Genesis
I had a fairly
extensive O Gauge
Lionel setup as a child. Every time our family
moved or had a reallocation of living space which necessitated the
breaking
down of the layout I would carefully repack each car, switch, or other
piece of
equipment in their original packaging and store them away until the
next time I
found a place I could set it all up again. I
think I got a much bigger kick out of the process of planning and
building the layout than I ever did running the trains. Alas, when
hormones
started raging
and I fell in first love lust I lent (I maintain that I lent,
she that I
gave) the entire setup to the girl's younger sister. So ended my model
railroading career.
Ended, but never
quite
forgotten. The biggest impediment to my
regaining my status as the modern Cornelius Vanderbuilt
was, of course, a lack of sufficient funds to rebuild on a scale
anywhere close
to that which I envisioned. The scale
and complexity of my fantasy layout also required an amount of
houseroom that I
never really had. The advent of
garden
railroading
solved the space problem and reawakened thoughts of designing a layout,
but
they never coalesced for lack of a focal point. I
couldn't really get worked up about the idea of building yet another
freight train wending its way across Midwestern grain fields,
Rocky
Mountain passes, or
Appalachian mining
towns.
My epiphany came
when
a friend
invited me to a 1996 World Series game at Yankee Stadium.
When I emerged from the tunnel and saw that
greener than green grass ringed by those whiter than white spires
around the
outfield I felt like I was on hallowed ground. I
was absolutely sure that some Catholics had a feeling that may have
approached, but never surpassed my feeling the first time they went to
the Vatican
. At that moment a northbound IRT train's
brakes squealed as it pulled to a stop at the elevated station beyond
Paul
O'Neil's right field fence. That
was my train. I had never seen an inner
city model railroad layout, but right then I knew I wanted to build one. It would stretch from Yankee Stadium west to
the
Harlem River and south to 149th
Street where the 4 train emerges from
underground. That way it would include
not only the elevated portion of the IRT and the 161st
St. station but also the tracks over by the
river
used by Amtrak and what used to be the New York Central commuter
line and was now part of the Metro North system.
I researched the
differences in car
body designs from the first R cars in 1932 to the present.
There's even a site which tracks each car, by
style, manufacturer, and car number from the day they were put into
service
until the day they were retired and since cars don't usually migrate
(you'll
never see an IRT car on a BMT track) it identifies which cars were D
trains, #4
trains, etc. I encountered my first
major obstacle. Style differences
between Redbirds, R-62s (
Kawasaki
)
put into service in 1983, or R-62-As (Bombardier 1985) didn't really
matter
because nobody made any of them. At
least nobody made them in G scale (there were HO cars out there, I had
been
told). There are disadvantages to being
one of the first to build something it seemed! There
were of course plenty of Amtrak and New York Central cars out
there to run north and south on the tracks over by the
Harlem
River,
but no subway cars. One dealer estimated
that since there was little demand for these cars, it would probably
cost me
upwards of $100,000 to get Aristocraft or some other manufacturer to
create the
dyes necessary to make a line of cars bodies.
The cars used by Metro North were also not in production by anyone, but
they
were Genesis Engines so I could just have Phase III cars repainted in
the Metro North livery. I had been given the name of a hobbyist
in Pennsylvania who was an artist when it came to painting
trains.
I also wondered if, for the sake of realism, I should have him tag a
few of the now nonexistant IRT cars.
The solution to the
total absence
of IRT trains, I reasoned, was
obvious. Since I wasn't about to pony up
that kind of money I had to convince one of the manufacturers that
there would be a market
for the
cars. How to do that? Create
one! Give them a solid foundation of press and
advertising so that a demand
for cars for urban railways is created. I had to
build such a huge,
impressive, kick-ass layout that magazines would want to run
regular
progress reports on the construction phase. My
preliminary rough estimate of the G scale Yankee Stadium was that it
would be at least 40'x40'. Once the
layout was in the final stages of construction with the Amtrak trains
operational and the elevated tracks outside right field in place, some
manufacturer would feel this overwhelming compulsion to build cars on
spec to
cash in on the free advertising (I hoped!). I
might even weaken and allow some idiot from ESPN to do a remote from
the site. My target audience was not confined to Garden
Railroaders but would include baseball fans.
As
Jennifer Tilly once said,
"Nothing
ventured, nothing ventured."
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