I Chose The

Northwest transcontinentals: not because it's what I grew up with, but where I live. Most of the on-ground research is easily accessible. As an Army brat, I lived around different railroads, and went to high school in SCL territory. 

Having been born in the C&O

Having been born in the C&O Hospital in Huntington, WV, my Mom worked for them for 26 years, a lot of my HO equipment represents that railroad and successors. In my college years at Marshall, the railroad was an irritant on occasion as a grungy GP9 slowly moved coal hoppers to and from the river docks blocking US route 60 through town.

First job after college was with ACF in the plant where Center Flows were made. No interest in trains till a special project located me at the C&O diesel shops for a while. It was located by the old roundhouse and coaling tower at the east end of the huge yard complex in Huntington. While gazing at the surroundings while eating a baloney sandwich in the foreman's office, I noticed a headlight poking out of the Sumac trees under the coaling tower. 

Walked over and it was a steam locomotive!  Climbed up in the cab and looked around. Wow, another steam engine was parked behind it! Turned out the first locomotive was a 4-8-4, number 614.  And the second loco was 2-6-6-2! My fire, so to speak, was lit.

My request to Santa that year was for a train set. The die was cast: spending money on HO trains and chasing real ones.

Being a lifetime Vermonter, Rutland and Vermont Railway.

Born on Depot Street in Bennington, Vermont.  This was a tease for me and maybe made me want my own railroad.  My mother was wonderful but was “She who must be obeyed”.  I was told to never go near the rail yard alone.  We were on the other side of the street from the yard and other houses blocked any reasonable view of the yard.  It was not more than a couple hundred yards from out house.   I did watch as much as I could see from Depot Street.  The Rutland steam engines would work the area daily and then the ALCO RSs would do the same.  Then I went to college about the same time the strike ended the Rutland.  I watched the 70 toners come back with both great hope and great dismay.  They were neither the steam locomotives or the RSs.  

Life took over for a long time.  In College I watched the Lamoille and St Johnsbury ply the route from Johnson, VT to St Albans, VT.  After college and into the first of my working years the ALCOs would occasionally be rumbling beside my VW bug heading to or from Burlington, Vermont.

During my years at college Jay Wulfson started the Vermont Railway with the remains of the old Rutland Railroad. Many years later I had the pleasure of knowing the Wulfson family.  David Wulfson, President of the VTR at the time opened the door for me to be a student conductor and engineer on the VTR, Vermont Railway, for most of one summer.  That was a major thrill because I had chosen the VTR to model somewhat earlier.  VTR Is close, has a classification yard and has HO models that the manufacturers liked to make models of.

The VTR exists in my basement now and I take pictures of the railroad regularly now.

The last thing to bring to the table is what the old Vermonter said to the outsider when asked if he’d lived all his life in Vermont.  The old Vermonter’s reply was, “Not yet....”

Curiously...

I have come by the C&O three different ways. The main one was via its steam locomotives. As a youngster, I read about the passing of steam in library books - in particular, Ron Ziel's Twilight of Steam. That lead to many other books on steam locomotives, including many that impressed an impressionable young boy about the biggest and best - UP, N&W and C&O prominently among them. I grew to like the "flying pumps" look, which made the C&O's stand out from their distinguished peers. I was hooked, and the railroad came along with its steam locomotives.

As it happens, I've lived by the C&O for nearly my entire life, although I didn't always know that. I grew up in northern Virginia, along the Washington and Old Dominion, a struggling short line that ran a few hundred yards away in a place then called Sunset Hills but which is now known as the prominent suburb called Reston. By the 1960s the W&OD was barely running, but it was running. What I did not know until decades later was that by then it was owned by the C&O. I went to college in Charlottesville, and the C&O Mountain Sub ran a few hundred yards from my apartment. After college I went back to Reston, now devoid of its one time railroad, which had been abandoned and taken up in the late 60s. After a decade living along CalTrain (once the Southern Pacific's Peninsula line), my wife and I returned to Virginia, first in Gordonsville - an important stop for C&O passenger trains on the Piedmont Sub - and now in Richmond, the once-headquarters of C&O. The house in Gordonsville was actually near the junction of the Piedmont Sub and the by-then-abandoned but still quite evident Virginia Air Line cutoff. I still live within hearing of the CSX/ex-C&O Rivanna Sub. None of these locations were chosen for their proximity to the C&O or railroads in general, it just happened that way. In fact, I didn't realize the proximity of the Rivanna Sub until after we moved in and heard the trains!

Lastly, after college I worked for a consulting firm in IT. One day the boss came in and said that our next assignment was a "mainframe interface project" - it was with a company called Chessie Systems, and had we heard of them? Well yes, one of us had... The project turned out to be connecting the C&O's scales that weigh coal trains out of the mines with the billing computers. Yes, those same coal trains that I had spent the past 25 years reading about! The project was based in a C&O building in Huntington, WV. When I got there, people were astonished that one of the new-fangled big-city folk knew all about places such as Barboursville, Peach Creek, Thurmond and Clifton Forge...

I’ve chosen to model the C&O from the mountains west of Charlottesville to the piedmont east of Gordonsville, because in steam days that was where the passenger trains traded “flat land power” for “mountain power” - so Charlottesville had both. I am fascinated by the fact that the five or six miles between the VAL connection and Gordonsville were some of the densest traffic on the C&O during WWII, since it was more or less the crossing point of two busy lines. During the war, almost any class of C&O steam locomotive other than the 2-10-4’s would have been seen at least occasionally on this line, from a few 2-6-6-6’s down to the last surviving 2-6-0, and almost everything else in between. I can sit at Gordonsville or Charlottesville stations and watch all of those familiar friends who happened to be steam locomotives doing their work, even though I was born several years after the last fires were dropped.

Always interested in switching

I  grew up in Northern Illinois and was blessed by seeing 3 class 1 railroads (C&NW, Milw. Rd., & Soo Line) along with one of the last Insull interurbans, the North Shore Line. Of these, I saw more switching movements on the North Shore than the others. That became my modeling focus for 20 years.

After getting out of the service and settling in north east Ohio, I started to look for a more local prototype to model. There were plenty of historical railroads to choose from with the PRR, B&O, EL, NYC, and NKP, for starters. Since I had a small-ish basement to work with and love switching operations, I started to look at some of the local branch lines. Another model railroader mentioned a town that he grew up in had a neat operation and shared a rough track plan. The Carrollton Branch of the Wheeling and Lake Erie ( and NKP ) had 7 customers in town and several other towns along the line back to the yard in Canton. Another model rail friend and I went on a "field trip" to see this branch and he loved the line also. So, he's modeling the Carrollton Branch and Minerva branch of the NKP. 

I didn't want to duplicate my friend's modeling efforts, so my search continued until I saw "The Big Picture". Literally, it was a huge historical photo of a customer's location in the post WW2 era with a lot of other industries in the area. There were lots of freight cars in sidings and a 0-6-0 steamer with an ice bunker reefer in this picture. Research showed that the entire area could be modeled in 16 feet length and about 4 ft width. This is the basis for the Freight House spur in Canton, OH blog here on MRH.

After getting started on this project, another subject presented itself - The Akron & Barberton Belt line. Again, here was a railroad with lots of various industrial customers that operated in both steam and diesel eras.

My summary would be to find what you want to model and then find a prototype you like.

Tim Moran Akron, OH

I Think I Was BORN with the Railroad Gene

My mother says that when I was 1 or so years old I would run from one side of my playpen to the other to watch the trains out the windows(AC&Y) as they ran past the house.

My Grandfather was a station agent for the B&O in Ohio and my uncle worked as a signal maintainer for the B&O also. The town where I grew up had the PRR east west main running though town and the remnants of the Cincinnati Northern, now a NYC branch also in town. I spent lots of hours watching trains on both lines and exploring the facilities of the NYC. My older brother, also infected with train disease, and I built a NYC themed layout for a few years when I was in high school.

Then I went to college and watched the (then dying) Rock Island out my apartment windows.

BUT, I model the Southern Pacific, in the 50's. The Freedom Trains kindled an interest in steam and I found myself attracted to the SP with all of it's little quirks in motive power.

It is interesting to read other's journeys of how they got to now. Thanks guys.

Espee over Donner

Southern Pacific - Stories my

Southern Pacific - Stories my grand mother told of grand father working for them.

ATSF - F Units

D&RGW - Mountain railroading

The Southern Pacific Siskiyou Line in the 1980s

Where I went on Vacation: Freelance

I grew up (?) close to the SP in Glendale, CA and worked for them in the engineering department.

However modeling was always to be an escape so I built a fictional RR that had "trackage rights" for SP, Santa Fe, and more recently BN, BNSF, and NP.  I can change out some buildings and highway traffic, and the station buildings to make these somewhat credible.

The layout scenery is a composite of vacation destinations: wide vistas and red sandstone mesas (AZ, NM, CO), basalt mesas and sagebrush (Eastern OR, WA, NV), and some deep forests with overcast (OR, WA).

But more SP than anything.

Mike McGinley

I was born next to the SP&S

Well, okay, I was born in a hospital, but my first home was a 50ft "mobile home" (trailer) on a piece of property that was very adjacent to the Oregon Electric mainline.

If I could extend my layout a few miles further south, I could have that property (the mobile home is long, and unregretably, gone) on my layout. I've been told that for the three years I lived there I was popular with the passing crews. 

Model where you grew up? Not me...

The funny thing is that I live in the Pacific Northwest and was stationed alongside the NE Corridor in the Army in the past, and you'd think I would wanna model something like that.

NAH.

Though I grew up in Florida, I always loved the narrow gauge East Tennessee & Western North Carolina, as it ran in the area where my parents grew up. We'd go to visit the area each year as I grew up, usually either in the summer or sometimes at Christmas.

The narrow gauge line was gone by the end of 1950, almost 20 years before I was born, but I would see what little remained when I was a kid as a standard gauge line (serving a rayon mill at Elizabethton TN which had a Porter 0-6-0 fireless switcher I saw in steam several times).

A few times, I got to see ET&WNC number 12 at Tweetsie Railroad in Blowing Rock, North Carolina.

It never crossed my mind to model where I grew up in Florida as the Seaboard Coast Line held no interest for me and modeling pine flats is probably impossible to do accurately.

Until Bachmann came out with the ET&WNC ten-wheelers in On30, it was only a dream to model it as I'd always wanted and I thought I'd never be able to model any aspect of the line. I knew I'd never scratch build one of those locomotives.

Knowing I couldn't recreate any of the ET&WNC's more notable scenes in scale, I therefore took an alternate reality stance to the dreamed layout as there wasn't really a railroad along Stoney Creek (a real place which runs northeast out of Elizabethton, Tennessee) after 1932.

Illinois Central & Southern Pacific

I had the love of trains farther back than I can remember.  I grew up in Illinois, California, and Louisiana.  I remember riding the City of New Orleans as a child.  I also had the experience of living with the SP in New Orleans and San Francisco.  This included riding San Francisco commuters when they were still behind.

When it came time to to select a road to model I chose the SP because the scenery was more dramatic and the steam power was bigger.  (The only real grade I can recall on the IC was the bridge at Cairo.)  Living in Maryland, I don't have too many fellow SP modelers, but there are a few.

Lemme add my stuff here

My parents met in 1940 while working for the Western Maryland RR in Baltimore, so the WM always has a soft spot in my heart.

But I grew up along the Maryland & Pennsylvania RR; it was the "Ma&Pa" that I saw frequently, and heard often. Back about 1963, my dad brought home a copy of George Hilton's new book on the Ma&Pa; I was hooked. And since the M&P started as a narrow gauge, that got me interested in narrow gauge as well, especially narrow gauge in the East. 

I don't have the discipline to model a particular prototype, so I freelance in both HO and HOn3, but the Ma&Pa and its narrow gauge beginnings are at the center of my interests.

SP my original interest but D&RGW now dominates.

There are always a few who model something other than where/when they grew up.  I'm sorta kinda in between.  I grew up with the SP running through my town of Davis where I lived from 6th grade and into my college years from the early 1970's through the early 1980's.  I still prefer that period when there was no ugly graffiti and spartan hood units ruled the mainlines.

I did make some trips during my college years to and through Colorado and became very interested in the D&RGW and that is what I have been focusing mainly on from 1977-1983, although I still have a strong affinity for the SP during that period too.  

A random choice

I've told my story before. A random choice by my parents for my first train set ended up with my first loco being a Blue and Yellow Santa Fe Geep. I fell in love with those colors right then. Eventually research on the ATSF took me to looking at the western US and the D&RGW, and SP as well. There is still a very special place in my heart for SPSF "Kodachromes".

For some reason, even though the Norfolk Southern runs all around where I live and I've seen it all my life, I've never had the urge to model it.

Anyway, I freelance because my thing is to take influence from the prototype but largely just to let my imagination take me where it will as far as creating my scenes. If I had to pick a prototype road now though, I'd stray towards the CP or the NP. I've become quite enamored with scenery from the Pacific Northwest lately.

Michael you mention the Pacific Northwest.

Watch this and see if it does not remind you of anything, it's the video link on the right that has actual footage.    Also keep in mind that Bill Ryan of PFM fame ran his Kettle Valley Railroad engines fairly often at John's place and they took trips together to see many railroads back in the day.   Disneyland never looked so good.  

   Nothing cartoonish about these high trestles going into rock mountain tunnels at either end and high curving steel girders.       

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1#label/G%26D/QgrcJHrntPmfZJflchgXHgpJHbtqQchlTZV?projector=1

 Along with the scenery of the Vance Creek Bridge, the Pacific Northwest is without a doubt the most scenic landscape to host many railroads and modelers dreams.    This bridge was, without a doubt, John Allen's prototype inspiration.  I'd say he not only nailed it but made it even more spectacular.   

The name is real - on paper

Everyone wants to know the name of your railroad.  No relative of mine ever worked for a railroad.  My paternal grandmother and my father were both born by the Rock Island tracks.  My mother was born by the M&StL because it ran through a corner of their farm.  I have the BNSF Chicago to Denver main literally in my backyard.  My favorite railroad is whatever I am looking at.  I chose the name Waterloo, Pella and Southwestern Railway.  It was chartered to bring a second railroad to my hometown, but never built.  I have their receipt book which may be the only surviving document of the real railroad.  My model railroad doesn't look anything like the terrain it would have run through.  It looks like whatever I want it to look like.  I will probably get some decals made to letter all of the undecorated kits I have.  My equipment is from whatever I like.  I don't cry about how I can't have something because my favorite railroad never did.  Don't be surprised if you see the J. W. Bowker pulling a hi-cube.  I wouldn't mind having a F7 or a GP7 along with a caboose from about any railroad.  Anyone that vandalizes a freight car with spray paint will be hung on HO gallows.  I don't care about counting rivets because 98% of the people that look at it aren't going to know the difference.  The arthritis in my hands is another determining factor.  The railroad is a big loop with a lot of passing sidings and industrial sidings.  That means I can either run it in a circle and let it go or run opposing trains with the passing sidings - best of both worlds.  That is just the scale room.  There is another room where I am going to do tinplate.  One foot is in the NMRA and the other foot is in TCA.  I enjoy both worlds and I try to have fun or it isn't worth doing.

Ken Vandevoort

J.W. Bowker pulling a hi-cube

OMG Ken that is a visual that is going to be hard to let go.....  LMAO    

     And yes sir, suffering through the fun is the point. 

Randy          

My journey

My journey through H0 model railroading starts in France in about 1980 when I was 15.
My parents and I are English but we had been travelling abroad since 1970 and dad wanted to live in either Spain or Portugal, he had been looking for a suitable property for years.

Spain became too commercialised and touristy so was dropped and replaced by France and the French property was found. Having settled in and earned myself some money, I wanted a train set and naturally, the only ones available were French and therefore H0 scale. N scale in France was very limited then.

Despite living in France until 1983 and collecting a few models, I wasn’t really passionate about them, I tried Austrian for a few years which was better but only in about 1989/90 did I fall in love with American modelling.

At first, I bought anything American I could get my hands on, this was in England so while stuff was available, it was not common. I quickly realised that to be realistic, I needed to focus on one road which became the Southern Pacific. I joined the local chapter of the NMRA, went to meets, became very much an “American” modeller.

But, having met Alcos in real life in Spain, Portugal and Greece, I wanted to portray them and they had been gone from the SP for years by then. Researching as much as I could (way before the internet!) I discovered the C&NW had run various Alcos until quite recently so I made the change.

I’ve had several distractions subsequently but the C&NW is still a large part of my modelling world although I’m still very fond of the SP. I now live in Greece and have a single “Greek” Alco and several other railways trains so now I have a problem of how to build a layout that I can run them all on. I’m not too worried as Jules Holland has done something similar!

Cheers,

John

Great Thread!

This is a great thread, I really enjoy reading about the memories and experiences that have influenced others' modeling efforts.

I grew up in the middle of nowhere, rural southern Iowa, and feel blessed to have 4 class ones within about an hours drive.  The Soo's Chicago-KC main was the closest, then the CNW Spine Line, BN's Chicago-Denver main, and then ATSF's Transcon in northern Missouri.

My first love was Cascade Green.  Whenever we were traveling through little towns like Lucas or Albia, Iowa there would almost always be action on the BN.  My favorites were catching 110 car coal trains with five SD40-2s, Amtrak's California Zephyr, or if you were really lucky #65, the hot westbound, early morning intermodal, usually with LMX's or SD40-2's leading and cabless GE's trailing.  

In my teenage years, my attention turned to my hometown road, the Soo Line.  There was a passing siding in Seymour that the Soo kept pretty busy.  The high school was a few blocks from the tracks and I can remember sitting in the classroom and hearing trains slow down to a crawl and stop.  In a short while, a distant horn to the east or west would signal that their wait was coming to an end.  Late afternoon was a  busy time on the line too, and after school/ practice I would swing by the tracks to catch a train waiting 'in the hole' or possibly a meet.  

By the time I went off to college times were a changing.  The CP/ Soo sold out to IMRL, the CNW was now UP and the BNSF had merged.   My interest in modern railroading slowly waned and I kept being drawn back to the railroads of the early 90's.  I didn't have much time for modeling, but I would occasionally pull out a freight car kit or locomotive to weather, but mostly I would draw track plans.  Everything from a conference hall-sized BN-themed layout featuring Minnesota, ND, and Marias Pass to small, modular, urban, industrial layouts.  

When I moved back to my hometown in the mid 2000's, I decided my future layout would focus on Soo's Kansas City Sub in the early-mid 90's.  Even thought the KC sub is often referred to as the red-headed stepchild of Chicago-KC mainlines, I like the diversity of traffic on the line with several mixed freights, an intermodal, run-thru coal trains, and occasional doublestack and unit grain trains.  Add to that the kaleidoscope of paint schemes on the Soo/CP roster and that cabooses were still used on Soo freights up to 1994, the line provides plenty of operational interest for a medium sized layout.   

What Brant missed

Brant, it would have been nice if you could have seen the Soo when it was the Milwaukee and they used FM H10-44's to shove freights up the hill out of the Des Moines River valley in Ottumwa.  The Milwaukee roundhouse was still there and the Burlington roundhouse was still on the BN in Ottumwa.  The Southern Iowa was moving freight under wire between Albia and Centerville. 

Closer to you, I believe the Milwaukee water tank is still in Mystic.  Iowa was once #4 in rail mileage in the U.S. states.  We sure didn't have to go far to find it.  That is why we model what we now miss.

Ken Vandevoort

Indeed!

You're right Ken, I would have liked to see the Milwaukee when it was in its prime.  I just need to find that time machine.

I have noticed in aerial photos that you can still see the outline of the Milwaukee roundhouse in the wooded area north of the Ottumwa yard.  I'd like to go do some snooping around there, but assume that it is off limits.  

Was the Southern Iowa line the same one the doodlebug ran on?  I don't know much about that, but it sounds fascinating.  Thanks for the memories.

Indeed! reply

Unfortunately, you can't go snooping around the roundhouse area anymore.  It isn't the 70's when you could visit with the crews or possibly be offered a ride up the hill on the helper.

The Southern Iowa was under wire when I started at Centerville Community College (across the street) in 1965.  When I left in 1967, they were switching with a Burlington doodlebug.

What will make a CP - KCS merger interesting is the crossing on the west side of Ottumwa with the busy BNSF double track main.

Ken Vandevoort

More pics?

Nick, would love to see more pics of your VTR layout. Do you post them anywhere online?

John