Speaking for me

Bill,

It's probably different for different people but I picked the Louisville & Nashville railroad because their double main line tracks were about 200ft behind my home.  As a boy growing up in the 50's & 60's I loved watching the trains (and there were a bunch of them then!) pass by our home.  Even though my layout isn't prototypical I model the L&N because it brings back those fond memories.  I can remember the MARS lights shining in the treetops at night long before you could see or hear those beautiful E & F units fly by.  Recently I turned off all of the lights in my layout room and ran my F7 loco around the layout and even with the artificial MARS lights it was wonderful to see it bouncing off of the scenery!

Here's a picture of my neighborhood Richlawn that  I had marked up for the L&N Historical Society to show the location of a F unit shown in a picture taken by Jack Fravert. passing behind my home:

Rick

What I grew up with

Bill,

You'll probably hear this a lot as an answer:  I grew up hearing and seeing SP run nearby.  I live in Ventura County, So. Calif coast, so I've seen SP steam then diesel, and now UP, run through the county for the last 60 years+.           So, I model a proto-freelanced regional railroad serving Ventura County agricultural and oil production businesses that I've grown up with.  My railroad interchanges with the SP, circa 1960.

As I thought about your question, I noted that one of the things that has guided my interest in the rail industry is unique histories and what the rail's served.  If I was to start a basement or garage sized railroad now, I may well pick the Western Pacific.  WP had a unique history, being a late comer, served and ran through diverse regions, from Stockton (a seaport), CA Central Valley agriculture, then as a bridge railroad up the scenic Feather River Canyon, and on out through mountainous central Nevada and Utah.   It connected with SP competitors Great Northern, and D&RGW.

In studying rail management history, Alfred Perlman's name comes up as one of the innovative leaders of the rail industry, and as one of the last CEO's of an innovative railroad, the WP.  But, this is another topic.  Nevertheless, the history and the characters are a definite draw in selecting a prototype.

A different look and feel

I got focused on a prototype in a round-about fashion. I was originally modeling an eastern narrow gauge coal hauling railroad in the mid-1920s. It was influenced by a Western Maryland predecessor, the West Virginia Central & Pittsburg. I was well along on design work when I realized that one HOn3 coal hopper cost twice as much as a standard gauge coal hopper. I only had a handful of HOn3 equipment at that moment in the mid-1990s. At some point, a lightbulb went off over my head and I realized I could model the Western Maryland, circa 1926, and still have a railroad with many of the same elements I wanted and be more affordable. At that time I lived in West Virginia, a couple of hours from Elkins, Thomas and the Blackwater Canyon.

After moving to a house down the block in 2001, I focused just on a mile or so of the WM in South Elkins where three WM branches came together and there was a connection with a B&O branch. I enjoyed using the prototype to guide my planning and decisions. It was exciting modeling a popular location, yet it was an end of town that few knew existed. There were several challenges along the way, but that's what I enjoy about the hobby.

In 2009 I moved to metro-Cleveland, Ohio and felt an itch to do something else. My space was an 11x11 spare bedroom, which was less than half the space of the previous layout. I reviewed some Cleveland rail maps to see where there were possibilities for interchange and a variety of industries. I picked a few blocks to focus on where three railroads crossed at grade, the Pennsylvania, Wheeling & Lake Erie, and the Newburgh & South Shore. The Wheeling had caught my eye several years beforehand and an online photo collection of the Newburgh & South Shore gave me more confidence in the project. The main thing was fitting the crossing scene into the layout and arranging the industries for operating access. I nearly got to the track laying phase before we moved again last August. Some of this layout is documented on my blog under the posts The Thrill of Discovery and Hitting the Fan:

http://designbuildop.hansmanns.org/

I've been making layout sketches again based upon prototype locations. We'll see what happens with the next layout. 

And I enjoy the pre-Depression decade as railroads looked remarkable different from the popular end-of-steam era. It is extra work, but it is most satisfying as each piece comes together. Again, I let the prototype be my guide. 

Eric

The W&N

I started modeling when I lived in Pennsylvania. I started modeling the my own freelance roads. The first prototype roads I modeled were PRR, then the PC. That seemed to be too big, so I went for the the LV. It had lots of colorful engines. Unfortunately it had lots of Alcos and in the 1970's, there weren't many Alco models that ran well around. Plus as I studied it, it seemed less and less appealing, it really shriveled after hard coal stopped being mined.

I then went to the Reading Co. It was local for research, it had a nice mix of engines, most available in plastic, a simple paint scheme, was busy right up to Conrail and had a good mix of heavy industry and rural running. I started in the 1970 era. As I did more research I backdated it to about 1950. I then flirted with the MoPac when I moved to Texas. Eventually I joined the anthracite Railroads Historical Society and they had a series of articles on Cattasauga, PA where the RDG, LV, CNJ, LNE and Ironton all met. So after I moved again to Omaha, I built a layout loosely based on the Reading Cattasauga & Fogelsville Branch. I moved three more times and after about 5-6 years had room for a layout, so I built a more prototypically oriented layout based on the north half of the Reading Wilmington & Northern Branch. I chose that because it had more traffic than the C&F, served a lot of heavy industry, was single track and was pretty well documented. I had that layout mostly operating and was about to start scenery when another bug bit me.

I had always admired layouts done in the 1890-1910 era. Then I got to operate on on Rev. Jerry McGee's 1906 era P&P (based on a Milwaukee line in eastern Iowa). That proved to me that small steamers could operate reliably.

I had been unhappy with the design of the 1950 era W&N Branch layout. The hidden staging and liftout/duck under combined with modeling only half of the branch just wasn't doing it. I could either stay in the era and make an industrial switching line (Philadelphia riverfront theme) or I could head off in a new direction. I decided to take the plunge and backdate the W&N Branch to the 1900-1905 era. About 3 years ago i completely disassembled the 1950's era layout, stripped it down to bare benchwork, and reconfigured the pieces to support a new trackplan that encompassed the whole branch. I have been handlaying all the track in code 70 and have had to scratchbuild, kitbash or use craftsman kits to make my rolling stock and almost all my engines have to be re-worked to backdate them.

So I am modeling an area 1000 miles and 110 years away from my present location. Its been great fun. I just last night figured out how to cobble together the cast metal boiler and tender from a 1960's Aristocraft 4-2-2, the mechanism from a Mantua 0-6-0T and the tender trucks from a Bachmann old timer 4-4-0 to make a pretty faithful model of a P&R class B2-b 0-6-0 built in the 1880's that ran in my era.

Do not expect the path to get where you want to go to be a straight line.

Pick a Winner

When I first got into prototype modeling, there were three class 1 railroads in my immediate area - UP, SP and D&RGW, plus coal hauler Utah Railway, and shortline Salt lake Garfield and Western. I wanted to model something with a local tie-in.

I briefly considered Utah Railway, but didn't know if I could maintain my interest in what was then almost a coal-only operation.  I wanted something with more action than the SLG&W shortline.  Everybody seemed to be modeling D&RGW or something influenced by it.  Those were out.

I grew up seeing a lot of UP and had a deeper connection to it from family history than the D&RGW that also ran through town, but it did seem big and overwhelming for the space I had available at the time.  I also had some affection for the SP, and there was a family link there too as my dad grew up around the SP, both the Cascade line and the Siskiyou line (for years he lived right across the road from it). It was also big, but a strong contender.

There was also the WP, which was absorbed into UP a few years prior, and my only memories of it were pool power and cabooses seen on UP tracks.  Nobody seemed to be modeling it in my area though, and it was manageable for a smaller-space layout due to its roster of exclusively four-axle power.  If I modeled the later years of its existence I could use a lot of UP pool power and model much of the UP stuff I liked.  The WP it was.

its local

I chose the UP because it was local and several friends modeled it, chased trains on it and looked into the history of it.

A close second was the SP Cascade line as I worked in the area while getting my college education.

Narrow guage was in for a while, mostly western/rocky mountain roads.

I set a "not later than" date and only purchased equipment that fit that criterion.  Saved a lot of dollars on good looking stuff that didn't fit.

Terry

I grew up a stone's throw

I grew up a stone's throw from the PRR's Philadelphia - Harrisburg mainline. I would ride the train from Paoli station to center city Philadelphia with my mom on school holidays - these were PRR/PCs ubiquitous MP54s! They were alternately referred to as either the Red Rattlers (Pennsy era) or the Green Rattlers (Penn Central era). We would pass passenger trains pulled by GG1s and freights pulled by GG1s and E44s.

That instilled in me a love of heavy electric railroad operations. For a modeler with such interests there are really only a few prototypes to model. Pennsy, Norfolk and Western, Virginian, Great Northern and, of course, the Milwaukee. Of these, the only one I had first hand knowledge of was the PRR/PC.

The first "quality" HO locomotives I ever bought were Rivarossi GG1 electrics. That was back in 1984.I still have them and they have been waiting patiently for me to build them an appropriate layout to run on!

Recently, I bought some Bachmann's E33 electrics, if I want to use them with my GG1s that pretty much narrows my time frame down to sometime after the Penn Central merger.

So, I model the Penn Central between 1970 and 1977 (I've revised history a bit to allow the Penn Central to hang on a little longer than it actually did so I can justify runing EMD GM6C type locomotives which I plan to kitbash from SD40-2s).

George

I liked the Santa Fe.

I lived near the Santa Fe mainline through the Santa Ana Canyon when I was a kid.  I thought I was going to model steam when I first started model railroading, but I could not afford brass, and in the 1980's plastic steam models were really awful runners.  When I went to diesel, I wanted something colorful that I was familiar with, so I picked the Santa Fe blue & yellow warbonnet scheme.  It didn't hurt that their ballast is a sort iron oxide that looks from dark red to pink depending on how the light hits it.

Then I joined a modular club and discovered that I didn't care about watching trains run in circles.  I don't really care about intermodal or other sorts of unit trains, and I was working in East Los Angeles, Vernon, and City of Commerce when I discovered the Los Angeles Junction Railway.  The Cf7 is so ugly, I just had to model one.

My story

I too picked a local road, but in a roundabout way.  I was modeling in HOn3 (freelanced Colorado narrow gauge, simply because I love the feel and the location) but I was frustrated with the poor quality of most HOn3 mechanisms and the high cost of pretty much everything narrow gauge.  I swore my next layout would be standard gauge, transition era, so I could buy stuff off the shelf!

About that time, my local hobby shop ran a sale on stuff that had been sitting on the shelves for years, and I picked up an ABBA set of F3's for about $100.  that got the ball rolling, and coupled with an interest in Southern Ry. and the Murphy branch (inspired by a modeling friend and the fact that I work for NS on the old Southern main line), I decided to super detail those units as prototypically as possible.  I had the parts, the date (late summer, 1953), and even though I never got around to detailing those models, they got me started on a Southern-themed layout.

As I developed a track plan, a friend suggested that it was a fairly good fit for the Danville & Western Ry., a line I just happen to have worked on, and that really got me hooked.  Since them, I've shifted my era back a decade or more (and sold the F units that started it all), spent countless hours researching a fairly obscure short line, built a web site for it, and have a layout more or less operating.  I even have started a number of D&W kitbashes.

All because I was frustrated with HOn3 mechanisms!

In my case, the railroad in my area holds no interest for me...

I'm actually a freelance guy and don't really model a specific prototype  but my prototypes of interest would be more of a western variety, The Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, D&RGW etc. are the ones I like. It all got started with the Santa Fe simply because the first HO train set I ever owned had an SF loco in the blue and yellow scheme. As time went on and I started looking for info on the Santa Fe, I ran into info on the SP, UP and D&RGW. I really liked the SP and D&RGW color schemes so my love for those prototypes sort of grew from there. My favorite scheme to this day remains the "Kodachrome" yellow, black and red of the short lived SPSF merger.

Strangely, although the Norfolk Southern runs all around my area and I see it on a daily basis, it has not one bit of allure to me. Don't really know why. I do enjoy seeing their locos and cars around simply because I'm a railroad buff but I can't see ever modeling it.

As it is now, I've been drawn to steam / transition era modeling not by an particular prototype but by my love for John Allen's Gorre and Daphetid so I freelanced a struggling ramshackle steam railroad located "somewhere in the west" when I was in N scale. Now I'm starting anew and doing HO and am presently trying to decide on a theme.

Just starting

I'm in the process now of designing my layout. And like some of the others, I've picked the town I grew up in, Fort Worth, Texas, as my main focus. But with a twist. I didn't really grow up watching trains or really had that much of a interest in them until recently in the past few years. I do remember a young age going to a house of one of our church elders and seeing his layout that he was building, but didn't really go much past that.

 But now that I've gotten bit by the train bug, I decided to go with Fort Worth. In my research, I found tower 55 and the interchange in downtown. I started looking at the different railroads that went thru there and decided on the Missouri, Kansas, Texas RR (KATY) as my North/South line and the Texas & Pacific as my East/West line. I chose these mainly because of the look of their herald, color schemes of their F1's & F7's and  and the passenger lines they ran. I also liked the 360 roundhouse of the T&P and the fact that the main post office between the passenger station and the T&P freight warehouse is where my mom worked for many years.Since I like steam and the boss likes the older diesels, I chose to model the transition era around Fort Worth. My other two towns on the layout will be Wichita Falls, serviced by the KATY and Midland, serviced by the T&P. I chose these two towns as I have family who grew up in those towns and remember them from my childhood.  

I've found some old maps of the areas from the 1930's/40's and am using those to layout the different industries that were there back then, some of them I remember. I wasn't around back during that time but think of it as a simpler time and a more interesting era to model.

Long Distance (and Time) Prototype Modeling

I live in Washington State, so you might be surprised to learn that I'm modeling an 1950 era Boston & Maine line that ran in Vermont and New Hampshire. I used to model a freelance coal hauler. That all changed when I read Paul Dolkos' B&M layout article in the September 1986 issue of MR.

The maroon and gold diesel paint scheme had always been one of my favorites, but after reading his article I decided to make a change. For those that haven't seen the various articles on his old layout, it was proto-freelanced, but captured the essence of the area in and around Woodsville, NH. I opted to go for total prototype modeling of the line with the usual compromises needed for accomplishing that.

Although I've purchased many of the B&M themed books that have come out over the years, most of my info has been provided by members of the BM Yahoo Group. Among them are several retired employees who worked for the road during my era of interest and have provided answers to my many questions.

Duane Goodman

In defense of local inspiration

I was at a Jim Six clinic once a few years ago, and heard him mention that he feels it is important to model a local road.  We (being in North Carolina) were giving him a hard time for selling off all his southeastern models and converting to New York Central.  His comment was that it is much easier to model a local railroad, since you can walk out your back door and get a true sense of how the world should look.  Thus, when he moved away from the southeast, he moved his modeling focus as well.

When he put it that way, it made a lot of sense to me.  As much as I love Colorado narrow gauge and the Rocky Mountains, I don't really know how they should look.  If I were still modeling that area, I would really be modeling someone else's models or photos.  By modeling a local railroad, I can also go to the locations I am researching and really see for myself how the land slopes, where the tracks are, what color the dirt is, etc.

Kansas City Southern

I started out modeling the CB&Q in Iowa in the early 70's around the formation of the BN.  I like passenger trains and long unit grain trains, so I thought about modeling CB&Q/BN in Iowa.  I attended college in Iowa and my parents lived for many years in Galesburg Ill, a big CB&Q town.

In the Mid 70's to Mid 80's I lived and worked in Kansas City then moved to Topeka KS.  I was buying a lot of rolling stock and locomotives but never had a layout other than a large oval of track on the carpet.

My modeling thoughts kept drifting to the Kansas City area in the 70's and 80's. I love EMD F units and SD40s. I also wanted to do something with the unit grain trains from Iowa, and while the BN to Kansas City was a thought, I settled for a freelance Kansas City Northern which would haul grain from Iowa-Nebraska to Kansas City and interchange with the Kansas City railroads.

Quite by accident I discovered the prototype Kansas City Southern, which met all of my modeling needs so I switched to the prototype KCS.

The World Is Getting Smaller

Maybe at one time what Jim Six says about local modeling was true, but I think that is changing.

With things like Google Earth, Mapquest, etc one can gleen enough information about a region to model it convincingly even though you live far away.

I'm modeling the Columbia and Port Deposit Branch of the Penn Central, which still exists as the Port Road Branch of the Norfolk and Southern. Using Google Earth I've been able to follow every part of the route from Perryville MD to Columbia PA. And although this is a very rural line, there are still enough areas where I can use "street views" to get a feel for both the railroad and its surrounding environs.

Now it is true that I grew up in that part of the country, so I'm kind of "dialed in" to what would look right from personal experience. However, I feel it would be possible for someone who had never visited the area in person to create a believable layout just using the resources available to him/her on the internet and by reading up on the area in libraries etc.

Remember even though Allen McClelland lived in Ohio he modeled Appalachia (and did so very well) and that was in a time before the internet!

George

I get the point about local inspiration....

I get the point about local inspiration and I certainly wasn't implying there was anything wrong with that but what if you're like me and the local line just doesn't "float your boat"? What then? You go find something that does interest you whether it be because of the loco color scheme, the scenery or whatever....

I just can't ever see modeling the Norfolk Southern even though it's right in my backyard. There's nothing about it that appeals to me. I love Georgia, that's why I live here but it's just not what I dream about when I think about my model railroad, it's scenery and the locos and cars that run on it. Those of you that do enjoy modeling something close by where you have nearby scenes and equipment for reference are indeed fortunate.

FREELANCE or PROTOTYPE ? WHO KNOWS

I am looking at three port cities. Charleston S.C.Georgetown S.C. and Wilmington N.C. with several major inland cities. All have large industries to serve. CSX would be the current operator. In the past was the CHESSIE SYSTEM, SEABOARD AIR LINE ,SEABOARD COAST LINE and the ATLANTIC COASTLINE. So there are many choices to make.                       

The biggest decision is were to build such a layout. I plan to build a storage building ( APP 36' x 24') for my camper and boats. This would allow for a 14' x 24' upstairs room for a future layout. It will be between 6 months to a year before  this will be finished. (I HOPE) In the mean time, lots of post and mag reading.

DC

It started for me when I got lost

hiking with a buddy - we were about 14 - on Hollyburn Mtn in West Vancouver, BC. After a long steep bushwhack down the east slope of the hill we came upon what was obviously an old railway grade which we were able to follow out to a road.  It turned out that the railway had belonged to the Capilano Timber Company, which operated up until about 1933.  Eventually I got enough information to write up a short history of the company.  In the course of my research I discovered a family connection: there was a photo of my grandfather escorting a touring group of newspaper editors over the line.

Capilano Timber more or less established my era, but I soon became aware of a couple of problems.  A logging layout needs an awful lot of trees - or at least stumps - and operations could tend to lack variety.  So we needed to involve a mainline railroad; I'm not sure why, but that became the CPR.  And after a few years working as a train-order operator for Ontario Northland I had a pretty good idea of the traffic patterns I wanted to model.  I was particularly taken by the interactions between the ONR's two local passenger trains and the mainline train to Toronto, so I knew I had to have a branch line, a junction, and somewhere to do a bit of switching.  And the mainline traffic had to originate somewhere and terminate somewhere else, which meant staging....

And with that in mind we designed a house to go around it.

David

Local, maybe not so much

Having modeled near real time (the early 1970's in the late 1970's), the past (the 1950's in the 1980's) and the distant past (the 1900's in the 2000's) I consider modeling what's outside your backdoor somewhat overrated. Any "view" in an area where there are people has about a life expectancy of about 20 years. After that so many things change that it really doesn't look like past. When that happens, you have to look at photographs to see what it used to look like. Once you have to go to photos for reference, you are completely unbound to location and era. Doing 1900 is almost as easy as doing 1950 as is doing 1970.

For example. I visited Joanna, PA on a research trip. It was a station on the W&N Branch I model. It had a neat wooden depot (which survives, moved to a tourist railroad). I could sorta make out where the railroad used to go because there was a definite grading and the trees were only 6 inches in diameter rather than a foot in diameter. I stopped in a convience store there and asked a lady who was over 50 if the depot used to be around here. She said yes, the tracks ran through the parking lot and the depot was about where the soda coolers were. That portion of the branch was abandoned after a hurricane in the late 1970's.

Regardless of what era I was modeling, 1970, 1950 or 1900 what was there now was nowhere near what was there then. Near there is a big hole in the ground where there was some sort of "quarry". Just past the depot was a switch for a branch to the Grace iron ore mine. If I was modeling 1970, the mine would be there and in operation. If I was modeling 1950 or 1900 the mine wouldn't have been there (it was built in 1956). So even the land has changed shape.

Even active railroads change dramatically. The Tower 55 area in Ft Worth looked completely different in the 1950's than it did when I first saw it in the 1980's and looked different than today in the 1990's and within 5-10 years will look completely different than it does today. Buildings are gone, new buildings are there, the road and highway network is completely different, track alignments have changed, tracks have been added, tracks have been removed. The land is shaped differently, the views are completely different, the traffic flows are different.

I agree that proximity does make it easier. But realistically, once you have to start getting your detail information from books and historical sources, and have to selectively compress the prototype down to an itty bitty 20x40 basement, proximity decreases in importance. 

It probably shouldn't have been the Missabe, but it is

Ah, another opportunity to wax eloquent!

When I was VERY young, we stopped in Two Harbors, MN to camp overnight on our way back home from farther north.  I vaguely recall, and back then could scarcely appreciate the sights and sounds of the Missabe’s mighty Yellowstones.  This was probably the year that these locos dropped their fires for the last time.  It was a one-evening visit - I was quite young.

When I was in early grade school, we lived in Albert Lea, MN across the schoolyard from the Rock Island’s line south out of town.  Most evenings a passenger train left town, and if the season was right, the sun was just setting behind the train on the sweeping curve past our house. 

I remember the Mars light dancing across the tracks, the twilight skies reflecting off the stainless steel car sides, and I think I recall sparks on the tracks as wheels hit rail joints.  It was a magical picture to capture the imagination, and I would often stand at our front living room window just to await the train’s departure for the several years we lived there.  I could have modeled the RI.

In late grade school, we built a cabin near the Soo Line’s line to Duluth, and I built a model of the Class 2 depot in Danbury WI.  When in Duluth/Superior, I would often stand alongside the Soo’s operation in Superior to observe.  I could have chosen the Soo.

Later in junior high we vacationed in DC and visited Cass Scenic Railway – only days after the loco shops burned to the ground.  Despite the catastrophe, they were still open for business, and I thoroughly enjoyed the visit.  It resulted in the consuming of several rolls of film and the acquisition of my first brass locomotive, a Shay.  I would sit and look through the slides afterwards and try to absorb the mountain scenery and rustic operations, hoping to model it faithfully.  I briefly did model logging operations.

Living in the Minneapolis area most of my childhood after Albert Lea, I was in and around the Great Northern, and as mentioned above, I had a camera, and used it a lot.  Modeling refocused on the GN.

After my second year of college in Moorhead, MN, I stayed on campus for the summer, and in sheer boredom, discovered Frank King’s “The Missabe Road” in the school library.  That was it!  The connection back to my early life was instant, and I could even recall the distinctive Yellowstone whistle from way back when.

Forget the RI, Cass, Soo and the Great Northern (well, maybe not the GN); it was Missabe time. 

I took a road trip to Duluth, walked boldly (for a nerdy college kid, anyway) into the Missabe’s corporate offices and asked to meet Frank King, who from that moment became a dear friend until his passing. 

During our acquaintance, he did everything he could to support my “habit”, and my years with the Soo Line as a purchasing agent allowed me to visit him every month as I traveled to Koppers Company in Superior to oversee tie treating operations.

I am saddened that the CN has acquired the Missabe, the maroon and gold is gone, and modernization of mining methods has removed most of what I thought was the “cool stuff” of iron mining.  Even though it’s not far from home, I have lost the desire to visit. 

My mental picture of the Missabe and the photos of Frank King’s book are lived out in my 1950’s era layout.

Milt

Inspiration...

  The layout I have planned is based on my local area set in the 70's.  The inspiration for it comes from the fact that my grandfather worked on the railroad here in Vancouver, it's the only place I have ever lived, I have always been intrigued by urban/industrial switching, and I just don't have the room for a satisfying representation of mainline railroading.

  That said, I drawn inspiration for scenery detail levels/realism/operations from Joe Fugate, Mr. Comstock, Mike Confalone, Lance Mindheim, Troels Kirk and a lot of other really super modellers.  My interest in having a layout revolves around presenting a believable scene, somewhat compressed, with recognizable structures and the "flavor" of my area.  

  I am not terribly interested (at this time) in hyper-detailing locomotives/rolling stock for a specific unit or specific time (other than general timeframe).  Possibly this will change as I get farther along in other areas of overall layout construction.  I have an interest in a narrow gauge railroad, again a local line about 130 miles away, set in the early 1900 timeframe.  But here again, my interest is in presenting a pleasant overall view of the era/setting, and not so much EXACTLY reproducing every piece of equipment/structure that existed on a particular date.  Stand-ins are just fine.

  Will this be enough to keep my interest up and satisfied long term?  I don't know - but the wonderful thing about this hobby is that there are a lot of areas to be able to focus on, and I am sure there is something in the mix that I will find relaxing/challenging without feeling that it is an onerous chore that MUST be done to be a REAL model railroader....

The Rio Grande Southern Narrow Gauge RR

From the first time I ever saw a Photo of this narrow gauge RR 50 years ago I have wanted to build my own RGS narrow gauge RR  in HOn3.  With a big Thanks to Mallory Hope Ferrell being the primary inspiration with his 2 Books "Silver San Juan" & "The Rio Grande Southern" With a collection of the Pathfinder of the RGS Otto Mears writings as The first President of the RGS and original owner of what is now known as the Durango & Silverton RR as well as the Photography of Otto Perry and Josie Moore Crums and others accumulated Knowledge and historical facts of the RGS. I have just always seen the RGS the most perfect Railroad to Model as have many other Model Railroaders Making the RGS RR the most reproduced Model Railroad in Model railroad History.

Its main purpose for being built was the Many Mines - Coal, Gold, Silver and later Uranium used to make the first Atom Bomb as well as Lumber, Cattle, and sheep as exports.

You can Call the RGS as the RR built just for Model Railroaders

The Rio Grande Southern has the distinction of being the last major Narrow Gauge Railroad to be constructed in Colorado. Its construction started in 1890 at Ridgway Colorado 7,003 feet above sea level & That's 1,723 feet higher than the City of Denver Colorado known as the Mile high city.

The RGS ran from Ridgway Colorado 162 miles south to Durango Colorado traversing some of  the most dangerous mountains the United States has to offer and with it's 4% grades reaching up to 8,989 feet above sea level and through places that for years most men wouldn't even take a horse.

With the many Bridges and trestles, All the River crossings and cliff hanging tracks and just looking at some of the places this railroad was built make most people just loose their breath at the spectacular settings of the RGS.

The memory of the RGS has now out lived the 63 years the Railroad actually existed 1890-1952 and the only thing keeping the memory of this 3 foot gauge RR alive is the Model Railroaders and their models and the few remaining pieces of rolling stock and the few engines still running.

Dan

Amtrak and Conrail on The Corridor, 1979 across the Garden State

I pretty much got lucky

From the beginning I knew I wanted to model electrics, but was split between my favorite railroad, Conrail, and modeling the more modern Amtrak and NJ Transit trains that were available in HO during my High school years..   Unfortunately, I was unfocused, and as most of us have learned, unfocused modeling is expensive.

Even more problematic, of the two time periods (late 1970s Vs early 2000s),  neither had a "complete" roster available for modeling in HO.   Locomotives like the E44 are nearly nonexistent.  Other models were difficult to find and obtain, such as AEM7s in the most recent "Phase V" paint.  Commuter cars from both time periods were also difficult to obtain, and were usually incredibly expensive, making it difficult to model an MU train. 

I also wanted to model freight, but that would be difficult on a more modern Northeast Corridor. 

Here is where I got lucky

A friend of mine offered E44A models in brass for an excellent price, and I was able to afford three of them (probably the best money i've spent on a train model). Only a few months later, another friend of mine traded me 6 out of production married pair Arrow III MU car kits (a total of 12 cars) for custom work.

This was the final push that drove me to model 1979.

With a trio of E44s supplementing my pair of E33s and with GG1s on the way,  modeling Conrail's freight operations hardly had any "hurdles" left in it.  It is now just a question of maybe one or two more GG1s.

At the same time,   the Arrow III kits brought my fleet up to 15 cars, instead of just the three I had already owned ( I currently have one Arrow III on the way for a grand total of 16).   These kits were consistent with the 1970s and 80s,  but not so much the modern day.  That is surely enough to represent a few commuter trains in an operational "Cycle".  

Amtrak was already well covered in the 1970s for the NEC, with GG1s, E60s, and Metroliners (bachmann, and now Walthers) being reasonably available.

All of this made modeling the NEC in 1979 a now reasonable proposition, and allowed me to model conrail and freight operations more directly.  

I'm currently researching just where on the NEC I want to model, but I'm thinking North Jersey between Metropark and Waverly Yard.  I don't plan to model it all, just bits and pieces in a sectional set up that can "grow".  

On my Current small layout, I'm already erecting catenary to get some practice electrifying.  They are similar in design and appearance to Andy Rubbo's catenary, as i'm using his protocol as outlined in old issues of "the Keystone Modeler",  with some inspiration also from Bill Kachel's catenary PDF. 

I Blame Casey

Not being from around here, that is not North America, my influences come from the media, and the fact that my favourite Uncle drove for the Toronto metro. As a result I have modelled North American Railroads on and off over the years as my fancy takes me.

So first love, New York Central, followed by the South Shore. Then a big break back to British outline then back to Southern Pacific and the Petaluma & Santa Rosa Railroad. Another break for British, and now back to the North Shore Line. Also like other American Railroads, but can't model them all.