I use to live in Des Moines,Iowa and was between 25-40 miles from the Milwaukee Road and then when the Iowa Division left I followed the Milwaukee Road from Ottuwma to Davenport until the Soo Line took over in 1986 in Jan.I enjoy the SD40-2's and MP15AC's that the Milwaukee Road had.I currently model in HO Scale since those models are available and they are not in N Scale.I don't have a alyout yet,still wwaiting on my hearing for disability.The reason above is why I model the Milwaukee Road,that has always been my favorite railroad followed by the Rock Island and the Chicago and Northwestern.
i really did not choose what i modeled, it kinda chose me. i really do not model one particular thing on my layout. the way i look at it, if i like then i buy it and put it on my layout. the really only thing that holds me back is my time frame, which is right now.
I have to admit that I am very much the same way. I run what ever I want. Most of my rolling stock is not the major roads. Some time during the late 80's I stopped purchasing the major roads and started purchasing short lines and private owned. Gary
TC&W Are you from the Twin Cities? I see a TC&W train once in a while ,usually near Hopkins, MN or in Downtown St. Paul and have always thought about modeling them myself but I can't paint well enough to make my own from an undecorated one. They are some sharp looking units and they are usually clean as a whistle. Where did they come from? Another intriguing short line from the MN area is the Dakota and Minnesota Eastern (DME). They named their loco's after Minnesota cities.
I think there are a lot of different things that lead me to the Erie. I had originally intended to model modern Norfolk Southern, but I think as my interests developed and I found myself more and more intrigued by the earlier days of dieselization, I started to look for a prototype that had what I was looking for. The Erie gives me a reason to run a lot of through trains, do a little switching if I want, and it's not all that difficult to find locomotives with the paint scheme (although I am still waiting patiently for F-3's). Being from western Pennsylvania, I wanted something that would also have scenery, etc that represents where I grew up. Also, because I run a lot of ABBA locomotive consists, it's not very hard to run some fairly long trains and keep a prototypical look. I've discovered that, because most of my rolling stock consists of 40' box cars, and some 50' as well, that a 40-car train in the 1950's is not as long as a 40-car train in the present. I think a lot of it goes back to my first exposure to model railroads through the magazines. As much as I like the Santa Fe (the first issue of Model Railroader I ever saw was the one that featured David Barrow's Cat Mountain and Santa Fe), I remember also very well the first time I saw Harold Werthwein's Erie Railroad. Wow! I've been inspired by a lot of model railroads in my day (including notably Tony Koester's steam-era version of the Alleghany Midland and Jim Hertzog's Reading), but Harold's Wyoming Division is a masterpiece. So maybe I'll try and create something like that in N scale here in no-basement Texas, except I'll be representing the Meadville and Mahoning Divisions from Jamestown, NY - through Meadville, PA - to Youngstown, OH. It's going to be pretty cool when I add the semaphore signals. And on top of it all, there's just something about the Erie that I really like. Maybe it's that black and yellow.
I originally started to model the NEC and CSX in swestern Balto. Co., Md. and then decided to switch to the WSOR when i moved out west. For the most part the units are kept fairly clean and I can go 10 minutes from home to research the prototype in Horicon, Wi. My girlfriend grew up on the Milwaukee Road running right next to her House here and her dad worked on the line. I can very easily back date to Milwaukee Road for a change and people will still no the location, no to just finish the train room to get the layout rolling.
Tehachapi - mountain railroading at its best! [No offense Scott. ] Yes it's over-exposed, but for good reason. For me those reasons are: * Scenery similar to what I grew up with in northern CA. It's all about "place". * Single track line shared by two roads with heavy traffic. * Compact geography with torturous tight curves - just like a model RR! * Good mix of traffic that I like: intermodal, grain, steel coil, solid boxcar trains, and lots of mixed manifest. * Very little of the traffic I like less: passenger, coal and trash. I model the modern era, but this line has changed so little in 50 years (except for concrete ties) that it's easy to cheat and run traffic from almost any era. What more could I ask for?
I chose the Reading because I grew up with it (my family had 90 years of service) and I also happen to be fortunate enough to own a set of track diagrams for every switch, signal, HBD/DED for the entire railroad. While I am not a rivet counter, it does give me a perspective of what went where and it includes shippers as well. This way I can include appropriate online customers. It also allow me to fuel my passion for watching other fallen flags live again. B&O, WM. LV, CNJ, D&H, PRR, CB&Q, GN, NP and others are frequent visitors at the interchanges. I also like "running for mayor" in the town I created on the layout. I have been re-elected four times when my rival "disappeared". I guess the town folk like my platform... Nick
Actually I was an ATSF modeler... spent a large amount of time kitbashing GP60m's, GP60B's, SD75m's, etc. when I realized that if I was going to spend that much time cutting and painting shells I might as well model the road I truly wanted to do. I grew up along the ICG Kentucky Division... a conduit for coal, chemicals, limestone and bridge traffic from Louisville to Memphis. Watching the vast fleet of Paducah rebuilds in orange/white all those years finally got the best of me and I sold my ATSF stuff on eBay some years ago...to switch over to the ICG of the 1980s. Growing up near the Paducah shops during that time, I can recall seeing the long line of locomotives awaiting rebuild (ex-SLSF, RDG, C&O, DT&I, etc.) and recall seeing locomotives on test runs for other roads that used Paducah's shop (blue RI geeps, Frisco units, SP units, etc.) I guess it's some desire to recreate that era of my youth in minature. Good thread!! Chad
Why I am modeling a scene based on Santa Fe in Galveston It has been a process of evolution. I think I model Santa Fe because I had a big O gauge Lionel F3 ABA set with 7 streamlined cars when I was a kid, and the Lionel catalog picture of the train running through what looked like Monument Valley inspired my fantasies. 1950s-Modern luxury and speed in a vaguely pictured exotic southwestern desert. (The “modern” of my childhood.) Romanticized compared to the “real everyday” trains that surrounded the Houston home I left in 1966. About 1970, I thought of modeling that Santa Fe in a romanticized setting. Spectacular desert. Big city. Super Chief. Why not a Hollywood movie studio back lot? Maybe vaguely Los Angeles…a Los Angeles I didn’t really know. I also thought from time to time of an East Texas piney woods logging line, but that wouldn’t fit the BIG rail operation I wanted. My Los Angeles layout never got beyond a 4x8 N-scale oval with a 4 track staging yard, that would have had to be all “underground” and inaccessible if the rest of the layout was ever built on top of it. In 1973, I took my first ride on a scheduled American train-- the Amtrak/Santa Fe “Texas Chief” out of Houston and I saw there could be interesting railroading in my own part of the world, despite the lack of mountain passes and ten-story-tall curved wooden trestles. I still wanted to move IN TIME away from my own “neighborhood”, back to a transition era when there were multiple daily passenger trains, and enroute switching, and a contrast between streamlined name trains and heavyweight lesser trains. I began thinking of a layout that was “not exactly Houston” but had many elements of my old home town and surroundings within 50 miles. To do it right would take a 20 or 30 foot long “dream train palace” which I did not expect to have anytime soon. About 1980, I started building an N scale 3x7 layout representing a Santa Fe East Texas piney woods secondary line. I thought of the woodsy scene as being connected with the big Houston-theme layout someday and I planned traffic between the east Texas layout and staging for industries to be built, maybe in some future millennium. My layout plan was written up as “Lost River District of the Santa Vaca & Santa Fe,” in Model Railroader Feb85 p.106, and reprinted in the Kalmbach book, Top Notch Railroad Plans. By 1990, the little layout was up and running and I had some 100 operating sessions. In 1993, I became a first-time homeowner and the deal came with a 17x17 double-car garage. While I polished my East Texas layout, I schemed about the Big One. Routes and features multiplied, while track plans drawn out to scale seemed to make the space shrink. I wanted my Big City scene to have plenty of local industries and switching, and switching of THROUGH freight and passenger trains. That meant I would need not only “rest of the world” staging north of Houston, but also staging for some representation of the Gulf Coast end of the line south of Houston. Galveston. I knew right away I would want to have Galveston staging. That grew from the standard concept of hidden staging to a sceniced Galveston staging. My version of Galveston, called Karankawa after the Indians that lived on Galveston Island, would not be realistically operated, but would have some minimal shallow-depth scenery. Galveston had so many interesting features. A passenger terminal with a modest amount of trackage but a big city station look, a seaport with ships visible a block from the station-- oriented so they could be easily depicted by a background. A downtown with big-city-look Victorian era commercial buildings --yet compact. Planning for that dream layout included more and more space devoted to Karankawa/ Galveston. So many features could be included…. BEGGED to be included. A cotton compress abutting an esplanade-divided boulevard lined with palm trees, oleanders and bouganvillaea. I called it the “garden warehouse district.” Mansions. A cemetery with above-ground graves reminiscent of New Orleans. Neighborhoods of middle-class and working-class preserved Victorian homes. A rattling wooden roller coaster. Garish shell and souvenir shops. The shrimp fleet. Huge concrete bunkers for World War II shore defense guns. A notorious illegal gambling pier nightclub. A two-mile long concrete arch causeway connecting the island city to the mainland. And interesting railroad freight traffic. The world’s largest sulphur export terminal. Cotton compresses with little tractor-trains of bales shuttled back and forth. A huge export grain elevator. Solid trains of refrigerator cars when the once-a-week “banana boat” (ship) arrived. Special “reefer salt” cars, dry ice reefers. Coffee and raw sugar imports. When I ran into some track problems with the East Texas layout, I had to decided whether to rebuild it or…. build a different part of the dream layout. I knew I wasn’t ready to build the 25 x 35 foot train palace that would house it all. Maybe never would be. How much of the big city representing Houston could I build in an available 11 x 9 ½’ space? Not much. But the Karankawa/Galveston scene? Yes. So that’s what I’m building. Planning thread for Island Seaport layout Island Seaport- Plan “D” Coming Together - TrainBoard.com KENNETH ANTHONY’S RAILIMAGES GALLERY Kenneth L. Anthony Gallery - RailImages.com
I have chosen to model the early 50's of the NKP since I grew up in Lima with parents(Dad 45 years, mother 25 years), grandfather (brakeman and conductor 40+ years) and neighbors working in Lima for the NKP when railroading was its own universe. I am 63 and do remember that era as well as know many of the details of the area since I worked on the NKP during college in the mid 60's, while watching the Lima Locomotive Works slowly go out of business after the last Berkshires were built. I have specifically chosen the Lima to Bellevue section of the NKP since there are fewer towns to model and my neighbor here in Ridgway, Colorado is a 4th generation NKPer from Bellevue. He got me back in the Nickel Plate Road Historical and technical Society. It also is some nostalgia for a special time and place in my life as well as allows me to do something that I couldn't do as a kid with Lionel or even HO. Finally, as my parents said many times you can't get the cinders out of your boots once you work for the railroad.
I grew up near Binghamton, N.Y. I got to see the Erie, Lackawanna, Erie-Lackawanna merger, D&H and Lehigh Valley growing up and have always felt drawn to these great eastern railroads. I now live in Wellsboro, PA which was serviced by the NYC and had Erie (later E-L) trains running down through the Grand Canyon of PA. All these roads now have a "home" on my layout which goes from Binghamton to the east, to Gang Mills,N,Y. to the west, and Newbury Jct, PA to the south. Depending on my mood, the era that day is either in the 40's with Consolidations, Mikados, Mountains and 2-6-6-2's, or the 50's/60's with first generation diesels.
My dad had an HO set that I had for a while and was in the planning/early track laying stage when I joined the Navy. I was stationed in Japan so I bought the trains I rode all the time and set them aside for later. My wife let me buy one of the Atlas Trainman GP15 sets (UP) but as soon as I got it home I was already planning the WP's Feather River Canyon as my grandparents lived in Blairsden and we went to the Portola RR Museum as soon as it was opened (www.wplives.org). Plus I grew up in the Bay Area and remember WP, SP, and UP units lined up a few blocks away (I wish I'd spent more time taking pictures of it now). I picked up some WP units but also found some shortlines that are fairly local and feed the UP (Central Calif Traction-great paint scheme, and Calif Northern -since it runs close to the wife's stomping grounds) I am still planning the "BIG railroad" and want an interchange with both and the BNSF. The "little road" is open for era and location and may or may not survive to be part of the other raod. Right now it's nothing more than a test track (2x4ft with a couple spurs). Besides, I'm on the East Coast now and the local NTrackers need some "real" mountain scenery if I can convince the CEO/CFO to let me build a module.
I had plenty of prototypes to choose from growing up- Union Pacific's Encampment Branch in Wyoming, the Rock Island main in Illinois, the Chicago Great Western in Iowa, and even (egad) Penn Central in Pennsylvania. However, in April 1973 my family mover to Afton, OK, a small farming community, where I finished out high school, stayed between school years in college, and finally left in June 1979. Mom sold the house in December 1998 and moved to a retirement apartment in Miami, OK. DUring that time, I became familiar with the Frisco, especially the action on the Cherokee Sub, both fast freights and locals. Later on, in Ft. Smith I refamiliarized myself with the Frisco, and especially their trackage in & around Ft. Smith and Van BUren and up over the Boston Mountains to Fayetteville. Got my first cab ride on a Frisco GP15-1 on the night switch job after a RR club meeting. Even after the BN merger, my fascination grew with trips to Tulsa and Springfield, hikes thru Oklahoma's only RR tunnel (ex-Frisco, natch, now KCS, and just yards inside the Sooner State), and interaction with retired Frisco railroaders and fellow Frisco fans theu the FMIG and frisco.org. I have a little MP tossed in the mix only because both roads seemed to cross paths in a lot of places. Perhaps later I'll add some Katy and Rock Island as well.
Research! Wasn't interested in big roads; theme roads or niches (logging, transit, belt lines). Lack of knowledge and information about Eastern roads, Mid-Western roads etc. and not wanting city-scapes but a look and feel, was the D&RGW as a transition road. Old equipment, newer diesels, well 5-8 years ago there wasn't as much around for a RTR modeler and reliability was a much bigger issue, so I also had to compromise, and as I learned (research and history wise) found that the prototypes evolution suited me. So I've built up a stock of knowledge and data, purchased on line and off line stock as and when and looked in with clubs etc. Built a 'run-in' 4x2 loop that I re-honed some skills on and now planning a door layout of modest trackage but varied scenery. A town (fictional) with small yard and industries off the main line but big enough to have direct and passing traffic, an uphill 'branch' of mixed local traffic (if it all fits) and the 'main' is also an interchange track when the occassional Rock Island train comes to town. cheers dave
what led me to my favorite railroad. Well. I grew up in San Diego. Both SP and ATSF had some major stuff there. When i was 6 I went to a model railroad boot camp in balboa Park. on the last day of boot camp we got to run trains at the layout of the San Diego model railroad museum layouts. I got assigned the Tehacipi loop layout. Which my dad joined soon after. I started looking up pictures about Tehacipi and found a tehacipi book. looking over pictures I was amazed at pictures of 12 units struggling over the grade with an Oil can train. I was hooked on SP. That was only increased a few weeks later on a trip to the campo railroad museum where we got to see SP's corrizo gorge route. BNSF I began to like because that was the only active fright railroad I ever saw (the SD&IY railroad trains came through at 2AM. I never saw them in action but I did see the remains of one after a derailment. I still have pictures of that). BNSF was only mild compared to my obsession to ATSF. then after we moved to colorado. a Friend got me addicted to BN. Which my dumb self sold all my SP stuff off and started buying BN. Well now i noticed my large fleet of ATSF and BN could be patched to BNSF and I could model the fall of 1995. BNSF was in exsistance (and with a few H1 units) and i can still model SP. So thats how all that came to place.
I also grew up in the Bay Area, in San Jose. One of my fondest railroad memories is being at the San Jose Flea Market and seeing my very first F units... WP's Fab Four. I don't remember the exact year, but it was the late 70s I believe. After a trip to Texas that included a drive through Colorado and seeing the Rio Grande Zephyr (my second F units), I modeled the D&RGW in HO for a while before switching to N scale and the WP. I don't have an operating layout right now, but someday...
