Well, not so new, since I've been around the sun more than 60 times now. But new to some aspects of railroads, particularly model railroading. I'm a professional librarian, a writer, an amateur musician and artist. I keep horses and live in McHenry County, IL, just a stone's throw from the Illinois Railway Museum at Union. When I was small my family lived in Melvindale, MI, inside the triangle formed by the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton mainline, the Wabash yards, and the Ford River Rouge plant. Trainwatching (and listening) was a daily experience and yes, there were still occasional steam locomotives running on the DT&I back then. My first elementary school years were spent at the Richard D. Evans Elementary School (built 1955, demolished 2006) which stood right next to the DT&I mainline where we could watch the trains pass and wave to the crews any time we went out onto the school grounds. And there were plenty of trains, believe me. There were five or six tracks there and they were busy. Some friends have recently interested me in N scale modeling, and I'm just looking into possibilities. Historic equipment and locations for the DT&I are what most interests me at the moment.
Welcome aboard! Sounds like you've got the makings of a nice layout with your intro there. MicroScale makes a bunch of DT&I decals in N-scale, so even if you can't find what you want RTR, you can get it done. Anyway, that's what we're here for.
Welcome to TrainBoard! What a great setting for a child and their school. My grade school years were across a street from a busy Northern Pacific branch line. Great memories!
Thanks for the welcome and the pointer. I figured there were probably logo decals available, but hadn't gotten around to hunting for them. Pre-painted DT&I rolling stock and locomotives are a bit scarce and I figured on having to do that detail work at least some of the time.
