The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

There are greats in the world of model railroading. Some are better well known and some are less well known. Two are John Allen and John Armstrong. Both have designs very worthy of copying in whole or in part. The original Gorre and Daphetid has been copied many times in many scales (I’m even considering it myself) and the Timesaver switching game is everywhere in many variations. John Armstrong’s Candaigua Southern, quite the signature rail road and his many writings on model railroad design have far reaching effects throughout the hobby. Both have plans published in Linn H. Westcott’s “101 Track Plans for Model Railroaders” including the original G and D plan with a turntable the paradigm breaking Quachita and Ozark which is a clever rearrangement of standard four by eight beginner layout to a one foot wide seven by ten foot doughnut of a shelf plus a ten foot yard section, absolutely brilliant. So, to all of you who are have copied their layout plans, way to honor the legends!

The Story Begins

This will be about my hobby and my quest to build my model train layout and my studies of prototype or 1:1 scale trains and my 1/87 or HO scale trains. I am a Reading man. That is pronounced like the town in California, Redding, not like the thing you do with a book. I do love to read also. The Reading Railroad, also known as the Reading Company and Reading Lines is one of the four railroads on the original Monopoly boards (as opposed to Star Wars Monopoly, Star Trek Monopoly and all the other versions out there now). The other three railroads are the Pennsylvania Railroad (which had my favorite loco, the GG1), the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the "Short Line" which is an abbreviation of the New York Short Line built by the Reading between Philadelphia and New York. Please remember that The Reading was primarily a regional freight hauler whose hub was Reading Pennsylvania even though the offices eventually moved to Philadelphia when Reading Terminal was built.

My focus is the Reading's Wilmington and Northern Branch in the 1950's with some leeway in either direction for various personal reasons (mostly I would like to run what I would like to run or keep certain freight and passenger operations after they would otherwise have ceased.) I chose Wilmington because of the Wilmington Pigeon Point Carfloat operation serving duPont and Carney's Point through Deepwater in southern New Jersey .

I am afraid that this will not be the most organized post as I still need to figure some thing out about how I want to do this.

Well that is all for now. Best Regards, David