Welcome Manifesto

Welcome to my first post of my blog about my interest British railway and American railroad model making. The title comes from Dr. Robert Churchward the author of Those Beautiful Daylight 4-8-4's. In it he mentions that Lima Locomotive works described building railroad locomotives as "no two alike", which I thought was apt for a model maker as I know that I strive to make variants of the same piece of equipment, all be it a freight car/wagon, locomotive, railway carriage/passenger car.

See what I did there. Yep, I'm bi-lingual, and will no doubt freely mix my terminology depending on whether I'm writing about North American railroads, or British railways.  However, I reserve the right to make mistakes and live with them.

So this blog will have posts about the models I've made in the past, drawn from my old RMWeb forum posts and new stuff about what I'm doing now. I've not been that active for the last couple of years due to health problems, but things have settled down and my passion for the hobby has been renewed now that I don't feel as ill as I have all the time. So what to expect?

I have eclectic interests and tastes.

American railroad wise and I will be posting stuff about the Petaluma & Santa Rosa Railway/Railroad that use to run in Northern California. I also have a passion for West Coast Southern Pacific Daylight locomotives, and I love the East Coast New York Central System Hudson, Mohawk and Niagara locomotives too. However, my current North America interest is centered around electric traction lines of the Chicago area. In particular the Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee, the Chicago South Shore & South Bend and the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin Railroads, which were all electric lines that were built up under the auspices of Samuel Insull.

British railways are dominated by my love for all thing Bulleid and his work on the Southern Railway especially his Pacific locomotives. However, saying that, I have found myself modelling a joint line that was owned by the London Midland & Scottish, Great Western and Southern Railways; the West London Line which was in two parts, the original West London Railway and then extended later with the building of the West London Extension Line. So I have had to bite the bullet and learn all about Great Western track for this project, which is on par with me as a New York Central fan having to run my locomotives over Pennsylvania Railroad track.

Anyway, enough of the manifesto, more modelling stuff to come.