All 'board!
Marlen Farm-house on the Meramec Valley & Pacific RR
One of the greatest memories from my childhood is of the summer vacations spent with my great-aunt, not too far outside of Springfield, Illinois. In this small rural town, you could hear the horns of the passenger trains just far enough in advance to give a small boy time to run the three or four blocks it took to get to the tracks, in time to see an entire train speed by at what seemed like over a hundred miles an hour to me back then. For a while, there was even an interurban line with an electrified third rail, although it was freight only at that point in time.
From early on, I had trains running through my veins.
The Model Railroading pages of this site contain photos and information about my present layout, the Meramec Valley & Pacific Lines, as well as my previous HO-scale layout, the Iron Mountain Diviision.
Rail-fan photos and video clips of various prototype railroads can be found on the Railfan Photography pages.
The Off-Track pages contain galleries of my non-railroad photographs, as well as images of my wife's quilts.
Time Travel
On the Meramec Valley and Pacific Lines layout, actual history has been altered slightly - in my version (to the possible chagrin of Frisco purists), the Frisco never obtained its own right-of-way from Pacific to St. Louis, and continues to lease rights to operate over Missouri Pacific Lines between Pacific and St. Louis.
It is the era of the nineteen-sixties and seventies that is represented on the layout - two decades in which railroading itself witnessed a lot of changes. Just a couple of short blocks from my childhood home, high-hooded no-frills MoPac GP7s and GP9s went about their daily chores. They would pass the old Maplewood Station and then pass over a concrete viaduct. Nothing was more magnificant than seeing a Jenk's blue GP9 peaking out from behind the brush and roaring over that viaduct as you stood near the foot of it, the ground shaking beneath your new pair of Keds. West-bound consists would head towards Webster Groves, and were just minutes away from passing the historic station and tackling Missouri Pacific's infamous grade at Kirkwood, Missouri.
A few blocks away, in the opposite direction, Frisco's busy Lindenwood Yard was always a beehive of activity. Many nights I went to sleep to the rhythm of squealing brakes, banging couplers, and the low rumbling of mandarin-orange and white diesel locomotives. There was just no better place to be for a young boy who liked trains!
Rather than try to replicate specific locations along the Missouri Pacific and the Frisco Railroads, I have tried instead to capture the essence of railroading in Missouri, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Included are the towns of Pacific, Sedalia, St. Louis, Valley Park, Kansas City, and Tipton, Missouri. Towns with the highest allocation of real estate are Kansas City, Sedalia, and Valley Park. St. Louis is represented by only a staging yard, and some of the other towns, only by an industry or two.
The Meramec Valley & Pacific Lines
Near the end of 2005, I began working on my fourth model railroad - an HO-scale layout inspired by both the Missouri Pacific and the St. Louis - San Francisco ("Frisco") railroads. The Meramec Valley & Pacific layout is a somewhat freelanced representation of the Missouri Pacific right-of-way from St. Louis to Kansas City, Missouri, with a Frisco Railroad interchange at Pacific, Missouri.
A Frisco and a Mopac MP15DC locomotive represent the two primary roadnames
on the
Meramec Valley & Pacific Lines Layout.
