The premise of the Erie, as a railroad alternative to the Erie Canal. Especially notable because its original terminus just happens to interchange with your railroad…
The counterpart for the stillborn Philadelphia and Erie would be Great Lakes, Susquehanna and Delaware.
Look at the ‘fifth system’ alternatives in the early-to-mid Twenties, as Federal Control ended and railroads in Canada and Britain were massively recombined. One logical combination was DL&W to NKP as a fast bridge route…
All too true! The histories of my favorites–Frisco and MoPac–are littered with just the elements you mean. That messiness gave me much room to work without getting too far away from plausibility.
Exactly! Some people want to mess with history, trying to ‘clean it up’ for whatever reasons. We get to play with it because we have imaginations and are thrilled to use them!
Kudos times a gazillion, for everyone who has written up, at least in their own thoughts, a history for their railroad.
When I got out of the Navy I floundered around for a bit, while deciding what to make for a career. A thoughtful friend suggested that I take a look around the environment I had created for myself, and take cues from what I’d put there.
The thing I was most proud of, of all my possessions, was the library I had assembled. Therein lay my answer. It was loaded first, with history books. Then railroad and woodworking volumes. I ended up with a BA in history and a Master of Science in historic preservation, courtesy of my veterans’ benefits. I specifically chose to pursue a master of science degree, instead of a master of arts, which is the degree far more common, because I wanted to know more than architecture, mindful of the preeminence of the word ‘historic’ in my chosen career path.
Not once in all my ten Navy years, which I began as a Machinist’s Mate in the Nuclear Power Program, did I ever imagine my military career training would be of any use afterward since I’d already decided, like so many Navy ‘nukes,’ that I would never work at a corporation-owned reactor. But a Machinist’s Mate of any type is basically a steam engineer. After working on a couple of 1:1 scale locomotives I knew I’d found my calling.
Following that path led me to a lot of incredible experiences, not a few of them in the form of books. If anyone has any interest at all, in growing your understanding of the significance of the arrival of railroads in every environment across the United States, I strongly urge you to find and enjoy “Metropolitan Corridor,” a brilliant book by John Stilgoe. It explains the impact of what really began and quickly proved itself to be the dominant urban behemoth - the railroad - that stretched itself into thousands of small rural towns and villages, completely changing the life and lifeways of everyone it touched.
Every time I see a railroad or any vestige of one, now I understand the once omnipresent impact it brought wherever it went and often far beyond. We are the country we are because railroads.
There’s another reason I so enjoy being a model railroader and that touches greatly on the deep impact of historic preservation. A creation the size of our nation’s railroads, plus everything associated with them, could not but leave in its wake a huge volume of Americana in the form of buildings, skill sets, careers, physical pathways from cities to hillsides and valleys and more.
Every model railroad is, whether or not we think of it that way, an act of preserving some of the most important aspects of our national heritage and patrimony. If you’re freelancing, you’re still working with things in your mind that resulted from a lifetime of sucking up and reimagining the impressions of the environment around you. If you model a prototype, how many instances can we each remember of someone purposefully recreating a scene that is no longer there in real life?
While obtaining my preservation master’s degree at the University of Vermont I had the rewarding experience of working at - and on - the preservation program’s “Visual Laboratory,” a model of Burlington, Vermont (where the university is) that can be easily adapted by adding or removing individual sites, structures and objects to accurately depict the city throughout its history. It can even serve to depict the city as it has changed over time, and more, suggesting possible outcomes for future development and change. When it was first created it was done in a scale close enough to our HO scale, possibly because so much modeling material was already available in that scale off the shelf. But our task as grad students was to flesh it out with detailed, accurate reproductions of historic stuff.
Isn’t that exactly what we do with our railroads?
One reason, probably the major one, why I love model railroading so very much is because it is the place where so many of my interests and skills meet. How utterly lucky I am!
Great back story! Now that helps me with my own back story with my semi fictional Rhinebeck and Connecticut Railroad. Helps me explain all the different road names on the rolling stock etc.
Al
My own railroad has a long backstory; here’s one of the highlights.
Once upon a time, the Lionel Lines owned steam locomotives. Many steam locomotives. However, the Lionel Lines also had some diesel locomotives and wanted to replace the steam locomotives with all diesels. Now, the Executives had already made a Corporate Rule: Thou Shalt Not Scrap a Diesel Due to Old Age Whatsoever. So, they went off to EMD to purchase several thousand GP18s. They were to have the same road numbers as the steamers they were replacing. However, after the order was accepted, the Lionel Lines went plain and simple bankrupt. Some idiot had recorded that all the diesels had replaced the steamers, the problem being that not a single GP18 had arrived. And, although the Lionel Lines was ressurected and then merged with the remnants of the Marlines, the Executives of today’s Lionel & Marx Railroad still cannot believe their eyes and therefore believe that all the locomotives of the L&M are diesels. Therefore, no steam locomotives have been scrapped (excepting accidents) and they are still hauling freight all over the L&M.
There’s plenty of other stories (many of which are more specific to the Lignite Subdivision), such as how the 8813 was purchased for $80 (at a bar), how the 9449 ran away with oil tankers (and nothing came of it), and how the 1110 was wrecked (and rebuilt).
My railroad(s) have a loooooong backstory 
The main backstory - The Iowa Central Railroad was originally founded on March 5th, 1976, as the Iowa Central Railway From the merger of the Des Moines Eastern Central Railway [DMEC] (Founded May 1st, 1895), Norwalk Central Railway [NCRX] (Founded November 22nd, 1949), and the Fort Dodge & Western Railway [FDWR] (Founded January 10th, 1919), In 1978, the IACR purchased the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific [CRIP] or Rock Island railroad for $1.5 Billion, in 1992, The Iowa Central Railway purchased the Chicago & NorthWestern [CNW] for $1.8 billion, After that the IACR became the largest MidWestern Class I Railway, in 2002 the CSX proposed a Merger with the IACR and subsidiaries, in 2005 the CSXT-IACR merger was approved by the NTSB and made the IACR the largest Eastern-MidWestern Railroad, After the merger the railroad became known as the Atlantic & MidWestern Railroad [AMWR] (Founded June 8th, 2005), in 2011 the AMWR changed its name back to IACR after the $2.5 Billion dollar purchase of Grupo Mexico Corp. (Owns Ferromex, Ferrosur, FEC and others) and acquired the Canadian Pacific for $2.5 Billion in 2015 making it the first transcontinental railroad, In 2022 the IACR announced plans to start MidTrans a passenger cooperation running on IACR trackage connecting the US, Canada and Mexico.
Interesting things that happened on the IACR
UPDATED!