For me, it most certainly is. It takes me back to my youth which in my case was the 1950s. Everything seemed so simple back then and this is when I fell in love with trains. This is why I chose the transition era to model. One of my fondest memories was a Christmas train trip in 1959 from our home in Omaha to my grandparents in Chicago on the Burlington. After Christmas, we took a side trip to visit my Dad’s relatives in Milwaukee on the old North Shore.
I have few memories of prototype steam in action but the electric trains of that era were almost all steam. I do remember as we left Burlington Station in Omaha passing a steam loco parked on a siding and my mother telling me that steam engines were a thing of the past. I wonder if that steam engine was the 4013 Big Boy which has been on display in Omaha for a long time. I do remember a little earlier than that we took a summer car vacation to Chicago and from the highway we could see in the distance a short train being pulled by a steam loco. I have no idea what railroad this could have been on.
Most of my memories of real railroading in those days were of diesels and F-units were the king. I remember many an occasion of sitting at the grade crossing of the MoPac on California St, just west of Saddle Creek as a long string of A and B F-units pulled a train in front of us. Often the engineer would wave or blow his horn for us. To this day, when someone says diesel locomotive, the image of a dark blue F-unit appears in my head.
While 1950s railroading is my nostalgia trip and has dictated that era as the one I want to model, I realize for others their nostalgia trip might take them back to the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or even the 1990s. Some may even go back to decades earlier than the 1950s. I wonder how many modelers have chosen their era based on the railroading they remember from their youth.
It’s an interesting question, John, but for me the answer is definitely not. I find myself very much immersed in the present because it is a modeling magazine with the latest gizmos and models. That context doesn’t let it get into the realm of nostalgia when I am looking through the various pages. The manufacturers’ names and the product reviews, the announcements of new products…they really get in the way. Yet, I don’t for a minute expect otherwise, and am not complaining. MR is precisely the tool I use it for.
Classic Trains, on the other hand, whizzes me back decades right there in my armchair. That magazine is one of my great delights and I look forward to it very much each quarter. The photos are a nice mix of the thematic black and white, but there is lots of colour imagery as well. And the stories are so interesting. I can’t say enough about this fine publication. [:)]
Crandell, I agree wholeheartedly about Classic Trains. Unlike MR which I begin to look for around the end of each month, Classic Trains is always a pleasant surprise since I never remember which months it is supposed to arrive. Usually it arrives with the the latest MR edition. Even though my layout is freelanced, CT is and excellent source of information about the era I am modeling and even the articles they don’t pertain to the time period I am modeling are interesting.
I wouldn’t call it a nostalgia trip. I’m far too young to have witnessed firsthand any steam locomotive under its own power, save for in videos and at museums. However, I doubt that I’ll ever get any more modern (era-wise) than 1955 or so as I don’t like the utilitarian looking diesels of today. Um, what I mean is the first gen diesels have (for the most part) a certain grace of line that I can handle - not to mention that hooded units were generally run long hood forward, which is reminiscent of the steam power that they were replacing.
So I guess to sum things up, MR is more of a history lesson than a nostalgia trip…
Nostalgia? Not for me. I model the New Haven RR almost exclusively going back to the steam era, and I was born 6 years after the fall of the New Haven’s flag. The only steam engines I’ve ever seen running have been on tourist lines and museums like Steamtown and Edaville.
If I modeled the “trains of my youth” (1980’s), or at least the trains I remember, that would be Amtrak and MBTA F40PH’s, Amtubes and Bombardier coaches, and Conrail B23-7’s. I know there were FP10’s and Boise Budds rolling around, and Conrail had a variety of power, but that’s not what I remember. It would be a very boring layout as there was little freight and relatively few passenger trains. Ho-hum.
So I model what was before. When RR’s cared about their public image, back when RR’s had class and style, back when there used to be heavy industry around these parts that shipped by rail. Back when it was possible to see a locomotive lash up that had 4 different locos in it from more than two manufacturers. Back when passenger trains on the Shoreline had sleepers and observation cars. Back when there were different paint schemes on just about every train that went by. Sigh. Now that sounds like fun to watch.
I don’t have much interest in the modern day RR scene. I’d much rather read a NH 1944 freight symbol book than go sit in a car and watch for the one daily freight that ambles by.
For me no…Even tho’ I remember the last of main line steam,recall seeing Alcos,FMs,Baldwins,early EMDs, last of the “real” passenger trains etc I perfer to model the late 70s early 80s.
Why? Because that era was a colorful area and a era that marked a change in railroading.
The drab 50/60s with the drab boxcar brown or boxcar red freight cars,dirty faded yard buildings and trashy looking yards is why I gave up modeling the so called “Golden Era” of railroads.
I’m assuming that we’re talking about MR as in the hobby of Model Railroading and not MR as in Model Railroader Magazine, right?
Well, for me, my ‘formative’ as in post-pubescent years were in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, when steam was to all intents and purposes, dead on American rails. Yet I was able to remember as a pre-pubescent boy the thrill of steam during WWII when American railroads were pressing into service anything they could get hold of–including steam locomotives that would ordinarily have been sitting on the scrap-line. Now that for me, was thrilling (not the War itself, of course, but the traffic patterns that ensued because of it). I remember being in Truckee, CA on the SP Donner Pass line as a child and watching those HUGE cab-forwards thundering by every 20 minutes or so with long freight, passenger or military trains, all of the eastbound trains pausing to pick up a helper for the trip up Donner Pass (and riding a couple, because my great-Uncle and namesake Tom was a fireman on the Truckee-Norden helpers). Truckee just THUNDERED in those few years, and it remained an indelible memory in my mind. Heck, I didn’t even know that other articulateds on other railroads ran cab-BACKWARD until I was about ten, LOL! And that was watching Rio Grande 2-8-8-2’s run off their last mileage on a trip to Colorado.
So, my Rio Grande Yuba River Sub is set during the 1940’s when steam–almost any kind–was still king. Nostalgia? A quest for my lost childhood? Actually, I don’t think so. It’s more ‘mechanical’ than anything–all those neat moving parts. And all those fancy ‘accessories’ that made a steam locomotive move, being pretty much exposed on the boiler itself–the Feed-water heater, the air pumps–it’s mostly all there for you to watch and listen to (if you’re into sound), but those big wheels and all of those rods–hey, even if they
I suppose I model the WC after memories. But really, I don’t remember much of the WC. I would of loved to see SD45s and F45s. My trips to the Stevens Point yard when I was little where slim to none. And then, my father never thought of taking pictures. No one knew that the WC would be gone in a few years. At the time, I was more concerned running my WC GP9/7 around a loop of track in my basement, than getting out and getting the WC while they where still around. In later years I do remember WC 2500 switching around here. Or WC 7526 and 6005 lead a north bound. The WC was every thing to me then. Now, I’m really recreating memories I never had.
But If I where to model it just off of memories, it’d probably be the WC/CN era. I quite fondly remember seeing 3 shining CN units setting out a car in Merrill. Basically I model WC because that was the only railroad I was quite truly exposed to.
I currently model the late, great Pennsylvania Railroad in 1956. But I was born in 1974. So it’s not first-hand nostalgia.
It’s more based on nostalgia for my annual trips with my dad to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania. I always tried to imagine what those giant fire-breathing beasts must have looked like out in the Pennsylvania hills hauling trains at speed instead of sitting cold and dead under artificial light. My grandfather told me a story about a trip to Pittsburgh behind triple-headed K4s around Horseshoe Curve.
So my layout is “nostalgic” for an era I never knew. My choice of a segment for the PRR (the Middle Division) is the segment, under Conrail, that I would parellel between Harrisburg and State College while I attended Penn State in the 90s. So, I guess that’s a wee bit nostalgic too.
But the big “nostalgia trip” for me has been my very recent purchase of some Conrail and Penn Central equipment. Those are the trains of my “wonder years.”
I was too young to really understand what had happened to railroading in the years just before my birth. Conrail came in 1976, and although Amtrak had taken over the Philly-Harrisburg line, my dad would still refer to it as either the Pennsy or Penn Central. He explaind that Penn Central had gone out of business and taken his beloved Reading RR with it… He explained to me that the black Amtrak GG1s I was seeing had been built by the mighty Pennsylvania.
But the enormity of the agony through which Northeastern railroading was passing in my very early life was completely lost on me. All I knew was that you could see diesels of every color in a single train, and that people trains were called Amtrak. I understood that the blue diesels were the new railroad, Conrail, and that Conrail would never be what the Pennsy was. Who’d have thought then that Conrail would have been so succe
Yes, and I listen to Oldies radio stations, too. There was a feeling about the 50’s and 60’s which I yearn for. It’s totally idealistic. I don’t model the fear of nuclear war, or the hopelessness of being diagnosed with cancer, or the sooty polution from almost everything. I only think of the good parts.
Yeah, it’s that, but then there’s also the relative ease of modelling with short engines like F7’s and GP-9’s, 40-foot cars and 18-inch curves.
It is for me also John, I lived 2 miles north of the former B&A main line from Worcester to Albany, and the big Berkshires pulling 70 car drags up over the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. I received my first train set ( Lionel) in 1947, and that got me started. When we went to my Grandparents home in Oxford, Ma, we went by bus, and many times we raced the steam locomotives along the Worcester to Webster branch line. As a boy of 4, I can remember the big locomotives on this same branch line racing along the tracks just below by Grandparents farm, an awesome sight at age 4, and a little frightening too.
I also listen to old time radio shows from time to time…for instance, how many people have the 1938 Lone Ranger radio show called " The Comanche Kid "? I do, on my PC. My grandkids get such a bang out of listening to it. As I told them, in our days of radio, you had to “imagine” the scenes in your mind, and I think that is why we are more creative John.
Ahh, to go back for just one day and sit along the tracks and watch those big Berks roll past.
Model railroading is definitely a nostalgia trip for me. I had my first taste of railfanning back in 1974, so that is the year I model in HO scale. There were still a lot of ‘first generation’ diesels operating back then, so 90 percent of my loco fleet consists of 1940s and 1950s era diesels in more ‘modern’ paint schemes.
WC? I’m afraid I predate the all-Diesel resurection of that old shield! My family moved to Waukesha, WI, in 1953, when I was 13, and the Soo Line’s main line passed through town about six blocks from our new home. I sat on my bike and watched many through freights rumble by with the Soo’s elegant maroon and DuLux Gold livery–usually in what the model rails call a “lashup” of EMD F units, Geeps, and square-nosed Alco FAs. I was fascinated by the consists of those drags, which had boxcars of many sizes–including heights!–lots of hoppers, gons, and both types of tank cars, fraamed and frameless. (Those old frameless jobs always reminded me of little old ladies rushing through mud puddles while holding their skirt hems up, as the frameless tank cars had the walkways suspended from the tank instead of the mounted on the frame.) And bringing up the rear was always one of the Soo’s antique “3-and 1”-window crummies. The famous Waukesha engine facility was a few blocks north of the crossing (Arcadian Avenue/Highway 59), with its 5-stall roundhouse and air-powered turntable. I say “famous” because MR did a photo story on it back in the '50s.
Those were the days when a great many of Waukesha’s (and other cities’/villages’) industries were serviced by rail, so I often watched the little Cummins-engined EMD switcher shuffle cars in and out of the lumber yards, oil distributers (the only coal dealer at that date was on the Northwestern, which crossed the Soo almost on top of Grand Avenue–and International Harvester, Oliver Industries, etc. (MR later did a story on that Soo/Northwestern crossing.) Railroading was really visible in those days! (And a lot of kids moved from Lionel and American Flyer into scale model railroading; where are our new modelers coming from these days?)