I’ve been a railfan and model railroader since I was a wee lad starting with Lionel O-27, Super-O, then HO. I built a small N scale railroad while attending Purdue, belonged to the Purdue Railroad Club, and have built five layouts since then: two HO, one large scale, and two Proto:48 railroads. I joined the staff of Railroad Model Craftsman where I worked for 12 years, then spent 20 years at Bell Labs, and have been writing and contracting for Kalmbach, now Firecrown Media, since 1985. In 1995, I was the founding editor of Model Railroader’s annual special issue, Model Railroad Planning, which I continued to edit. I have written more than 20 books about scale model railroading for Kalmbach/Firecrown.

When RMC/Carstens Publications moved to rural Sussex County, New Jersey, in 1973, my late wife Judy and I built the house I still live in. I started the Allegheny Midland (AM) before the basement floor was poured by drawing the main line in the sand. I enjoyed designing, building, and operating the AM, also known as the Midland Road, for a quarter of a century. It grew out of a friendship with the late Allen McClelland and his Virginian & Ohio (V&O) that began in 1970. I acquired U.S.G.S (United States Geological Survey) topographic maps and plotted the main line from a Nickel Plate Road connection at Dillonvale, Ohio, south to the Virginian & Ohio at Kingswood Junction, Virginia. There was also a heavily traveled branch on the northern half of the railroad (Wheeling Division) to Connellsville, Pennsylvania.

Once it was operational in the 1980s, during fourth-Friday-night operating sessions (Allen and I lived in the same time zone), we coordinated movements of the passenger trains and hottest freights by long-distance telephone calls between the dispatchers. Both of us used a form of command control, of course. I used Dynatrol wireless throttles, which eventually had 18 channels. We both ran a 6:1 fast-clock ratio, allowing us to work through an entire day in four hours. A US&S (Union Switch & Signal) Centralized Traffic Control machine, now in the National Model Railroad Association’s scale model railroading exhibit at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, was used to dispatch the railroad.

The railroad was planned as a steam-powered operation, but good HO-scale Nickel Plate Road (AM’s parent company) steam power wasn’t available in the 1970s, so it was initially set in the second-generation diesel era. As RMC’s editor, I felt it was important to keep moving the era ahead in time to ensure I stayed current with what was happening on the prototype. But I left RMC for a 20-year career at Bell Laboratories in 1981, and in 1983 Key Imports brought in a line of well-made HO-scale NKP Mikados and Berkshires. I immediately acquired a fleet of both types, and the era shifted back to 1957, when the NKP acquired EMD SD9s and Alco RSD12s. The AM bought some RSD12s and earlier RSDs to tackle the stiff West Virginia mountain grades, but oddly we never acquired any SDs. We also had some USRA (United States Railroad Administration) and Chesapeake & Ohio-design 2-6-6-2s.

Jim Boyd had been a good friend in the Midwest when I lived in Indiana, and one night (after Jim had also joined the growing Carstens Publications staff) during a slide show at my house, he showed an image of the classic C&O yardmaster’s office at Quinnimont, W.Va. It had a tower stacked atop the roof, as did a number of C&O depots. I was instantly impressed, and that led to all AM depots and most line-side structures being copies of C&O prototypes.

The shortline Ridgeley & Midland County (a play on RMC, of course, but Midland Road was an accidental play on MR) connected with the AM at Midland, West Virginia. It hauled coal and timber products out of Preston County to the AM and switched a large furniture plant at Midland. 

As I grew familiar with timetable and train-order operation (TT&TO), which we employed on the Otter Creek Subdivision, I realized that it was a more challenging form of operation than CTC (Centralized Traffic Control), where the dispatcher makes the movement decisions and the road crews follow signal indications. Towns on the AM were too few and close together to make it a candidate for conversion to TT&TO operation. So, after 25 years, I decided midway through a north-end yard rebuilding project that it was time for the Allegheny Midland to move aside and create space for my former Indiana hometown favorite, the Nickel Plate Road’s St. Louis Division. It’s a single-track railroad dispatched by TT&TO rules, which keep crews' heads in the game at all times. I’ve never regretted my decision, but when someone hands me a set of sound-equipped AM SD40-2s and a string of Appalachian Lines freight cars to go behind them, I head down into the basement, fire up the NKP, and transform it for an hour or so, like Brigadoon, into the Midland Road. And I thoroughly enjoy every minute of the transformation.