I paid a visit to Mike’s Train House (MTH) with a couple of buddies the week after the East Penn meet; the main raison d’etre for the visit was the recording of station stops for various upcoming projects (you may, in fact, hear my dulcet tones on their upcoming Pittsburgh Railways and Red Arrow Brills).
Anyhoo, since MTH makes CTA 6000 series subway cars, and since SEPTA ran same on the P&W for awhile:
http://www.davesrailpix.com/pw/htm/pw145.htm
http://www.davesrailpix.com/pw/htm/pw161.htm
http://world.nycsubway.org/perl/show?52152
http://world.nycsubway.org/perl/show?52155
et cetera, I put together a 50 pic or so slideshow for Mark Hipp, VP for production, showing how MTH could put a new product on the street with virtually no tooling costs.
Purists need not panic at the fact that the MTH CTA cars are the flush-door models while the Norristown cars were the recessed-door models; I pointed out that little fact, and Mark assured me that, should they go ahead with the project, doing minor changes like that in the tooling would be fairly simple.
Anyhow, here’s hoping. I managed to chat briefly with Mike Wolf himself, and he seemed to like the concept as well. By the time I left, the guy in charge of research had copies of the pics I had brought, and I had recorded a set of station stops…just in case.
Anyhow, here’s hoping! If you like the idea, it wouldn’t hurt to drop MTH a line:
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