Share Pictures of Your Pre-Amtrak Models Here!!

I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, riding and watching passenger trains on the Lackawanna, PRR, NYC, New Haven, Boston & Maine, Southern, Seaboard, ACL, RF&P, B&O, and others. I've always wanted to incorporate them on a model railroad, especially the secondary, less glamorous trains that carried mail and express. While I have passenger stations and tracks to accommodate passenger trains, it's been a long job to figure out how to run them in a satisfactory way. Here are a few examples of what I'm working toward, first an IHC ACL coach with GSB trucks:

Next a JC Models 18-roomette:

Next a Walthers express reefer with some added grabs and so forth:

If there's interest, I'll post some more equipment and show how I'm starting to operate it.

Let's start with exactly what trains we're talking about. Into the 1960s, the biggest passenger carrying railroads had basically three types of passenger trains (leaving out special cases like oommuter, rural local, or mixed trains): limiteds, secondary trains, and mail-express trains. By the 1960s, the secondary trains were carrying mainly rail employees riding on passes, while the mail and express trains may not have carried passengers at all. For instance, the B&O had the Capitol Limited, the overnight train to Chicago, but had secondary trains with names like the Diplomat or Shenandoah running on a roughly 12-hour opposite schedule. The Santa Fe had the Super Chief (and also for much of that time the Chief) running as prestige trains LA-Chicago, but it also had the Grand Canyon making more stops and on 12-hour opposite schedule. The secondary trains were slower, made more stops, were often shorter, and carried more express and mail cars. So these can be more interesting from a smaller layout standpoint.

Then there were mail and express trains that carried baggage, RPO, express, express reefer, and box-express cars. These often ran up to about 1970, and sometimes past Amtrak, although Railway Express went out of business about that time, and that was the biggest part of these trains. It also didn't help that the Post Office discontinued RPOs in the mid 1960s, although they still sent storage mail by rail. In general, mail and express trains gradually morphed into today's intermodals, with UPS and FedEx replacing Railway Express. What the mail and express trains had most in common with other passenger trains was that they had steam heat and often used passenger power, or power like FP7s. The Seaboard ran its SDP35s on their mail and express trains (you could ride on theirs as a passenger, and I did once).

The mail and express trains have the big advantage for the modeler that you can run them with box-express cars and so forth, so they're easier on curves. You can also switch them more easily like freights.

I've found more and more that DVDs with archival railfan film are a very good and cost-effective research tool. I like it that a lot of DVDs cover the 1960s, when I started to seriously railfan. You can get a lot of inspiration from Emery Gulash's DVDs on the New York Central, PRR, and Penn Central, which ran a lot of these trains. They're available from Green Frog, which often puts them on sale at very reasonable prices.

I'll post some more later on exactly what I'm working on.

I have to agree with the DVDs. I have the Penn Central box set by Greenfrog, and its fantastic! I wish there were more Northeast Corridor (there is only a little on the volume 4 DVD), but on a whole, its still a fascinating look at the PC, including the passenger trains.


Another good DVD for the electrified passenger stuff is Pennsy's Racetrack 1940-1980, by Heron Rail. Its got a lot of shots from the 1950s and 1970s, and even some older footage from the 20s and 30s

Wow, Awesome stuff!

GMP,Very well done,was the photos done on film or digital?

God Ed,

I just saw these, I am SIMPLY BLOWN AWAY!

Tom

Started unpacking some of my stuff the other night and thought I'd snap a quick pick.  Hopefully I'll be able to start some benchwork for a new layout soon.