Owner: Joe Loggans
Location: Hot Springs, AR
States of Operation: AR, MO, MS, NM, OK, TN, TX
Era: 1970-Present
Reporting Mark: AV
Scale: HO
As told by Joe Loggans:
In 1979 I was hired by the Illinois Central Gulf as a clerk in New Orleans, LA. A short time later, I was introduced to the Crescent City Model Railroad Club (CCMRC). Their layout was huge!! It took up an entire building. The biggest layout I had ever seen was on a 4X8 sheet of plywood. And they didn't model a real railroad. They had created their own railroad called the Crescent Lines (CL). I had heard of guys who just gave their layouts fancy names like the "Pine Tree Central" or such, but this was different. I was hooked and soon became a full time member. I was a just a renter at the time and had no space for my own layout, so The CCMRC soon became a second home.
I started buying equipment at Hub Hobby to put on the layout, but nothing said "me". I knew it was time to create my own empire. If James Hill could do it, so could I (at least in HO scale). First off was location. I wanted to interchange with the CL, so it had to be somewhere between Kansas City and New Orleans. I had spent part of my childhood in Arkansas was was fond of the Ozarks and Hot Springs area. So Arkansas it was. Now for a name...I wanted a name that would be simple to say; not a tongue twister. I didn't want it to be a play on words like "Northern Burlington". Just sounds weird. And I wanted a name that had never existed before. Using my resources at the ICG, I looked in every RR journal I could find. Then I spotted a railroad up near an area I had lived in Mississippi called the Mississippi and Skuna Valley RR. It was long, but the word "Valley" stuck in my head. "The Arkansas Valley Railroad." I like that!! I searched high and low and could not find any reference to any Arkansas Valley. I had it!!! Thus the "Arkansas Valley Railroad" was born.
Well, I had the name I liked; now I needed a paint scheme. I wanted to create something original, yet keep it simple. My air brush skills were still rough, but I didn't want just a dip job. My favorite color is blue so I started to see what other RRs had done. Hello CONRAIL!!! I decided on CR blue, but wanted more white. With my airbrush skills being very limited at the time I decided the less masking, the better. White cab, blue hood with a black frame. Custom decals didn't exist back then, but I liked the big letters of the KCS and ICG. I found white dry transfers that worked out great.
The year was 1980. I knew what a Baldwin was and an EMD. What's an ALCO? Never heard of them. There was brass, Athearn, and everybody else. I hadn't thought about any kind of organized roster, so I just grabbed anything and started painting. The first lesson I learned was "cookie cutter" flanges don't run on Code 70 track. The track at the club was all hand-laid code 70. One of my first engines was an AHM SD40. Yep, time to bring out the Dremel. Wish I still had it. Tyco wasn't much better with their brass wheels. Then I saw a Pemco C430. So that is what an ALCO is!! I even painted up an RS3. GE was next with a Bachmann U36B. But I wanted something bigger. What about an AHM AV "Big boy". After cutting down the flanges on that puppy, lesson learned.
Bring on the Athearn models. A couple of SD45s and an U33C. All this time, one of my fellow club members kept nagging me about ALCOs. What's the big deal about ALCO? Rare, yes. Out of business, yep. Who cares...Then I saw a giant postcard of an IC C636 on a coal train. I was hooked!!! The more I read about ALCO, the more I knew I wanted a fleet of ALCOs. This was long before EBAY and there was almost nothing out there for ALCO. Even anything in brass was hard to find.
I wasn't going back to the deep flanges so I stayed away from the AHM's and such. I had just finished a T&D SD40T-2 shell, So I thought I'd try my hand at building an ALCO. I found a TYCO C630. Spliced on the cab of a Pemco C430 and added a few more details. I built a custom frame for it and put Athearn GE trucks under it. Well, it kinda looked like an ALCO. Fortunately, Atlas saved the day. C424s and C425s started showing up in AV paint. The last thing I painted before heading out west was a Spectrum C40-8.
Even though I didn't have my own layout, I still wanted everybody to think that the Arkansas Valley was real. When I was a clerk at the ICG, I discovered the resources to make the AV seem real. We would receive letters and waybills from other railroads that I had never heard of. But they were real railroads. With the help of a few friends, I started to create a real AV. I created AV waybills just like the real ones. Trainorders, MOW sheets, envelopes and the such. I was starting to get the AV name out into the real world. Then the big break came in 1981. Andy Sperandeo, who was a former CCMRC member, had come back home to do a write up on the club. Our 25th anniversary show was coming up so he did a small write up in the April 1981 Model Railroader. I couldn't believe my eyes. There, on page 91, was the AV was in MR!
As I began to look at the picture for the thousandth time, it seemed that something was missing. The AV needed a herald; a company logo so to speak. How do you make the letters AV into a logo. Everything I tried just didn't look right. I had ordered a dozen baseball caps to give to friends, and when they showed up, what did I see? There it was ... my logo. That's it!!! I contacted Rail Graphics and soon had my own custom decals made. My corporate logo started to show up on everything. Next up was the Walther's catalog. Just a picture of a couple of cars, but there they were in the 1984 catalog.
Why Arkansas? When I was just a small lad, my family lived in Magnolia for a couple of years. On several occasions we would visit a friends camp up near Hot Springs on the reservoir. It wasn't the Rocky Mountains, but those hills and lakes always stuck in my memory. My first thought was to just build a short line from Hot Springs to Little Rock, but I wanted to interchange with the Crescent Lines. The nearest place on the map was Helena; over on the Mississippi River. So I went due east from Hot Springs thru Pine Bluff over to Helena.
Next I turned my sights west. I wanted to head over to Oklahoma City, but there is nothing between Hot Springs and OKC. The Rock already went from Little Rock to OKC and we saw how that went. So I headed west out of Hot Springs and then turned north to Ft Smith. From there, it was on over to OKC. But why stop there?! With the Rock going belly up, I grabbed a couple of sections on over to Tucumcari. I then extended the line from Helena up to Memphis, creating a true bridge route east to west. For several years, this is all my railroad was meant to be. Then rumors started flying that the BN was going to start shedding some of their former Frisco lines. I jumped at the chance and grabbed the line from Ft Smith up to Springfield. I then grabbed the line down to Paris, TX with the trackage rights into Dallas.
Now in real life back in 1986, I went from being a railroad man to becoming a trucker. Mostly piggybacks. What better way to railfan your territory than from a cab of a big rig. Any chance I got, I would grab a run up to Kansas City from New Orleans. Sometimes I would go up thru Little Rock over to Ft. Smith and then up to KC. Other times I would follow the Thayer sub from Memphis to Springfield and then up to KC. I fell in love with the Ozarks. On several occasions, I followed the old Frisco ROW from Springfield up to Clinton. I discovered that the Corp of Engineers had condemned the line when the Truman Reservoir was created. I wanted to grab that line to get into KC, until I found out that bit of information. I headed NE out of Springfield going around the lake to the east and then tying in with the old RI line into KC. The Arkansas Valley was now complete.
By 1984, the AV was starting to acquire more rolling stock and engines. Bad thing was, I was just painting anything I could get cheap. As the AV progressed thru the years, it became apparent that I needed to get my roster organized. I started looking back into history to see how my roster as of 1990 would have developed over the years. The first to go was a T&D tunnel motor and a Trainmaster. The rest of my engines I could work into the plan. The only history that I tweaked was that after ALCO shut down, MLW finished building all of the outstanding orders left on the books.
After WWII, the AV turned to ALCO for their first diesels. First to arrive were 10 S2's and 10 RS1's, followed by 10 RS2's in 47. Heavy steam would still rule the rails west of Hot Springs, but the end was soon approaching. By 1948, 20 ABBA FA1 sets arrived on the property to take over the runs between Ft. Smith and Oklahoma City. Only the 2-8-4 "Ozarks" and the 4-6-6-4 "Ouchita's" remained on the roster. In 1949, 30 EMD GP7s and 20 NW2s came on board. The AV also picked up 10 Baldwin AS616's in 1950. They were assigned to run between Hot Springs and Little Rock. The EMD's stayed east of Hot Springs in the flat lands due to slipping problems. Mechanical issues aside, the AV liked the ALCOs for their pulling ability. They could really dig in and pull the house down.
The AV's biggest headache was the ruling 2.4% grade between Hot Springs and Ft. Smith over Honald's Mountain. 20 RSD5's were purchased in 1952 to battle the hill. Better, but not great. The AV even borrowed a UP turbine in 1953 for testing. That worked, but the maintenance problems killed that idea. The final blow for steam came in 1956 when the AV took delivery of 20 RSD15's. The last fire was dropped in 1957, but two examples were saved. One Ozark and one Ouchita ended up in parks in Arkansas.
By 1962 as the mechanical issues on the Alco's started to take their toll, the AV went back to EMD for power. 15 GP30's showed up that year. For the remainder of the 60's, the AV stayed loyal to Alco with a 70% purchase ratio although GE was coming on strong because of the shared running gear with the Alco's. In 1972, 10 C430's, 10 C630's and 10 C636's were delivered by MLW to complete the last of the Alco order. A handful of EMD SD40's and SD45's were delivered in the late 60's, but by 1973 all future orders went to GE. EMD did not return until the 1980's with the purchase of 20 SD60's. 40 Dash 8-40C's and 20 Dash 8-40B's were the last new units purchased by the AV by 1990.
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As my roster was starting to take shape, I realized that I was going to end up with a couple of "oldies but goodies". That got me started into thinking what the AV would have looked like in the past. I started with the blue and white, but what would a first generation unit have looked like? I wanted to keep it simple so that it would stand the test of time. The founder of the CCMRC was a big time C&O fan and his C&O engines made a nice impression one me. So I thought I would try a solid royal blue scheme for my first units. The first RS1s would have been delivered in the AV's phase one scheme of solid royal blue with roman lettering. The end handrails were painted yellow. [see #46]. I liked it, but I did not want to carbon copy the C&O. In 1956 when the RSD15's were delivered, they showed up in a Phase 1a scheme. This was solid royal blue and Gothic lettering. The end rails were painted blue as well with white corner grabs.[see #624]. This would remain until 1972 when the last Alco's were delivered from MLW in the blue and white.
Phase 2 was a solid medium blue hood with a white cab and pilot. The frame and trucks were black. Arkansas Valley was dropped and big AV letters were added to the sides of the hood.[see pic from CCMRC]. Now the AV experimented with barricade stripes on the nose to increase visibility but it was only applied to a couple of units. Phase 2b was adopted in early 1982 with the addition of the new AV logo.[I'm back dating an RSD15 [work in progress]. This scheme lasted until Dec 1983 when the Jan. issue of Model Railroader hit the stands. A friend of mine said that the AV was in MR. I thought he was crazy until I saw the issue. "Those s.o.b.s" "They stole my paint scheme!!!!' Right there behind an SD50 was a blue and white MR&T engine. "Andy!!!!!" Shortly thereafter, phase 3 came out. I extended the blue to include the pilot and painted the frame and tank blue as well. Silver trucks were an added bonus. This lasted until 1989 when brand new Dash 8 40C's arrived on the property. I will have a C430 in this paint with the correct number. Next, the big move.
When you're basically an arm chair modeler and belong to a club, you tend to lose track of what you have. Well back in 1993, I packed up the family and moved from New Orleans to Vancouver WA. After a few months of getting settled, it came down to this: Do I join a club again or do I finally build my own layout? There are several very nice clubs around the Portland area, but I knew if I went that route, the AV would never be more than a handful of locomotives. I decided to build the Arkansas Valley at last!
Unfortunately, there was one thing I knew I would never have: time. When you are a self employed trucker, time is a precious commodity. I knew I would never have the time to build a big layout, so I grabbed the biggest bedroom in the house. Besides, I'm into details. I enjoy putting as much detail into a scene as I can. The layout is basically just a double track dog bone folded over itself. I removed three closed doors to open up one end of the room which will become the main yard and engine terminal. I haven't started on that section yet. What you have seen so far has taken me over 20 years to do. If I'm lucky, I should finish the AV in about 200 years!!!