Some have asked, what is the origin of your town names on your layout? My belief is that most people, in naming locations on their layout, choose names with personal meaning that have a story behind them. I am no different.
Donna Pass and Laskey refer to the very dear lady, who takes zero interest in the layout, but on the other hand is very forgiving and understanding about my own interest in it and has never questioned anything about the budget or the space.
Midland is a name I’ve had since I was 14 years old. The family was driving west to Houston on a vacation, on US 90 traveling through Southwest Louisiana. This highway pretty much paralleled the T&NO over most of its route. Following the railroad through the prairie country, we came upon an abandoned wood depot in the settlement of Midland. It had once been an important branch line juncture and was still active then but barely. The depot, in the middle of nowhere, was beautiful and run-down and seized my imagination very hard. I immediately named my layout the Midland Western, a name that has stayed with me through all these years and I will never let it go. On the same trip the next year, the depot was gone. I cried for it, but it will always be memorialized on any layout I have.
The name Thunder Grove came a couple of years later, also in an instantaneous flash. One of my railroad pals and I, we were 15 or 16 at the time, decided to spend the day out along the T&NO main line just west of town near the interlocking tower called West Tower. We had brought sandwiches and went to cool off and eat lunch in a little grove of willow trees across the road from the tower. We never found out what had actually happened, but suddenly the ground shook insanely, yet silently, like a large earthquake. It was actually pretty scary, but in that very moment that place became known forever more as Thunder Grove.
West Tower ca 1962. Thunder Grove is directly behind the tower in the photo, across the road. Everything is gone now, except the main line.
My layout dead-ends south of Midland in what appears to be the remnants of a line that once went further. Way back in the same golden high school days, my pal and I were talking about some rock formation scenery that we saw in some magazine layout photos of some guy’s mountain railroad. He said that he really liked that crumbly rock. In an instant, I said, “ that sounds like a town name.” And from that moment on, Crumblyrock was the old terminus of the Midland Western on a part of the line that was abandoned years before. One day, though, my road will actually reach Crumblyrock.
My friend also was talking about something that looked good on some layout somewhere and said that it “fits well.” Immediately I said, that sounds like a guy’s name. And from that moment on, Fitzwell was a guy who lived over in Crumblyrock.
I hope that you all don’t mind me telling those little stories. Those names go back to my very beginning as a serious modeler and transport me back to those golden days in memory. They will always live on, on any layout I ever have.
