Tolga's Railroad Repository

Time Magazine has its Person of the Year, therefore we shall have the Model Train of the Year. Their choice of PotY is always characteristic of that person's impact on the year's events. In 2023, the choice was surely clear. For us, when evaluating the various model railroad projects I've taken on at my leisure, the choice couldn't be clearer.  Since 2019, ECHOES, the East Coast HO Exhibitors Society, has displayed at Pinecrest Gardens on a new, sweet, extended arrangement for their holiday-themed Nights of Lights festival. Gone was the short opening weekend stint that usually happened on the second weekend of December. Our display time and scope swelled up like a sweet tooth only would during the Holidays into a three week affair. The two end-loops with five lucky 2'x4' modules turned into a much more appreciable fraction of our maximum possible footprint. Our Nights of Lights display has become the marquee event, trumping the annual Harvest Festival that has a...

It is Thanksgiving morning in 2018 (Fall vibes!)... and Nelson Acosta and I are venturing about the area railfanning our way up to the US Sugar Fields meeting a railfan, Laurence, who visited from the UK. The first catch is in my wheelhouse - CSX Y322. Miami Iron and Metal and Ferrous Processing and Trading can only put out up to about a combined 10 loads of scrap metal due to size, and push this arbitrary limit with the graveyard shift job in addition to there being a cut of empties from Sungas and Family & Son. This leads to making heavy work of CSXT 2051, a GP38-3. The acoustics become one for the books as the engineer throttles the 2000hp locomotive out of the spur proper onto the RTA mainline, sparing no minute to get the job done swiftly.  CSX's GP38-3 is a railroad unique rebuild analogous to the SD40-3 and GP40-3, using new electronics and a Wabtec cab, affectionately nicknamed the "LEGO Cab". Aside from the frontal rebuild, the rear receives a new ratchet bra...

CSX Y295 works Rattlesnake Point industry Cargill Sweeteners near the rapidly gentrifying West Chase neighborhood in Tampa, FL. Freight rail service on this spur is on borrowed time as developers are moving to revamp it all.  Unarguably the earlier times we think about, the simpler they were. Miami and Tampa were much smaller. Cell phones and social media did not dominate life as they do now. As per the hobbies, railroading has evolved so much that we crave the classic single-car switch and first/second generation diesel locomotives more than ever. Everything these days in a class-1 scheme of things is either bulk freight, freight to a shortline, or major customers meeting an arbitrary quota of cars per week or something -- a moderately reasonable metric to think of since time is money. As with anything of a large scale, if trends evolve, places can take as little time or as much time to catch up to that trend. Railroads with single car industrial switches have disappeared from the...

  My buddy Anthony Reyes and I participated in a special "Pints y pinturas" session at Unbranded Brewing in Hialeah, FL. The prompt of this ticketed $30pp event in the middle of Miami Beer Week was to offer a nice, casual social painting experience while enjoying familiar Cuban bites (pastelitos, croquetas), cafecito, and a selection of Unbranded's core beer.  Attendees were prompted to paint a cafetera, though it was evidently very optional. Darn! Missed opportunity to paint a GEVO. Let alone, I could have painted a CSX yard job with the Antillean Marine containers in the background. But the original prompt was more than good enough for the newest display piece in my train room.  The vibe was intended to be nostalgic just like the YN2 color scheme thrown on the cafetera. It came through as such. Classic Latin music emanated over the taproom's audio system, some songs you can find on my Voodoo & Palmettos playlist , themed to the CSX Miami industrial vibe made fam...

June 25, 2009 (per Flickr) - likely running as Y322 in summer morning light the job crosses N River Drive heading railroad north. Tom K photo   Tom Klimoski, a famous model railroader in northeast Georgia and forever-member of ECHOES, was very kind to share pictures of the CSX Downtown Spur in its last heyday before the downturn following the 2008 economic recession took a toll on much of the line's business. He has allowed me permission to share them on this blog and by doing so there are plenty of takeaways from the camera roll. To add to the latest discussion of the Downtown Spur operations. I had the honor of being able to finally visit Lance Mindheim's layout after quite a few years; he's done so much to the Downtown Spur setup since the May 2019 visit. Probably one of the most comprehensive operation sessions was conducted impromptu as well, where a lot of the recent railfanning experiences were reenacted and a couple blasts from the past were sprinkled in. But as I ...

  My friend Anthony R., who some railfans may know on YouTube under the handle TrainHunters1 or TrainHuntersFans, affectionately likes to pinpoint "movie scenes" in events that take place in various hip and hot Miami venues. I have been fortunate to join him in some of these adventures as of late, and look forward to many more in 2023. They are as he describes, "movie scenes" -- settings one can only imagine seeing behind a screen of one's choice, perhaps too overwhelming to be even deemed a believable enough scene in person... but they are. Model railroaders take to capturing scenes alright -- some that can be reproduced today and some that are blasts from the pasts that can only be reimagined through film and other works. But Miami in all its glitz, glamour, and vice, possesses scenes that can only be associated with the Magic City. Regardless of the era, some beg to be modeled. Some make it to video games like Driver (1,3, etc.) and GTA. The James Bond movie ...

ECHOES member Tom Klimoski, who has been a major contributor to Lance Mindheim's R&D for the Downtown Spur layout built the Hawksridge Division proto-freelance layout back in 2000 . He had to discontinue and dismantle the layout in 2011 sadly when he moved out of South Florida, but do not despair; Tom's Georgia Northeastern layout is a masterpiece and truly masterclass material for industrial operations. I strongly recommend you check out his channel. On top of all this, three of the modules, which are designed to be compatible with ECHOES layouts, have been saved for use on club displays going forward. Up to five sections on the layout were removable by design as a condition of having the layout in a single car garage. If you look at the visuals on the link, and have seen the layout, you may recognize them off the bat. Two of the modules (Amtrak Station/KFC/Heritage Furniture) are in club standard 4'x2', and have been the thumbnails and backdrops for many shots I...