INTRODUCTION

As a former professional railroader (working my way up frombrakeman to agent to trainmaster and ultimately vice president over a 20-yearspan), I appreciate the efforts to model specific company operations. But thechallenges to do that can be great, given the scope of most popular roads andthe many compromises required.  Proto-freelancingis a way to create your own vision of the ideal railroad, without beingconstrained by specifics.  

Like many of us, I was inspired by the works of AllenMcClelland, Tony Koester, and Jack Ozanich, all of whom realized that you couldcreate in miniature the operations that reflected the movement of freightacross the rail network without modeling a railroad which really existed.  Coming from a railroad background, building amodel railroad that performs like the real thing was very important.  Fortunately, I am blessed with a supportivewife, and a large basement and garage suitable for what I had in mind. 

CONCEPT AND DESIGN

The Oxford County Railroad (OCTY) is a short line which operates light-density branch lines in western Maine which were spun-off by the Allagash Railroad (AGR). It is a typical short line operator, utilizing hand-me-down, first-generation diesel power, operating on relatively poor track laid with light rail, and focused on being the low-cost carrier serving three smaller, marginal paper mills and some of the few remaining small customers on these former AGR branch lines. The name comes from the real Oxford County itself, firmly placing the operation in a distinct area of western Maine. 

EQUIPMENT

The OCTY rosters a small fleet of secondhand Alco and EMD power which is maintained in the railroad’s wooden two-stall engine house at its home base of North Rumford. Here, there is a fuel facility as well as the company office. Active units currently include a pair of ex-Western Maryland F3s recently retired off Chessie System, a single former AGR F3 and Alco RS-3s from WM and Spokane, Portland & Seattle. The railroad also has a small fleet of 50-foot double-door boxcars to serve on-line customers, and to roam the rail network like so many other “incentive per-diem” cars of the era.

OPERATIONS

Like most short lines of the era, the OCTY operates on an as-needed basis, but generally runs something like five days per week from North Rumford. Paper mills are located on branches out of North Rumford, to Rumford Point, and Newry (a fictitious former Maine Central branch). These lines are served by night jobs on an alternating basis. The mills are represented in hidden staging. In other words, the traffic is modeled, but not the actual mills.

A typical day finds the OCTY crew grabbing one or two units from the service tracks at North Rumford and switching out the cars brought in from the prior night’s run to one of the two aforementioned paper mills. In addition, the railroad serves three customers at North Rumford. When all of the traffic is gathered and blocked, the crew will grab the road power set (usually two or three units) for the northbound road train to White Mountain Jct. Two or three units are needed because of the significant grades encountered along the line.

(This material was condensed from an article in the March 2025 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman. For more on the OCTY, see this publication.)