Speculative Locomotion

[Anonymous]

I am in the planning stages of my first serious attempt at a model railroad layout and have finally decided to loosely model the railroad that I grew up watching. The now abandoned Oregon & Northwestern RR. Here is my dilemna. When the railroad was in operation 1934 -1984 they used two types of locos, Baldwin AS-616's & Alco S-3's, I am not particularly fond of the S-3 and the 616 is in very limited supply, so I thought I would try modeling this flag as if it had never fallen. Now to the meat of the question. At what point do you think that this RR would have replaced or upgraded these loco's and what type do you think would have been the most obvious choice? I know that there wer probably several different directions that they could have gone but I want opinions on what you guys think would have been the most likely choices. Thank you in advance.

[gvdobler]

I have no idea, but I love the premise of modeling as if they were still here or had not fallen til the 1970s or so.

Great idea.

Jon - Las Vegas

[Anonymous]

Let's look at it from another angle. What other locomotives do you like? I am not familiar with the prototype, but it sounds like it was a smaller road. As such, perhaps they would have purchased used GP40s or something similar from a class one when they were upgrading. I saw a virtual fleet of Conrail GP40s show up on the Kyle Railroad in western Kansas in the early and mid 80s. Slowly, but surely the Conrail Blue was covered up with the Kyle's blue and whilte. The ex-BN Alco Century units they ran in the early 80s never did loose their Cascade Green paint, however. The "BN" hearlds were covered up, but the BN paint stayed. If you like a given type or types of locos and they were being replaced on the UP or the BN, etc. your road may have purchased some of them.

Cheers,

Ed