General Discussion (Model Railroader)

Two thoughts:

Railroads are often referred to as the arteries of commerce, so the idea of a railroad as a circulatory system carrying the freight of oxygen and CO2 seems plausible.

The other thing, next time you're in Philly, check out the giant heart in the Franklin Institute. As a kid, I remember walking through the four chambers, listening to it beat. I think it was renovated a few years ago.

They also used to have a product of the Baldwin Locomotive Works inside. (The museum, not the heart) Push the green button and the loco would move forward, then back about five feet. Don't know if it's still there.

Eric

Closest I ever came was a plan to use my mother's clothes horse for a mountain range...

Seriously, to come close to modeling the cirulatory system of a human foot in HO, with ore cars for corpuscles, would result in a slightly humongous basement filler.  Expand to the whole body and you could fill a commercial aircraft maintenance hangar.  The concept is sound, but the execution...

OTOH, the digestive tract, from input (Mouth mining company) to the waste dump 'way out on the far side of the refinery that extracts the values from the waste rock...

My daughter started as an EMT.  These days she's a Paramedic-Firefighter assigned to one of those, "Respond to anything," trucks...

Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)

Dave you have a few valid points to ponder,What I was trying to do was blend the two passions of my life, EMT work and trains thats all.

I value all kinds of wisdom on these train subjects I write about and take everything into concideration thanks for your input.

To all the others who gave encouragement......"SSssshhhhhh, lets not let "Dave" play with any of our trains"....."he's grumpy"!!!

Ok after much research I'm not going to try this idea until I've had a few years of model rail road building under my belt.

BUT, I have another idea that I will be doing,

After I'm done piecing my military train together via eBay wins, I will be doing a box car train and each box car will be dedicated to one of our past great Native Warriors, each car will fetcher a picture of the warrior or chief and a little info about him/her what tribal affiliation, date of birth and death, and the warriors accomplishments.

Red Horse wrote:

Ok after much research I'm not going to try this idea until I've had a few years of model rail road building under my belt.

You know, we are so dedicated to actual models here (and for good reason), that nobody seems to have suggested 'V-scale' in this thread (including me - oops), virtual train simulations - you said you were planning to bring a video to show groups (as opposed to an actual layout), no reason why that can't be generated digitally as opposed to actual models - and with a train sim you don't have to worry about running out of physical room (as opposed to memory and disk storage constraints, which with 300g disks & 8g ram becoming base lines shouldn't be a problem) - and you probably could have the rolling stock change color as it passes through the lungs and back again.

On the other topic, I know you didn't mention this exactly, but wasn't there collector sets of Native American tribes issued (I know there were lots of collector sets issues in the 1970s & 1980s) - yes, not the same as the individual chiefs, but might be of some interest (no idea of how to search for this on google/ebay etc. without bringing up tons of irrelevant stuff)

Greetings chutton01

Could you tell me where to reasearch the computer program you are talking about, that sounds like what I need, I'm real new to all this and do not know the thing your speaking of.

Maybe this idea isn't dead after all, thanks so much.

I shall look into the Native train thing also, I wasn't aware anything like that was ever done.

Thanks for the boost to my spirit, I really wanted to do this and was bummed when I figured out how next to impossible it would be to do.

I appreciate your input and help.

Jess.

Oops, now that this has been bumped after a month & a half, I see Red Horse asked me a question about V-Scale (which I never saw, and consequently didn't answer) - which covers a number of different train simulations programs.

Well, I guess he's learned about it by now, but for anyone else who's interested, here's a good place to start V-Scale Railroading.

You'd need some really custom ground textures/skins, and lots of custom-modeled 'structures', but in computer modeling it really makes no difference if a transload area looks like a team track or looks like a Liver...

Brother Red Horse,

If you do assemble the train of box cars dedicated to warriors, you can run them in back of a locomotive lettered for the Quanah, Acme and Pacific.

Quanah Parker was the railroad's founder and (original) principle owner - a (half) Native Warrior who learned to beat the White Man at the much more significant game of economics!  (He also founded the city of Quanah, Texas.)

Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)

Thanks, That is a great idea, I'm familiar with Quanah Parker and have a very nice portrait of him burned on leather.

I didn't know he had anything to do with the rail road but UI did know he was the first native to walk that fine line between our cultures and be successful at it.

When I get to doing this train I sure will use your suggestion, thanks very much as I was having a problem trying to decide which warrior the Locomotive was going to be named after because there are so many deserving that honor, but now that you tell me of his link to the rail road that just bumped him into first place.

Very Cool, I'll have to try and find stuff to read on the connection between him and the rail road so that I can expand my knowledge of his accomplishments.

Happy Rails Brother, Jess.

Red Horse wrote:

... I have another idea that I will be doing....  a box car train and each box car will be dedicated to one of our past great Native Warriors...

I don't know whether anyone has done a collector model train set like this, but I know there has been a set of cars featuring Native American chiefs on the PROTOTYPE, done by the Santa Fe. 

Santa Fe had a fleet of heavyweight buffet-library cars named for famous chiefs, covered in the article "The Chiefs of the.Buffet-Library-Baggage Cars" by John Rhodes, in Warbonnet, the journal of the Santa Fe Rwy Historical and Modelers Society, 2nd Quarter 2003 p.8.

One such car was ATSF1301 Buffet-Library "Chief Yellow Bear".  Photo Steel,Steam & Limiteds p.304; also Warbonnet 1Q 2003 p.20; also sister car #1302 on the "Valley Flyer", in Iron Horses of the Santa Fe Trail p.269.  A photo of one of the former buffet library cars in work service is in the SFRH&MS book Work Eqpt.Cars p.135

Red Horse, if you do make the native cars, and might happen to make a couple extra of Crazy Horse, I'll be more than happy to buy them off you!! Wopilla tanka, (many thanks)

Dick.

Texas Chief ,

When I get to that point where I'm positive that I can do the Warriors justus I will do that for you, I figure maybe by next year at this time, my skills are still a bit underdeveloped....well ok maybe a little more than a BIT!...LOL!

Happy Rails.

Now PM me and tell me about your people, I'm guessing you may be a native Brother?