tankertoad70 wrote:for me, it is the GN. It all started with my fascination of watching an R2 working helper service over Marias Pass
"I've spent most of my money and time on trains, the rest I've just wasted."
From the far, far reaches of the wild, wild west I am: rtpoteet
Texas Zepher wrote: Arjay1969 wrote:Mostly Santa Fe, circa 1969... My favorite train is the San Francisco Chief...Cool, That ran on the 'southern' main through one of my pondering places to model - Kiowa Kansas. Do you know if it was ever pulled by the PA units? They would have been rather old by then. My only problem with that train is that it replaced the California Limited , which was one of my favorite trains.
Arjay1969 wrote:Mostly Santa Fe, circa 1969... My favorite train is the San Francisco Chief...
Texas:
Do NOT accept this as the Absolute Truth, but when I was driving through Williams Junction in Arizona on my way back from Texas to California, in about 1960, a passenger train with VERY tall passenger cars screamed past me pulled by Santa Fe PA's. Now it could have been the "El Capitan" (which I doubt) or the "San Francisco Chief" (which I found was scheduled for a time over the Arizona Divide in daylight). Either way, it was a train that stuck in my memory, since the then Hwy 66 was just about a stone's throw from the right of way. And those PA's were SMOKIN!
Tom
Tom View my layout photos! http://s299.photobucket.com/albums/mm310/TWhite-014/Rio%20Grande%20Yuba%20River%20Sub One can NEVER have too many Articulateds!
I'm an adherent of the ever graceful Western Maryland Railway. The handle says it all...
WM3798 was the last diesel to retain it's original WM colors and lasted well into the CSX era.
She was renumbered 6573 by her new masters around 1987, but she continued in revenue service until 1993 or so, never being painted into Chessie or CSX colors. After being "retired" she was purchased by a the Indiana Southern, denuded of her dynamic brakes, and painted into a rather garish scheme (but not as bad as Chessie!)
But she soldiers on, earning a living hauling the commerce of a great nation...
Here's the Rest of the Story...
Lee
Route of the Alpha Jets www.wmrywesternlines.net
WP
The "Wobbly"
The Feather River Route
California Zephyr (WP)
Wespac (Where did that come from)
I guess you have figured out by now.
I didn't grow up near it at all. I was on the CP mainline.
My father and I had a large Lionel layout for many years and one Christmas he gave me a silver boxcar with the orange feather and I was hooked. That was probably about 55 years ago. The Lionel layout and my Father are long since departed. But my love of the WP. has grown.
I started reading all I could find about the WP. and became fascinated with the story and the troubles that they overcame with the exception of the merger. It just felt like it became a part of me and I have been loyal to it ever since.
You will see other units on my layout but they definately would have had opportunity to run here as is witnessed in so many photographs. such as: Burlington, BN, D&RGW, WP.unit #3532 in Uncle Pete colors. A Tidewater Southern RS-3 and a couple of EMD demonstrators. I might even insert a bloody nose geep at some point.
My layout however is freelanced, lots of mountains a canyon, tunnels, and many other elements that strike my fancy.
Johnboy out................
from Saskatchewan, in the Great White North..
We have met the enemy, and he is us............ (Pogo)
Santa Fe in Oklahoma, north and north central, set in 1989, I do fudge a year or two forward at times to include warbonnets. I model Santa Fe because most of my family, including father, were Santa Fe employees, I worked for them summers while in seminary, worked for them later in Topeka GOB while I pastored small rural churches.
I do include BN and UP (MKT) at Oklahoma City and Enid in the mix, along with a freelance regional, Oklahoma Northern.
Bob
Always interesting to see what you guys are motivated by and why. Well, for me, it is the GN. It all started with my fascination of watching an R2 working helper service over Marias Pass and got fortified via several trips east on the Builder, where I spent many happy hours in either the observation or full length dome cars. In '58, we moved from Kalispell to Grand Rapids, MN where I got exposed to GN's extensive Mesaba Iron Range operations. Always loved seeing a brace of Fs pullin' a loaded train of ore jennies through Coleraine. Those big SD7s and 9s, runnin' long hood forward, further whetted the appetite.
selector wrote:But I grew up largely around steamers in Peru at 14,000 feet above sea level...
Seaboard Air Line - Gulf Coast Florida - 1949.
I grew up in Plainfield IL. But at that time (70's/80's) I hated the "J" because the locos were so bland and ugly (in my childish perspective). But now that time has passed and I look at things in a different perspective, I have to add the "J" to my list of favorites.
My favorite ACTIVE railroads are IAIS, EJ&E, & IC&E. I like these three because the IAIS has heritage as part of the remnants of The Rock, the IC&E has a main that runs right down the middle of the street in Bellevue IA that I find very fascinating (inspiration for the spur in the main town on my layout in the works. I was just there in Bellevue on a motorcycle day trip this past Saturday), and lastly because The "J" was the railroad in the town I grew up in and is a very interesting railroad to photo/model.
I like rail-fan/modeling any Class II railroad mostly because they do not have bottomless pockets, this makes things interesting, they run just about any Gen II EMD stuff they can get their hands on, GP/SD38-2's, GP/SD40-2's, and don't forget the First Gen GP/SD7/9/18's!
Alex
CSX
Jimmy
ROUTE ROCK!
I wanted to be free of the constraints of prototype correctness so I model a shortline. In addition, my desire was model most of a railroad, not a condensed version, so again my choice came down to a shortline. Lastly, I can take all of my favorite elements from the Arkansas & Ozarks, Missouri & Northern Arkansas, Arkansas & Missouri, KCS, Southern, Mopac, and the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad and cram them all into one line!
The end result is a shortline serving three towns deep in the heart of some mountains which look suspiciously like the Ozarks.
The Cedar Branch & Western--The Hillbilly Line!
Raised on the Erie Lackawanna Mainline- Supt. of the Black River Transfer & Terminal R.R.
I grew up in Waldwick so I'm very familiar with the area (not so much the Greenwood Lake area) although there are times when the reservoir is low you can see the old right of way going through it. The 4 track main had its east/south bound track pulled in the late 80s/early 90s as there is very limited freight over this line and the line north of PJ is really no longer used.
I think the single track is still visible on the east side of Route 23 (?) through the woods, going up towards Route 287 (built a few years ago). After I got married, I moved to Glen Rock so I still get the best of both the Main and Bergen lines. If you go to google maps or local.live.com and go to either satellite view or birds-eye view and you can see what the old neighborhood looks like these days.
Ridgewood hasn't changed much (other than Starbucks and other higher end restaurants that came in). You have approximately 20 years on me...
Re Ramsey, if you're referring to Hi-Way Hobby, it's still there although selection is unfortuantely very limited, prices generally poor with what seems to be a very limited model railroad following.
Rgds.
Well, surprisingly, I don't model what I grew up with!
I grew up in Beaumont, living right between the SP and MP lines coming in from the west.
What DO I model, then? Mostly Santa Fe, circa 1969...I love the blue-and-yellow freight units, but I love the red-and-silver even more! As far as the scenery, I've gotta say that I love the SF mainline through Arizona. Canyon Diablo Bridge, anyone? My favorite train is the San Francisco Chief...gotta love a train originally made up from cars leftover from the Super Chief upgrades!
I have dabbled a bit into HOn3, mostly Rio Grande-esque, and I also have a bit of standard gauge Georgetown Railroad (Texas, not the Georgetown Loop in Colorado) equipment. In fact, I'm the only person I know with a GRR "GP20" (ex-MILW GP9 rebuilt into a GP20). And one of these days I'm going to get going and make up molds for the GRR gondolas so I can cast them in resin.
Robert Beaty
The Laughing Hippie
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The CF-7...a waste of a perfectly good F-unit!
Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the
end of your tunnel, Was just a freight train coming
your way. -Metallica, No Leaf Clover
My 1:1 scale life reached a high point in September, 1964. I was living in Japan, with a rail line literally across the back fence - DMU trains on frequent schedules, and several freights a day behind 2-8-2s and, occasionally, 2-6-2s. The steam was pulling loads upgrade, so the exhaust was somewhat louder than the usual soft chuff common to JNR steam.
Some years earlier, on a previous tour of duty, I had spent much of my off-duty time following the rails and visiting the mines along a web of coal mining branchlines to the southwest of Fukuoka. The whole business fascinated me, especially since I realized that I was seeing a way of life and a kind of operation that would shortly fade into history as the coal mines died out. (Today, the mines are closed, and what used to be open countryside has become bedroom suburbs.) That led directly to the first Tomikawa Tani Tetsudo layout in 1960.
Then, in September of 1964, faced with a 'use it or lose it' situation with my leave time, my wife suggested visiting the nearest place where there was a large timber operation. When we arrived at Agematsu, in the upper Kiso Valley, I fell in love with the 2 foot 6 inch gauge Kiso Forest Railway. I also admired the local JNR operation, with relatively short freights taking a pusher at Agematsu before tackling the 25/1000 grade to Kiso-Fukushima, then smoking up the tunnels of a single track that clung to the south side of the Kiso Gorge by its fingertips. On top of that, the whole area was absolutely beautiful!
So, what do I model? Mainly, the JNR as it operated through Agematsu to Kiso-Fukushima (with the stations renamed to protect the guilty,) and the freelanced Tomikawa Tani Tetsudo, based on those Kyushu coal operations but transplanted from the flatlands of Fukuoka-ken to the West Virginia-like setting of the Upper Kiso Valley. For now, the Kashimoto Forest Railway will be modeled as a static background display, but may be made operational on an upper deck some time in the indeterminate future. The same is true of two other favorite prototypes now not included - the Hakone Tozan Tetsudo and the Kurobe Railway.
Maybe what I need is a bigger garage...
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
I have a lot of them...
I've pretty much decided to model Colorado narrow gauge, so I guess the DRGW would be my favorite road. The narrow gauge steam engine (K and C class) were among the best looking steam engines ever made.
If I were going to builds a "traditional" class 1 yard to yard layout, I think I would have to model the Burlington Northern in the earliest days of the merger, when it was an explosion of color with CB&Q chinese red, GN orange & green and sky blue, and the classy northern pacific scheme.
As a railfan, I miss Conrail.
Like the moniker says Espee is the favoured road with BN second. Spokane Portland & Seattle was the local road originally in my hometown.
Besides Espee & BN there is GN MRL C&NW SBD and my shortline Oregon Central & Pacific in the collection