I like to think I’m a pretty clever guy, but I have seemed to have hit a bit of a mental block…
I’m in the planning stages of putting together a large, freelanced, present day short line in the Pacific Northwest, yet I am having trouble coming up with a decent, creative name for it.
I want something that sounds rugged and robust, yet slightly quirky. For the life of me, I can’t come up with the right moniker.
Just looking for some ideas. Who knows…it might spark something back up inside of me.
If it helps, my main industries will be lumber and aggregate.
I really, really like incorporating at least one Native American or wildlife name into a railroad. Mine is the Moose Bay. The tribes in your area probably have great names that would go well with your proposed prototype.
Real-life railroads don’t generally do quirky. They are businesses and need to be regarded as such. For me, that’s why funny names or acronyms don’t work very well.
You may not be interested in realism, but if you are, Bob Warren undertook a survey of 100 railroad names and found that the majority (nearly 70%) had a geographical term in the name (Pacific, Atlantic, Central, Western, Eastern, etc.). 56% had a city name in the title, 29% a state name (of course, there were many combinations like New York Central). This article was in the Layout Design News LDN-13, April 1995, published by the Layout Design SIG.
So for realism, pick a city or state name and a geographic element … Chehalis Western and Portland & Western are two real-life PNW examples.
For quirky, it seems you already have lots of suggestions.
I live in Washington and, based on an old Northern Pacific/BN/BNSF route, have the following suggestion for you: Willapa Bay and Chehalis. These are two existing places with Chehalis being a connection point to the BNSF, and Willapa Bay being a large bay on the coast with former lumbering operations in the area. Your stated two main industries would fit in very well with the region. Hope this helps.
Well being fictional you can always go wih the city to city rout and there are alot of cities to choose from that have native american names to them up there. (I know I lived most of my life in a place called Olalla, WA) There is the Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges they have robust names. Evergreen and Cascade? Puget Sound Logging Ry. Cascade Mnt logging. There is also the mountain peaks that are all named the 2 most notable are Mnt Rainier and Mnt St Hellens. If you use Mnt. St. Hellens you could always have your locos painted with the erupting mountain and then make the top of the loco grey for quirky. Just some ideas.
I was in the same boat for my name. I went round and round with all kinds of ideas. My freelanced road is here in Arizona and I was trying, I suppose, to hard. Then one day, after all kinds of ideas I hit a wall and gave up… then my wife gave me a name, “Kiva”! I stuck on the Valley and I was off.
Where the name Kiva came from gets asked alot. Something historical? A location? A famous person? Nah, it is the name of my street that I have been living on for the last 3 years… Sometimes it can be something rigth in front of you and not know it.
Otherwise, write a bunch down on post it notes, stick them to the wall, and grab a dart.
During my HO years I had two freelanced railroads.
The first was a turn-of-the-century Colorado standard-gauge line much like the Colorado Midland. It was called the Gunnison, South Park & Pacific RR.
Later I modeled a 1910’s-era freelanced standard-gauge Pennsylvania coal hauler similar to the Huntingdon & Broad Top Mountain RR and narrow-gauge East Broad Top RR. Mine connected the steel mills at Johnstown PA with the Broad Top Coal Fields by a somewhat more direct, although more vertical, route than the Pennsylvania Railroad. It was called the Johnstown & Broad Top RR.
While neither helps your Pacific Northwest setting, my point is that surrounding real railroads may give inspiration. Honestly, I agree that “cutesy” or “quirky” names are less credible than real railroady-sounding names. But that depends on what your objectives are. Many modelers prefer a touch of fantasy to nitty-gritty business-like railroad names.
I have the same problem naming a feeder line to the Virginian/N&W lines, its narrow gauge, so I looked up lines in the book of American Narrow Gauge Railroads and found abandoned lines that did interchange with them or standard gauged and eventually merged in.
I used a name and just said “they never abandoned…”