roads to buy their engines because of the the paint scheme: Providence and Worcester, Bangor and Aroostock, and more ETC...

4) You can have your own car shops / locomotive works to justify the bashing you do with other locos and cars such as: 2 Life Like FAs combined or the "shell" of a 2-8-8-2 on an old geep chassie.


5) You can create an entire industry based on a made up substance called "Mystrium" because you know you could never do accurate models of prototype industries.

6) Your local is high desert so you can have mountains but you can have dry gulches since you can't model water convincingly.

7a) You create a subsidiary of your short-line called:
Pink Fox Lines

to please your girl friend
7b) Your girlfriend likes steam and you like short covered hoppers:

 

Oooo, right, forgot I did that.

Wait! just a minute!. I personally care a lot more about the poor rats rear than the opins of the nitpickers.

 

You commission Micro-Trains to do a special run of your fantasy railroad.

 

You run a 282 mike on the head end and a BN Cabooseon the tail.:tb-biggrin::tb-shocked:

 

You’ve completely re-written the history of the Western Pacific so you don’t have to bother with Oakland and San Francisco.

You’ve completely morphed the local geography of the “Lost Coast” region of California to justify the above.

You’ve completely exaggerated the economic and geographical importance of the “Lost Coast” region to justify both of the above.

Eureka CA. becomes a major port as a result of “All of the above”.

You’ve even dragged Alaska into your delusional world.

 

When you spend hours poring over old topographical maps, trying to figure out the route and topography of a railroad that never was built. Not that I would do such a thing..............Frank

 

Ya Really Know You Have Freelance-ites when...

Beside your own Freelanced locomotives, Your 'Pool Service' loco roster has paint schemes with names like; Georgia Road, Southern Alberta, Great Lakes Eastern & Utah Belt..... And you have Intermodal equipment with those names, plus more than 20 other such names ......

....... and you're still adding to the list ... ; )

 

When you mixed and used a color for your undecorateds on you proprietary line and decal them and they look great and then you modify the paint color a tad in the next batch and change decals and logos and they also look great and you and you are happy that your purchasing agent got a bargain on the "almost the same" color and that your line updated its logo in 1923 and again in 1934 and again in ........

 

I had to laugh at this one. I live in the high desert and am genuinely startled whenever I see actual water in gulches--or even in riverbeds. If all your high desert gulches had water, now THAT would be freelance-itis!

 

you buy any of the con cor paint jobs on their products......

 

The train car you custom painted and decaled from memory that was boo-hooed by the prototypers. The one you threw away...gets pulled back out of the trash and run on the layout...anyway.

When you decide you can't do without seeing trains from another railroad operate on your layout and you make up a perfect storm story to provide plausibility.

When you name locations on your railroad to names similar to the Santa Fe stations and divisions but once removed to just sound like them.

When you build a double cabbed SD9 just to see if anyone is really paying any attention to your layout. Or a stretched double cupola caboose for the same reason but you call it a drover's caboose and it rides behind your improperly lettered Rio Grande stock cars.

 

You purchase trains that would never run on the geography of your layout, because they looked so good and you liked them. (man, that's ME)

Then you spend a lot of time coming up with some creative and vaguely rational reasong why that train would be running on your tracks. In my case, how could a SP Daylight run a train on my western Pennsylvanian layout?

(Easy, I built a super "trouble shooter" maintenance facility that specializes in very difficult and technical problems related to steam engines, and the GS4 is their latest customer, because SP engineers cannot rectify its operational problem. howzat?)

Ken "FloridaBoy" Willaman

 

When you pick a road to model in part because the SP 4449 runs on their home tracks often.

When you pick a road made up of kind of a smorgasbord of power and equipment simply so that you don't get bored.

When you feature lots of "excursions" and "photographer's specials" just so that you can run whatever wacky anachronism you can think of with at least a modicum of a justification.

When you run a PRR lettered Galloping Goose, itself a freelance item, on a Pacific Northwest layout. (There's a guy in my club who has one and was quite excited about getting it. You could put "Pennsylvania" on a urinal mint and he'd grab a glove and pull it out of the drain just to have it.)

 

Lets face it, you're just too creative to be confined by reality!
Ernie C