Know Your Railroad's Time Period - Model Train Help BlogModel Train Help Blog

April 10, 2012

Know Your Railroad’s Time Period

Another great contribution from John.

From horse-drawn cars to the great technology of today, railroads have been around for a long time and hopefully will exist for many years to come. For that reason, it is good to choose a time period to model, but besides the usual questions of how much space and money are available, that brings up other questions, the most important being what you as a modeler like to see in locomotives, cars, and the environment in which they will run.

To use myself as an example, I model in N-Scale in the United States during the late-1950’s, with a concentration on the roads that will make up Conrail less than 20 years later. To do this, much research was involved, as there were many major railroads in the United States that weren’t yet merged into a bigger and more affluent company. Though most railroads had completely dieselized by the 1950’s, there were not a lot of types of freight diesels available for modeling compared to later times, so one had to choose carefully. The same with freight cars, as the box car red color in pre-war consists was being replaced by colorful units that really made a company name stand out.

Knowing with what was around in a certain place at a certain time is a lesson in history as well as railroading, so it pays to study actual railroads, which parallel the time periods that we model. But there’s something that was not discussed yet, and that’s doing what gives you enjoyment in your work and makes other people happy to see it.

No matter if your layout is small or garage-sized, and though it is good to model a specific time period/road, the main consideration is to do what makes you happy. If you like to see a Burlington Northern SD pulling a string of old Central Pacific box cars, then go right ahead and know that no railroad “law enforcement” will arrest you for that. The layout is YOURS alone, and that’s what makes our hobby great!