The Million Dollar Question, Part 1: Why Model Railroading?

This is a fairly common question over the years.  Being interested in trains is what some consider an odd phenomenon, and I'm not sure I disagree with that assessment too strongly.  So I figured I would "defend" my insanity a little bit to give some perspective and history.



I have been involved in the hobby of model railroading (building scale models of real trains) and the related hobby of railfanning (watching real trains do work) for pretty much my entire life.  Major influences early on were my two grandfathers and two uncles, and with great support and encouragement from my parents.   Both grandfathers had jobs that were directly or indirectly related to the railroads…one did work for the ATSF Railway in Flagstaff for a short time as a machinist, and the other was a postal carrier and interacted with the Fort Worth & Denver Railway in that capacity.  My uncles were both model railroaders, and one was also into railfanning and railroad photography.  The first was only a few years older than I was and I helped him build several model railroads.

I have attempted to build several model railroads over the years, but none have really reached any semblance of completion.  In fact, the current layout I have built is the only one I have been able to run on with any regularity and has some bit of scenery in place.  But I have also been involved in other ways:

• As a member of an N-scale club for several years
• Proud member of an n-scale lunch social group
• As contributor to a regional railroad publication
• As a (former) member of the NMRA including one year as division photographer and member of a regional convention committee
• As a sustaining member of the Friends of the Burlington Northern Railroad Historical Society, where I also currently serve as Social Media director
• As a participant in a few local model railroading operations sessions.

So, to say it’s “in my blood” is quite the understatement.  One of my favorite photos is when I was 4 and the American Freedom Train locomotive came through my home town of Bowie, TX on a test run before the actual train made its run through Texas.  There I was posed in front of the massive steam locomotive.  It had passed by our house 5 miles to the south and my mom took me and my uncle and his best friend to see it.   Just one of many examples of the passion I have for the massive, high horsepower machines and anything else that is railroading.

Another early memory I have is walking adjacent the right-of-way near my uncles’  mom’s house near the Fort Worth & Denver Railway’s tracks in Bowie.  We were near a grade crossing and as the train approached we were right up close to the gates watching as a Santa Fe F45 led an eastbound hotshot with a collection of 89ft flat cars and 40-45ft trailers and containers in tow.   There were others: trips on the Texas State Railroad; numerous trips to railroad museums; many hobby shop visits; train shows; railfanning trips, including a “ski trip” where we saw the then brand-new Oakway SD60’s clicking away in Trinidad, Colorado.

Regarding my “favorites”, well my grandparents lived right across TX 101 from the Fort Worth & Denver Railway’s right-of-way, and adjacent a busy passing siding located at Fruitland, TX about 50 minutes northwest of Fort Worth.  We also lived near there for a couple of years when I was very young.  So I had a strong connection to the big green BN machines and the early beginnings of the Powder River Basin coal boom on the BN.  There was also an eclectic mix of motive power that traveled through--especially Rock Island early on--then MKT, UP, and Santa Fe regularly made appearances.  The Rock Island also ran through Bowie…a line that ran from Fort Worth to Wichita, KS and that eventually became the Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas (OKKT) subsidiary of the MKT.  At the end of the Rock Island era and beginning of the OKKT operations this line became of great interest primarily because my dad had started a business in Bridgeport, TX that backed up to the line that also served the nearby rock crushers at Chico.

So my early modeling efforts were in HO and revolved around MKT.  The closest thing to a layout I had was a point to point layout that was basically going to be a switching layout but never got much past enough track to run a single train back and forth.  My uncle and I did have an HO layout but it got to running trains stage and no further and then lost its space and was dismantled.  I played around with n-scale for a bit but then it became high school years and the interest waned somewhat.  The next time I became semi-interested in trains was my last year in college when I built a 4x8 HO layout that once again got to train running stage and no further.  That was a very short lived spurt back into the hobby and it would be 5 years before I really even looked at a Model Railroader magazine again.

While not deeply immersed in the hobby, I did follow railroading some and was “always railfanning” during my trips between college and home as well as frequent trips to the DFW area.  So BNSF definitely caught my attention as I had always been a big fan of the Santa Fe and also of intermodal.   And, when the BNSF merger occurred the Fort Worth & Denver became all of a sudden VERY interesting to me again.   So one fateful day in early 1999 I picked up a copy of Model Railroader magazine and on the back cover was THE catalyst that got me back into the hobby.   A big, (err---small) beautiful n-scale Burlington Northern SD40-2 locomotive by Kato that advertised as “DCC-Ready”.

Now, as an electronics/computer geek by birth and by profession, I had always appreciated command control in model railroading as a far superior method of operating multiple trains on a layout of any size.   I dreamed of Keller Engineering’s “Onboard” system when I was in HO, and before my sabbatical I was hearing of such systems actually small enough for the new generation of n-scale locomotives that were light years ahead performance-wise than the locomotives that my uncle and I had purchased a decade prior.   So I said then that if a quality BN SD40-2 with command control ever came out in n-scale, that would be when I would come back to model railroading.  The alure of n-scale was the ability to get more trains into less space.  This was important because I was interested in modern model railroading which meant long intermodal cars and autoracks that required broad curves to operate on.  So sure enough, there was that DCC-ready BN SD40-2, and here I am.