In March 2023, Steve Sweeney had a Conrail 1980s HO scale layout discussion with Dave Abeles. In total, Dave talks about Conrail, Penn Central, New York Central, Pennsylvania, and other railroads and how Conrail became a time of optimism for railroading, especially in the Northeast and Midwest states that once saw a multitude of bankruptcies and track abandonments.
Dave shows off an intermodal train in action and also share his philosophy of modeling including what changes he made to a model railroad to make it period and place specific for Conrail in Upstate New York.
Conrail was a fascinating prototype. It is one of those railroads where nothing is what it seems. A good example is the locomotive fleet where predecessors were known to swap numbers on locomotives in a game of subterfuge with the holders of the equipment trusts that financed them. As a result, There were numerous GP7s renumbered as GP9s and vice versa, number swaps between NYC and PRR units under Penn Central, and even the units under Conrail sometimes emerged from the shop rebuilt from a completely different unit than the one listed on the official published rosters. I regularly walked the deadlines in Altoona chacking serial and frame numbers during those years, and in one case even found a unit with a serial number that didn’t correspond to anything Conrail owned.
Although freight cars were harder to trace the heritage of, I have to believe there were many instances of things being hokey there as well. Certainly, I came across some true antiques in Altoona and Hollidaysburg during those years. Rostering cars originally built for literally dozens of railroads resulted in some real oddballs, made all the worse Conrail augmented its fleet of 86″ boxcars with many purchased secondhand from a variety of railroads. There was also at least one trough train on the roster, and a short lived series of high sided coke hoppers.
All in all, it was a fascinating railroad to observe during its entire existence.
This was fantastic, thanks for sharing your backstory and philosophy, along with some history and a layout tour! I think we got an economics lesson along the way too. I’d love to see another one of these videos in the future.
Happy Conrail Day! Thanks for sharing this with all of us, Dave!
I hope to see more interviews of model railroaders! Thank you Steve and Dave!