Brian Sheron’s Long Island Rail Road is a 27 x 48-foot HO scale model railroad that depicts Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the north shore of Long Island. He built the layout, featured in the August 2024 issue of Model Railroader, in three phases. Brian started work on the model railroad in 1988 with the Port […]
Chicago & North Western 4-6-4 No. 4004, having brought the San Francisco-bound Gold Coast in from Chicago, backs out of Omaha Union Station for servicing in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on June 6, 1953. Alco built nine of these 84-inch-drivered Hudsons for C&NW in 1938. R. R. Malinoski photo […]
Harold W. Russell’s illustrations have been appearing in Model Railroader magazine since the mid-1960s. He has more than 150 bylines to his credit. In the July 2024 issue he shared plans for a masonry depot on the Lehigh Valley in Gorham, N.Y. Click on the link below to download Harold’s plans. Use this link to […]
When I was a kid, we’d drive 3 ½ hours north to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to visit my grandparents a couple of times per year. Of course, that long of a drive necessitated one or two pit stops. Most were at tiny gas stations in small towns. Menards Sunoco Station (275-9288) reminds me […]
On June 8, 1968, at Baltimore, Penn Central GG1s 4901 and 4903 lead a 21-car special train carrying 1,146 people and the body of New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated June 5 in Los Angeles while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. Crowds thronged the right of way between New York and Washington, and […]
My early “trainhood” was 1955 to 1968. I had an uncle who gave me a train the year I was born, and he added to the Lionel fleet on birthdays and Christmas for many years. All the trains were Lionel, but when I unboxed them in the early 1990s, I discovered the track, switches, and […]
Chicago & Eastern Illinois locomotives served the road well through many decades of operation. C&EI was a coal-hauling railroad and, other than some early switchers, stuck with steam through World War II. Three E7s and a bunch of F3s made quick work of dieselizing the line from 1946 onward, with the last steam […]
In about 1950, the operator at Reverse, Idaho, hands up orders to the engine crew of westbound freight 3-257. Two 2-8-8-0 pushers have been removed here after assisting the train up Medbury Hill. Henry R. Griffiths Jr. photo […]
Norfolk & Western class A No. 1239 is ready to depart Roanoke, Va., with eastbound time freight 84 in 1954. The potent 2-6-6-4 was built in N&W’s shops here just five years earlier. W. A. Akin Jr. photo […]
Facts and features Name: Southern Pacific Keeler BranchScale: On30 (1:48 proportion, 30″ narrow gauge, also called On21⁄2)Size: 6 x 17 feetPrototype: SP narrow gaugeLocale: Owens Valley, CaliforniaEra: 1950sStyle: sectionalMainline run: 36 feetMinimum radius: 24″Minimum turnout: No. 5Maximum grade: noneBenchwork: open grid Height: 50″Roadbed: 1 x 4 clear pineTrack: Micro Engineering code 83Scenery: sifted, demagnetized […]
Download the track plan here! See more in the Summer 2024 issue! […]
Two big 2-10-0s cut in as mid-train helpers assist in lifting a train up the Western Maryland main line west of Cumberland, Md., at famous Helmstetter’s Curve in May 1952. The road engine and rear-end helper are also Decapods. WM’s class I-2 engines were the heaviest 2-10-0s ever built. Edward Theisinger photo […]
