Back in the Jurassic, on the high school layout, I was lucky to have about 20 freight cars, some plastic, some built from wood kits. I packed away everything at 18 years. I moved around for a good many years, carrying that stuff around poorly packed, slowly getting damaged.. it all fell by the wayside eventually except for a couple of exceptions that were hidden away. Everything except the exceptions that were hidden were destroyed in a fire about 20 years ago.
I started modeling again about the year 2007, with all new equipment and rolling stock. Looking through a couple of boxes of stuff I had left, I found two heavily beaten up survivors from the old days. I restored them to operation and put them on the layout. But they were so evocative of the golden days of yore that I decided I was going to try to reconstitute as much of that early roster as I could with stand-in items.
Who else has created such a train out of nostalgia?
I’ll start with a car that actually rolled on the historical layout 60 years ago. It’s the only survivor that was actually on the rail back then.
I came close to ruining that car with the weathering job you see on it.
All it needed to roll was new couplers and trucks. The old trucks and couplers went inside the car, where they will always ride on my layout as a connection to the past.
The weathering job continued to aggravate me. So I tried to tone it down on one side with a terra-cotta tone art pencil. It came out great!
There’s only one problem. I can’t find it. It’s somewhere in my stuff and will turn up one day.
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Had stuff from the 80’s that I tried to bring back, but only the wooden buildings were successful. A fellow at church gave me some real old stuff, but the engines and cars were too far gone. Somethings are best left as memories.
I know that in the golden mist of memory a lot of our early stuff looks a lot better than it really was.
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This will be fun! Looking back I think practically all of my layouts have had at least a little bit of tribute on them. I’ll start with the one that grew over the 9 year span between Easter 1979 and the summer of 1988. I was 9 the first time I visited Walt Disney World and after returning home I was absolutely obsessed with creating a miniature world as exciting and wonderful as the one I had just left. Thus was born my first big layout.
That layout was disassembled to have room for relatives sleeping over on account of my high school graduation.
Then came the table around 5 years later.
There was the stern third of an Olympic class liner.
So many repainted locos wore the cab number 4070 over the years after I rode behind her in 1976.
In the bedroom more recently was my tribute to Thailand layout I started after going there in 2005.
The tribute to the family road trips on the turnpike and all those “service plazas” where I ate so many Howard Johnson’s Frankfurters.
Lionel made this tribute piece and of course I had to have one since I went to the fair.
Of course I revisited my childhood dream and built bigger and better than I ever could have.
And you can say that my current Christmas layout is a tribute to the first one I ever had.
Wish I still had the box!
The layout under construction for the summer time is all about Cleveland and it’s railroads.
It’s safe to say I prefer to have items of personal significance on my layouts and in my collection.
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I think I get that 
I’ve already said it, but I should say it again, all of the serious prototype stuff we do, it’s fun or we wouldn’t do it, but I’m not sure if it’s as much fun as the three rail Lionel trains we had as a kid.
I still have Old Red.
Red has been the watchdog for every layout I’ve ever had since the Lionel when I was five. He was posing on my wood rack car here , but he actually rode in the Lionel gondola, right ahead of the hopper filled with Cheerios.
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Here’s my next heritage car. This one never ran on the original rail back in the Jurassic, it was a car that came out of some train set a kid had trashed. I saved it meaning to rehabilitate but never got around to it back then. It went in the same box of assorted stuff including the Santa Fe boxcar shown above, and along with everything else, it went to sleep for 41 years.
When I reactivated as a model railroader back in 2007, by accident I found the forgotten box of stuff that had made it through 41 years without being hit by a flood or a fire that I suffered in the interim. The flat car was in there, still in it it’s original Tyco dayglo yellow Union Pacific scheme with shocking electric red lettering, you could’ve used that thing instead of a flashlight at night.
The thing about those Tyco cars back then was that while they had cheesy paint schemes, for toys they were really solidly built with a complete diecast Zamac floor and under frame that really had a lot of weight and made those cars track really well. This one was no exception. The only thing wrong with it was the truck mounted couplers and the paint job. I corrected those shortcomings, decaled it for my home road, and Voila, instant nostalgia in the form of an actual operating car that has really never left my layout in all of these 19 years I’ve had a meaningful HO scale layout.
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I forgot to mention that I also put A Line stirrups on the corners of this car along with probably a dozen other blue box type cars I had that got upgrades. Look at the photo and see how much it improved the appearance of this car, along with a scale brake wheel.
Diverging slightly for the moment, I’d like to show the similar treatment I did to several blue box type cars I had. New stirrups, new scale brake wheel, and a little ratchet down at the bottom of the brake rod. What a difference for about 15 or 20 minutes of attention. I did that work during my lunch hour at my job before I retired. Lunch only took about 15 minutes of the one hour, the rest of it was doing stuff like this.
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The next car is the first of the recently acquired stand-ins. It represents the first car beyond the HO train set that came before I was 13 years old. I saw this particular 1950’s Revell car on the used shelf at an LHS in Florida, it rang my nostalgia bell really hard, and I bought it. I’d say that this one started the motion towards acquiring replica stand-ins for very early cars I had in my youngest days.
I did a few things to the car. The yellow ends are a Missouri Pacific practice that signals to
switching crews that this car could be occupied. I don’t think I did a good job and I wish now that I had not done it. There was a cast on brake wheel on one end that I cut off, replaced with separately applied parts, and added a set of steps below the side doors there were extra parts from an Accurail kit. This car actually motivated me to create a maintenance of way train , which will be a later subject of discussion.
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All of my cars from 1960 were in a green carrying case I made in high school shop. During the past two years, most of them have had the trucks changed and Kadee couplers replaced the X2Fs. I can run them next to a Kadee car and 98% of the people watching the train won’t know the difference. The other 2% I don’t care about. It’s my railroad.
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Right on. No one really notices blue box cars mixed in with the Intermountains, except the rivet counters.
I suppose that I am a low level rivet counter. Although rivet counters in general drive me crazy. A post or two above I showed a boxcar on which I modified a couple of clunky details to be a little better. To my eye, it helped them blend in with the higher end cars with separately applied details which I bought for a while.
I am a rare model railroader in that sometime back I realized I had enough and even too much stuff, and basically quit buying, unless it was an absolutely over-the-top have-to-have kind of item. Of the first things I quit buying was expensive separately applied detailed cars. My small layout can only handle about 35 cars at one time, yet I I was trying to cycle three or 400 cars on and off the layout to run them all at one time or another. Plus, with periodic handling the cars on and off layout, some detail was always getting damaged or broken.
When I moved in 2021 I decided to go with a “when did I last operate this?” method for thinning my collection. Some things like the train set I’ve had all my life weren’t going to be sold but about 90% of everything else got eliminated. Now I have both the trains I love the most and the ability to build or buy new stuff for the new layouts. (Heavy on the building, that’s the most fun in my view 
)
I’m not going to sell anything, it’s too much trouble, there’s no one around here anywhere within 300 miles to buy it, and I’d never get much for it anyway.
I’m planning on leaving everything to my friend’s son. I’m getting ready to give him a bunch of it in advance that hasn’t seen the light of the day in several years..
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Here is the next heritage car:
It is a stand in for an identical car that was in my first HO train set, Lionel by RivaRossi. It turned up cheap on eBay so I acquired it and it has a honored place on my roster..
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A year after I got my Lionel HO set, I found that they were two cars. I really wanted to add to the set. One was a boxcar of any kind since most prototype freight trains had boxcars, and mine didn’t. The other was a better caboose than the four wheel bobber that came with the train set..
In early 1960, we took a family trip to Houston and I made my first visit of many to come to the G&G Model Shop. I was allowed to buy two cars. One was a Mantua Maine Central boxcar, the other was a Revell ATSF caboose which I correctly thought bore some resemblance to the Southern Pacific cabooses that always were spotted near the home town depot.
Here is the stand in for the boxcar, and Intermountain X29 car:
And here is the stand for the caboose, it was remarkable to find a completely intact one online, toy cars like this lived terrible lives until finding a quiet and dignified retirement home on my layout nearing age 70. All the caboose needed was new trucks and couplers.
As a side, I also got the yellow Union Pacific version of this caboose, because I remember seeing it all over the place back in the Jurassic and really liked it. It was more typical in that it came as a beat up shell that needed new ladders, smoke jack, handrails, and paint touchup as well as the new trucks and couplers. Both of those cars occasionally run sentimental trips on local freights.
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The next visit to the family in Houston of course incurred another trip to the G&G Model Shop. One of my acquisitions there was an Athearn pulpwood rack. Illinois Central is a very important road name for this car, but I just chose it quite by accident because I liked it. After that Christmas, I made a pulpwood load for that car by trimming limbs off of the Christmas tree as it went out of the house.
Here is the stand-in, an identical car off of eBay, with a Chooch pulpwood load.
I liked this car so much, I bought three more friends for it.
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MP Eagle Merchandise boxcar - Part one
This particular narrative will be a little long-winded, so please forgive me, but there’s a lot to say about this particular car, both model and prototype.
By the time I was a senior in high school and slipped out of model railroading, I suspect I had about 20 freight cars. I do not remember them all unfortunately, they all were traded off or burned up in a fire I had in the ensuing years. Some stand out, though, in the golden mists of memory, and those I was able to recapture for my heritage Train.
One of them that really always seized my imagination is the blue and gray Missouri Pacific Eagle Merchandise boxcar. In real life, there were never really that many of them, and they were never interchanged off of the MP or the subsidiary Texas & Pacific. In comparison, there have been hundreds of versions of this car offered as models in every scale, and they run on every railroad in the universe, which they never did in real life.
In all the years I lived in New Iberia and often went past that Missouri Pacific freight house with its team track and house track, I only ever saw one of these cars once. It was in the early Lionel train set days, and Lionel had one of these cars in their catalogue as I recall. I really wanted one, but of course never got it. I thought that the red buzz saw herald in particular was very beautiful. By that time, the MP had repainted most of their depots white and an applied a large sheet metal red buzz saw to the walls.
It didn’t take me long as a teenage model railroader to discover the local Missouri Pacific branch line and all of its charm and advantages to Model Railroad replication. I bought an Athearn blue box kit car like this one as soon as I saw it at the G&G Model Shop.
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I started to write a long part two about this car, but it really diverges from the subject of the heritage car roster. I’ll probably start another discussion about the various other models at some point. Suffice it to say at this time that none of the models are the correct car body and none of them have a 100% correct paint scheme except for one that I can think of right now.
When my father enlisted in the Navy during WWII he rode that era’s version of the Southern Railway’s Crescent to boot camp in Bainbridge, MD. When I joined the Navy in 1976 much to my great surprise I ended up on a later version of the Crescent to Orlando. I’ve recreated both trains for my railroad, although era-fitting and specific equipment questions have been a bit fudged. Some of the sleepers, though, survived from one era to the other.
