After twenty years of collecting tinplate, I recently branched off to N scale with a desire to take up scale model railroading. The problem is, I entered the hobby with the tinplate collector mentallity and went about things all wrong according to the experts by buying whatever diesel in whatever roadname strikes my fancy. I must be focused and stick with a specific era and roadname so I'm told. Well I tried that and it just isn't any fun. I can't seem to re-program myself and probably never will. Today, I bought a Pentrex fallen flags video called "Classic St louis Railroading". It proves the experts are not totally right. It's OK to be a collector and model railroader. The clips were shot in the 60's and portray 14 major railroads running through Saint Louis. This was a time of mergers and railroads running in the red so there's shots of N&W, Wabash, and IC diesels all lashed together with coaches in a rainbow of roadnames. There are meets of Wabash trains passing CB&Q trains. there was woodsheathed boxcars mixed with 86 ft hy cubes!! YES!!!! I even got to see a Life Like chineese red CBQ GP-20 in real life. Man what a sight. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and witnessed the BN merger and end of the Milwaukee road out there. But the chaos was nothing like what this video portrayed. The chaos is kind of cool actually. I doubt my modeling will be as chaotic as this video but it proves there is a prototype for what I'm doing.
I've thought about it a little more and it seems to me the parent railroads of merger programs are really collectors shopping around and buying up railroads resulting in a vast, confusing array of equipment. So really, collecting is really more prototypical than we thought. Proto-chaos is the category we fall under.
If you model the early years of AMTRAK you can pretty much run whatever you want and get away with it.
I can site all sorts of excuses why my layout will feature a banquet of paint schemes, but it all comes down to me missing the fanciful paint of all the fallen flags. I don't care what people say, Modern UP and BNSF and CSX are just boring. Keep at it with the schizophrenic fleet.
Ahhhh yesssss.... That's what I think really attracted me to the 1960's as the main focus of my model railroading. At first, I only wanted to do strictly ONE roadname... Rio Grande. However, Rio Grande was a bridge route for goods & passengers from the east going west.. and vis-a-versa. They were a fairly small Class One railroad too... dependant on other larger railroads to provide interchange traffic at Denver, Pueblo, Salt Lake City and Ogden. Without the other railroads... the Rio Grande would not have lasted as long as it did. So... I began to collect interchange partners on the east.... CB&Q(FW&D or C&S too), Santa Fe, MoPac, Rock Island & Frisco. On the west the interchange partners were Southern Pacific (Cotton Belt, TNO too), Western Pacific, Northern Pacific SP&S and Great Northern. One obvious missing road is Union Pacific... with their interchange partners C&NW and Milwaukee Road. As you can see by my Avatar, Burlington Rio Grande & Pacific, is a fictitious railroad alliance to combat the influence of the Union Pacific and its allies. The beauty of this is that I can create a seemingly plausible reason for this railroad to exist in the troubling times of the 1960's. I can run consists with any combination of motive power and roadnames and it can be explained. I can create a 'named' passenger train from Denver thru Salt Lake to Seattle called the "Cascadian Zephyr" with Northern Pacific F3's for motive power. Or a passenger train from Denver thru Ft Worth to New Orleans named the "Bayou Zephyr" with black widow F3's . Get the picture!!! I really feel that getting a broader sample of trains with different roadnames makes the experience more interesting.
John and all, if you have the chance to read the books "Merging Lines" and "Main Lines" they are great reads on how the railroads "accumulated" each other. Of course, when railroads collect each other it's generally with the aim of improving their bottom lines; which as we know doesn't always happen. When we accumulate, it's generally not with that aim!
If you want a prototypical reason for running many roads' equipment all the time, there are several options: -A large city's belt or terminal railway. Chicago, for example, saw a huge number of railroads connecting, as almost every big road - east, west, or central - ran into the city. -A large merger, such as BN or Conrail, in its early days. -A jointly-owned line, such as the ATSF/UP through Cajon Pass. -A bridge route, such as the RF&P, which gets most of its traffic from connecting railroads. As for different eras, one not-so-often-used idea that I find attractive is rotation. If it's the 60s this week, it'll be the 70s next week.
Thanks. Early BN merger area is probably where most of my stuff fits. John Allen once wrote you have to build your first layout to learn how to design a layout. I think the same holds true when trying to figure out what roads and era you want to model.
Prototype modelers and the prototype themselves do collect! It's called Merger:teeth: Seriously, my wifes BNSF stuff is set in 2000, so it's not so boring, GP30M's in Heritage paint look cool. BNSF got a lot of neat stuff from Santa Fe after the merger, GP7U's, GP35's, GP60M's. And paint? Just go to Galesburg some time, on any given day you'll see at least five different paint schemes ranging from Santa fe Superfleet to BN Executives. Still you have run through power too so add old Conrail engines, CP, NS and UP to the list. Not as cool to me as 1970 with the BN merger colors, but not boring.
Calzeph, I had the same ideas regarding Illinois central and N&W. A good buddy of mine runs Rio Grande and I was thinking maybe when my layout is up and running he can bring some of his units over for a fun operating session. One day I found a picture of Rio grande F's pulling freight on ICG track through central Illinios during the 60-70's era. It seems there was a power shortage and what Rio Grande would loan out was their passenger diesels. After seeing that picture I realized I could pretty much run anything with anything and no one could say anything to me about it. Everything is prototype.
I worked for the CB&Q in 1968, before the BN merger (they thought about calling it the Great Northern Pacific, but dropped the idea because GNP already had a different meaning...), and I remember all kinds of equipment running through. Yes, the late 60's and early 70's were an interesting time in the railroad industry, so don't worry... be happy! You don't even have to work too hard to come up with a realistic justificatikon for whatever you want to do.
Late sixties and early seventies are a great era to model--for all of the reasons stated. In addition to leased units (like IC's leasing of DRGW and MKT F units) there were regular run-through operations: CB&Q/UP, ATSF/PC and MILW/EL come to mind. Don't worry about being prototypical--no one's gonna mistake your N scale models for the real thing!
