Souces of Inspiration

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

Louis Armstrong once said on inspiration “Forget about inspiration, give me a deadline!”. However, since most of us have no deadline on our model railroads, that means we must rely on inspiration to decide what railroad(s) to model, or if we want to freelance/proto-freelance or not. So, with that…

…my question is this: How did all of you decide what you wanted to model? Back stories, memories, loyalties, whatever, please share! Everything is welcome! For instance, I decide to build a steel mill after searching for other ideas simply because I thought the unique buildings and rolling stock looked cool, in addition to the large amount of operation with a minimal number of spurs and sidings.

How about the rest of you out there?

Steamfreightboy

2

My railroad is still in the planning stages. The location is my former home town Wheeling, WV. The Wheeling and Lake Erie, Pennsy, and B&O met in Wheeling. The B&O then went South all the way to Kenova on the East side of the Ohio river. I have chosen to take a section of the line from Wheeling, to Moundsville which is less than 20 miles and model it the way it might have been. The area hosted a steel mill in Benwood as well as a great many manufacturing industries as well as coal mines, power plants, chemical plants, Foundries, tobacco plants, glass factories etc.

In my case I will fabricate some history so the Virginian merged with the W&LE and gained control of the wheeling terminal railroad and the Ohio River line in exchange for not opposing the B&O C&O merger. My Railroad will have connections with Pittsburgh, Pa and the Atlantic Ocean as well a DC via the RF&P. In Ohio it will serve Cleveland, Toledo, Huron, Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown as principal cities. The connection with the Virginian will be from Deepwater to Parkersburg WV and will continue the electrification that existed from there through Virginia. The railroad will serve 4 states although only a small part of PA, the other three will be OH, WV and VA, which should allow for a profitable railroad. The time will be the fall of 1959 with most of the road dieselized and a few remaining steamers running out their lives along the Ohio River line and on to PA and Ohio.

FM, ALCO and EMD will be featured on the layout as will super power steam and some usra hvy 2-8-2s that were still able to be maintained. Guest power via trackage rights from the pennsy and B&O will also make appearances.

3

How did I decide what to model? Well I was up in Northern Ontario doing some fishing. I’m sitting in my boat having a beer (I wasn’t driving) when I heard this loud noise coming our way. It was a Ontario Northland mixed train and I thought it was the coolest looking thing. It was blasting through the trees and birds and wildlife were running for their lives, lol. The fish too. That sold me on the ONR as the basis of my railway.

4

Having grown up in northern FL for the first 21 years of my life, the New York Central was nowhere near me to have any sort of influence. I can pretty much blame my initial interest in the NYC solely on an initial trip to an LHS (around Christmas 2002), where I picked out an Athearn Genesis NYC 2-8-2 Mike. Within a short time I had also picked up a Proto 2000 NYC S1 switcher off eBay.

Over time I discovered that the NYC had a VERY strong presence here in the NE Ohio area. Collinwood yard is only 4 or 5 miles down the hill from my house. The more I researched; the more interested I got in the historic RR.

I’ve chosen to model a fictitious but prototypical NYC freight house and steam/diesel servicing center during the early 40s because I like:

  1. Steam and early diesel
  2. Freight (and the variety of cars)
  3. Learning the nuts and bolts of railroading and how they worked
  4. Switchers - They were the backbone of the RRs

Tom

5

When I was a boy, I loved the look of the iron ore pit near Crosy. I decided to model it as my first layout. I never got that done, but modeling what I liked and knew was a principle

I then learned of John Allen and his use of whimsy to be a parable of what was important to him.

When I started this layout on my 70th birthday I kept those two principles. Thus the layout is called the “Wormhole and Time Warp Division” of the “Sublime to RedikulusRailroad”. This reflects the premise to model my memories of places I have been and things I have done. It is a model of the prototype which is my life.

There are those who would say it is not a model railroad, but a model of life with a railroad in it. Others would say is is just a string of dioramas. They would all be correct…

So I thank John Allen, Capt Kirk and Sigmund Frued for the best times of my life. And I can run a train through them any time I wish.

6

For me, when I discovered shays I was hooked on them. I was about 13 and it was sort of a “What is that? What’s it for? How does it work?” moment. Followed with “That is SO cool!”

So, I built a 1930s era logging layout - it seemed like logical surroundings for class A (two cylinder/two truck) shays.

After a while, the logging theme seemed a little limiting, so I added a few small industries and towns. Now I have some small rod-driven locomotives to go with my beloved shays, and they all share duty. Yes, once in a while even the local passenger train is dragged up the hill by a little shay; that’s how the Blackwater “cannonball” got its name - a sarcastic and impatient customer called it the cannonball and it stuck.

Really, my inspiration comes from whatever is most interesting to me at the time.

7

I grew up in Kalispell, MT and loved watching GN’s freights thundering down the valley off Marias Pass with upwards of 12 F units on 'em. A coupla trips on the Builder, 1955 and 56 cemented my love of the GN. I remember riding the Mountain series obs, fascinated with the semaphore operation and talking with the Porter. In '56, the full length dome became my home. Mom and dad new where I would be and were never concerned. Dad bought me my first Lionel set when I was 5, a 6-8-6 freight. I still have it for nostalgia purposes.

My modeling was picqued by John Allen and the G&D book published by Linn Wescott. Also, I met Don Mitchell who showed me a batch of slides on the G&D that he took. Apparently those were the last pix of the G&D.

I reckon I have been a devoted model railroader since 5 with a major interest in lumber ops. Dad owned 2 lumber mills, one in Kalispell and one in Kemmerer, WY. I loved watching the 40’ boxcars being loaded one stick at a time as boards came off the planer mill into the boxcars where two men stacked 'em up.[C):-)]

8

I’ve always loved trains. As a small child I loved seeing the green and gorgeous Southern Railway PS4 in the Smithsonian but always I loved my Thomas the Tank Engine books and the original TV-series with Ringo Starr.

My inspiration to model the N&W had been thanks to O. Winston Link’s photography though I always had a soft-spot for the N&W as I’m a Virginian at heart. I don’t have a set time and place, so right now I am acquiring, casually, pieces of the N&W in HO-scale.

Alvie

9

Originally, and now that is decades ago…

I was a youngster wanting to run/ model what I was seeing trackside.

Living in Chicago, narrowed that down to … nearly everthing…

As time passed: prototype standardization, and mergers, made railroading less interesting to me.

Solution: I halted the advancing years from ever occurring on my model railroad.

So it’s generally: Hill Lines, before Burlington Northern (1960’s) to Conrail (1976) to about 1985.

I’ll run and model whatever I want, when I want…

By the way… I enjoy train videos for more of that ’ vintage vibe ’ !

The 25 year time-frame does provide all the inspiration and focus that I require.

10

[:)]

11

My railroad went without a name for several years as I decided where it was to run. Then suddenly, I knew it had to be the East Central Indiana. Why? Because it ran down the eastern side of Indiana from Anderson to Westport. After that it was almost anticlimactic to pick the colors and logo and have a few items that were backdated.

Now, I have moved the railroad a little backward in time to be able to run NYC equipment.

http://madisonrails.railfan.net/eci/eci_new.html

12

A few things for me. Steve King’s book Clinchfield Country. Model railroads - Virginian and Ohio, Allegheny Midland, Ohio Southern, Cat Mountain and Santa Fe. And the group of layouts I get to operate on in our round robin group and around the country. All great inspirations for me.

13

I started modeling the Penn Central as that was what I saw running thru my town. Even after moving to another town where the Chessie System was the only railroad there, I continued to model the PC. A December issue of RMC in the late 70’s changed my course, though not immediately. The cover photo had a beautifully detailed Burlington E unit in a winter scene and the hook was set to change railroads. However, it took over a decade and happened when the Air Force brought me to Nebraska. I contacted a couple of folks that had knowledge of the Q and started changing my locos and rolling stock. The first change was trading an Atlas SD-35 Penn Central shell for a CB&Q SD-24 shell, it fit perfectly on the chassis and I haven’t looked back since. I don’t have a layout yet but stay fairly active in Free-mo. My modules are based on prototype locations along the Burlington and with the size of the layouts we build, I get to see freights pulled by early GPs and SDs in the Blackbird scheme or newer locos in the Chinese Red and Grey scheme and of course stainless steel passenger cars pulled by the same silver E units that inspired me in the first place.

Ricky Keil

14

I spent four decades (mostly without a layout) researching and planning to model the Pennsylvania Railroad - acquired rolling stock, books, tons of detail parts, and a file of ideas. The paralysis was 1) what part and what era to model and 2) how to get all that lumber and plywood home and down the basement steps!

Then in 1995 within a matter of a few weeks a combination of events totally changed everything. David Barrow’s “domino” articles appeared in MR, I discovered good quality plywood 2’x4’ “handi-panels” at a big box hardware store that i could (and did) fit in the trunk of my sedan, a friend sold me the track and cork roadbed from his newly built but dismantled layout, and most important of all, LifeLike P2K came out with a Chicago & North Western switcher in the very numbers that I used to see switching the industries of my old home town of South Milwaukee WI.

Suddenly all the paralysis about benchwork and era and layout plan was totally gone. And the moment I saw that engine everything PRR was swept out of my mind and all I wanted to do was recreate the scenes of railfanning that i remembered from my teens. And that is what I have been doing ever since.

Dave Nelson

15

It’s all right here…

Lee

16

I guess you could call my journey “Themes in Search of a Prototype”.

When I headed west for my 1st assignment out of college at Coos Bay, Oregon, it was my 1st time west of the Mississippi except for a backpack trip in the Sierras. I was smitten by the beauty of the Blue Mtn area as we drove across Oregon. And the names - John Day River, Picture Gorge, Tillamook Head, and so on. I became determined to locate my fictional prototype in Oregon, going east across the state from Tillamook.

Many years later, I was enroute to Alaska from North Carolina. We stopped in Durango and rode the D&S. While in Alaska, I explored the WP&Y and the Klondike country around Dawson City (Klondike Mining Railway). I was smitten with narrow gauge. I wanted to use Chuck Yungkurth’s famous Gum Stump & Snowshoe as a basis for my narrow gauge branch. I envisioned the lower terminal as an interchange with the standard gauge.

Then a move to Northern California and camping trips along the coast exposed me to the world of dog hole schooners and lumbering operations. The Caspar, and Union Lumber ops at Noyo and Ft Bragg became the new inspiration for my narrow gauge line (even those were standard gauge for the most part). The lower terminal on the switchbacks would work very well as the wharf at a dog hole port. But I wanted the other end of the line to extend beyond just logging to an interchange with my fictional Picture Gorge & Western, to generate general freight service for the region. The vision would end up being similar to the NWP. The only issue was that the Tillamook and east standard gauge was way too far away from Northern California.

I discovered the real Oregon Pacific and Col Hogg - who had a vision remarkably similar to my Picture Gorge & Western. I decided to base the PG&W on the Oregon Pacific, excepting that PG&W’s visionary had made the wiser choice of Coos Bay entra

17

Well, I grew up in the California Sierra Nevada around SP’s Donner Pass line during WWII and the subsequent Steam’s Last Hours. The railroad itself fascinated me–the spectacular scenery, the sections of non-parallel double trackage, trains every thirty minutes or so, and during the summer and fall, those long strings of PFE reefer extras wheeled by two and sometimes three of the big Cab-forwards (I was almost twelve before I realized that most articulateds ran with the cab in BACK, LOL!).

As I grew older, I still kept my love of steam, but fell hopelessly in love with the standard-gauge steam of the Rio Grande against the backdrop of the spectacular Colorado Rockies. Mind you, I never saw one of them in action, nor had I visited Colorado (that came much later), but there was something incredibly fascinating about a relatively smallish (2-state) mountain railroad fielding such enormous and handsome steam power.

So, when I decided to put in my garage empire, I changed history quite a bit, had the Rio Grande extending itself to California via the Yuba River watershed (somehow completely ignoring the fact that it already ‘extended’ itself to California via the Feather River and the Western Pacific, LOL!). Now I had my Rio Grande steamers in the Sierra. I immediately gave trackage rights to SP so I could run my cab-forwards, and designed the MR with SP’s non-parallel double track a-la the area from Roseville to Colfax, CA.

And since I was modeling the WWII/Korean conflict era of the mid-forties to early 'fifties, I could ‘borrow’ as much motive power as I wanted from other railroads as I saw fit (C&S, GN, MIssabe, etc.).

And there it is, my Yuba River Sub, with equal parts Rio Grande and SP and lots and lots of ‘loaners.’

It’s fun. I don’t know whether you’d call it “Free-lance”, “Proto-lance” or just plain “Fantasy” (and frankly I don’t much care), but it’s a fascinating never-ending project.&nb

18

Well my first layout followed a plan in the back of Track Planning for Realistic Operation by John Armstrong 1st ed. Then I decided I liked the Belpaire fireboxes on the PRR so I followed that for a while. Eventually, I decided that I preferred a short line and was influenced by George Hilton’s book The Ma & Pa. So that’s what I’m following on the present layout currently under construction. Along the way I’ve been interested in the WWF, but haven’t decided how to fit that in yet.

But really, I just like model trains.

Enjoy

Paul

19

My Dad took me to a train show in Hobokon, NY when I was fairly little and then we had Lionel layout in the basement. After several trips on the 20th Century Limited and the Broadway Limited, I have always been interested in trains and model train since that time.

I just recently started my first layout after many years and having great fun with the Pueblo, Colorado City & La Veta Railroad, my 4X6 HO Empire.

20

When I decided to get back into model railroading the trains and the industries in the local area were my inspiration for the Layout.

The industries selected so far are a grain mill, pasta plant, small oil distributor, and soon a sand mine. The prototype mill and pasta plant are unique in that they are built side by side. The mill pipes its flour directly to the pasta plant. It also ships flour by rail to other customers. The operation is so large it has it’s own switcher to move the grain cars. As for the oil plant my family operated one for two generations.

The sand mine which has been around forever is served by a local short line, the Winchester & Western. The W & W goes back to the early 19th. century. Unimin Corporation some years ago bought the sand mine and ended up owning the W&W as the railroad’s only customer was the mine.

In addition to modeling the W&W, the B&O built a main line here before the Civil War. The B&O obsorbed the C&O so there are Chessies on my layout as well and CSX is the sucessor to the B&O.

While the B&O was on the East side of town the PRR was on the West until the 1950’s. A PRR engine or two have some how found their way on to my track from time to time, however.

Happy RailRoading

Bob

There are so many other industries served by CSX or the W&W I may add one or two more depending on space.