My railroad is a mix of Conrail and Amtrak set roughly the 80s to the present day (depending on my mood) but I’m flexible on the specific decade. And I’ll even do weird stuff like let Thomas the Tank Engine pull the Lakeshore Limited, or run the German DB Discocar, or run a Shinkanssen down the Northeast Corridor, lol.
Anyway, I just bought a Conrail AC4400CW that was listed as “FANTASY.”
This is considered a workhorse locomotive that is basically required on any modern era layout.
But what does “fantasy” mean?
Here is the exact text of the description on the site I bought it from:
HO ATHEARN 77665 AC4400CW NORFOLK SOUTHERN NS CONRAIL HERITAGE # 8098 FANTASY
I’m not aware the Norfolk Southern ever merged with Conrail, but then history isn’t my strong point, so please don’t anyone yell at me. I just like the locomotive when I saw it and it looked like a good fit for my layout. What’s going on?
A ‘fantasy’ scheme is one that was never applied to a real locomotive. The immediate example that came to my mind was a Milwaukee Road GG1, but there are many, many other examples. In this particular case, the ‘fantasy’ is Conrail paint on a locomotive built after the Conrail split-up.
This is different from a ‘heritage’ scheme, which is fantasy paint applied to all or part of a full-size locomotive (and which may then become a non-fantasy scheme on a model… do you see why?)
Sometimes a great deal of thought and care goes into the creation of fantasy schemes; I chuckle a bit when manufacturers have authentically-printed and sometimes carefully weathered fake schemes for popular railroads. I often go along with ‘representative paint schemes’ on locomotives or cars when they’re fun to watch, but as the price gets to hundreds (and in the case of Lionel thousands of dollars) for something only peripherally ‘authentic’, I begin to question the greater fools who indulge it.
Conrail was formed in the 1970s out of the remains of a number of northeastern US bankrupt (or near bankrupt) railroads. In 1999 it was privatized by being split up between CSX and Norfolk Southern.
As far as “fantasy”, this case is a bit more complicated. Norfolk Southern really did do a series of locomotives decorated to look like the railroads that had gone into it over the years, like the Southern, Jersey Central, Norfolk & Western, etc. One of those was a Conrail engine, No. 8098.
However, the real 8098 is a General Electric ES44AC. Your model is an older GE engine, an AC4400CW. However, they don’t really look that different overall; close enough Athearn was OK with doing the engine you have…more what we’d call a “foobie” - a ‘fake’ but pretty close to the original.