History rewrite or what if

[Thai1On]

This idea is aimed at Trainz fans that enjoy a bit of fiction or full blown imagination engineers. Working on my route I find I would like some more fictional lines to connect to for passenger service. So far I have a few route builders that have their passenger equipment coming in, but I would like some input on what if some small, real short-line railroads did not remain small? Or even better do you have a reskinned passenger train able to be shared with the community that you would like see operating on other routes? Post it here and let us all have a look at it.

My first example would be the Chicago & Illinois Midland. What if it grew into a a full Class 1 railroad and offered passenger service? What could you see being their color scheme on their passenger rolling stock in the very early 20th century?


Dave

 

[JCitron]

I'm not familiar with the C&IM as a railroad because I'm from back east, but to me I see that company running deep maroon varnish with gold striping and lettering similar to the Boston and Maine did in the same time period. This red is deeper maroon than the PA Tuscan red, though that would be good too. The alternative to the red could be a deep olive green also with the gold striping. That too was very popular during that time period as well.

 

[Vern]

I have pondered given the lack of rolling stock assets for the Scandinavian countries, "what if" WW2 had turned out differently and Norway/Sweden/Finland had been annexed by Russia? A perfect excuse to use all the Soviet assets and rolling stock from the TS12 era (and now Belezino on TANE payware) to depict your favourite Norwegian route. Flam, anybody?

 

[Thai1On]

Great idea John, I'll fire up old Photoshop.

Vern, your ideas are what I'm working towards. I'm going on a theme that WWI turned out very different. Here are 2 timelines to look at.

http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/No_World_War_1

http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/Never_Ending_Great_War

Also if anyone has some ideas for paint schemes for the varnish please post your ideas.

Dave

 

[cascaderailroad]

Well those 2 scenarios dint' happen in history ... I went to a couple of Civil War movies, and stood up just before the movie started, when the "Silence ALL Cell Phones" notice came on screen, and announced to all the theater goers: "Folks we all know what happened here, the South lost, and the North won, nothing to see, move along" !

The NYC, PRR, Southern, C&O, B&O still exist and have modern locomotives ... US passenger service, and cities trolley systems were never sabotaged by Eisenhower and his national interstate highway system ... Amtrak was never created, nor was Conrail, CSX, NS, BNSF ... etc ...

And we dint' have a choice between 2 totally ridiculous presidential running mates: The one being totally mentally ill ... and the other: Nobody really likes her, and we all hate her voice ... 87% of the public are thoroughly disgusted with voting ... and Ahhnold Schwarzenegger becomes President, and Michael J Fox Vice President, defeating Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood

 

[JCitron]

In my railroad world, Guilford happened and has been replaced by another regional with Conrail living side-by-side with the other roads it replaced so it's not unusual to see Conrail engines pulling freight by EL, NH, PC, NYC, LHR and everyone else. There is Guilford and Pan Am Railways equipment, but that's a mere shadow of what they were since their ownership has been reduced to a small branch line in northwestern New Hampshire.

John

 

[Thai1On]

With any luck other route builders will be inspired by this thread to make the next great route. Some great ideas posted.

Dave


Dave

 

[mjolnir]

I'm not familiar with the C&IM as a railroad because I'm from back east, but to me I see that company running deep maroon varnish with gold striping and lettering similar to the Boston and Maine did in the same time period. ...<snippage> ...

The Chicago and Illinois Midland did have passenger service, as demonstrated by this image

(found on the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and museum website)


of the last passenger train operated on May 8, 1953. If there was ever any "varnish" operated on the line, it was probably only Samuel Insull's private car. Similarly, most of the other short lines in old official registers did not have "varnish", either; with passenger service often provided in a combine in a mixed train, often held together by baling wire like the rest of the railroad.

ns

 

[JCitron]

The Chicago and Illinois Midland did have passenger service, as demonstrated by this image

(found on the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and museum website)


of the last passenger train operated on May 8, 1953. If there was ever any "varnish" operated on the line, it was probably only Samuel Insull's private car. Similarly, most of the other short lines in old official registers did not have "varnish", either; with passenger service often provided in a combine in a mixed train, often held together by baling wire like the rest of the railroad.

ns

Thank you for the bit of history. This sounds like a lot of the lines up in New England as well. However, since history is being rewritten here, we can have varnish.

Back here in New England, the Boston and Maine got rid of it's old wooden passenger cars initially by retiring the through cars to passenger commuter service. It was quite common to see old open ended vestibule cars in commuter service. This, however, ended in the mid-1940s when the B&M replaced all their varnish with the then new Budd RDCs, aka their Buddliners. The B&M was one of the railroads to start the conversion to dieselization, which started in the late 1930s. The conversion to RDCs saved the railroad a substantial amount of operating revenue as it eliminated the turnaround time of the commuter trains and eliminated the necessary extra crew working the roundhouses through out the lines served. The venerable old Buddliners served their time right up into the early 1990s even as coaches pulled by FP40Phs and rebuilt F8s painted in maroon and silver. Today these old unpowered RDCs are still kicking around as passenger cars on many shortline and tourist lines.

John

 

[bendorsey]

My scenario would be:

What if the D&RGW narrow gauge system not only did not go the way of the dodo but expanded throughout the Rockies up to and into the Canadian Rockies. All 3 ft gauge. This would include the D&RGW absorbing the other smaller NG lines in Colorado to become one large system.


Ben

 

[RW912]

I am building a rather large layout with a some mainlines (including border stations for trains entering and leaving the country) and an extensive narrow gauge network. The railway system is entirely fictional but based on non-realistic realism. ( Wow, didn't that sound weird? ). What I am building is situated in the Eastern part of Europe, mostly in the Carpathian mountains ( yes, the ones Bram Stoker used for the setting of the Dracula story ) but also extending beyond. I imagine history didn't go as it actually did and another country emerged, surrounded by Romania, Hungary, Ukraine and Moldavia. The narrow gauge railways service the mountain regions and are the main transporters for the peat processing industry.
It's a poor country and most of the rolling stock is bought second hand from other European countries, this includes a lot of steam locomotives and they are still in active service, despite continuing protests from environmental institutions. But the one thing the country is rich with, is coal so there is no hurry to abandon the steam powered trains yet. Besides, as it is currently the only country in Europe with regular steamtrain service there is a lot of tourism by railway enthusiasts from all over the world and that generates income too.
The narrow gauge network is......decrepit to say it nicely, bad tracks, overused (Russian) rolling stock, etc. But it is vital for the economy of some parts of the country so it keeps running on shoes without soles.
The mainline rolling stock is still using it's original paintwork from the countries it was bought from ( ranging from Germany, Spain, France, Romania to Russia, the latter converted from broad gauge to standard gauge ) but a repainting plan to make them all having identical logos and local numbering has been in the works for several years, it just hasn't expedited yet.

 

[jopartain]

@Thai1on looks like we're on a similar page!! The route I'm working on right now is the "Illinois & Southern." It's a fictional route heavily based on the C&EI. So far I've modeled track from Thebes and Joppa up to Findlay. I'm about to build on to Saint Louis and finish the whole rest of the route. In total it could easily get to be over 60 miles long.

I suppose mine isn't all that much of a "what if," but I intend to create more local traffic than the C&EI had, keep a stronger coal industry, and add on a Chicago-STL passenger service to make things more worthwhile.

I really like your idea for the C&IM. It looks like an entertaining route to model. As a class one, it could become a western Illinois interurban, connecting to Rock Island, Rockford, Danville, East STL, Alton, and so on. It's unlikely you'd get something major unless you connected to Chicago and STL at the same time. As for coloring scheme, you'd probably get an olive green for heavyweight passenger cars with a gold and red stripe. Streamliners would get a predominately green and yellow scheme: green on the bottom, a thick red stripe in the middle arching upwards, and a yellow top--or have a thick yellow stripe and a white top.

 

[Thai1On]

As for coloring scheme, you'd probably get an olive green for heavyweight passenger cars with a gold and red stripe. Streamliners would get a predominately green and yellow scheme: green on the bottom, a thick red stripe in the middle arching upwards, and a yellow top--or have a thick yellow stripe and a white top.

What a great idea! I'm going to have to fire up Photoshop and give it a try.

As for what if What if due to the severe winters halting rail travel and the fact that the city of Chicago had burned down again... The city of Cincinnati became the gateway to the south and Midwest. Chicago would still be a major player in rail travel, but not the only show in town. Trains like the 20 Century Limited, Broadway Limited, and National Limited just to name a few would leave New York city and make their way to Cincinnati before heading to Chicago or St. Louis. A few of the things that caused the city to grow to this size was Cincinnati was known as Porkopolis because of the sheer amount of pigs that were slaughtered and shipped nation wide and also Machine City due to the large number of machine factories. The city consumed millions of tons of iron, steel, and aluminum and shipped out equal amounts of finished goods needing to be moved by rail.

By 1915 Cincinnati was served by numerous rail lines and was a madhouse for passengers trying to make connections to other lines because many railroads had their own railroad stations and didn't want to share with other rail lines. The city then persuaded/forced the railroads to make a Central Station and what came about was 2 stations. One would serve the western railroads and the other would serve the eastern lines. The western station was of a more traditional architecture as the eastern station would embrace the new "Art Deco" style of streamlined architecture to give a sense of modern high speed travel. Both stations were finished by 1920 and none to soon as the war with Mexico was over, but the war in Europe shown no sign of ending.

The war was growing at an alarming rate causing the price of oil to skyrocket and in effect killing off the idea of using it as a fuel for commercial or public use as the machines of war were using it at a breakneck pace. As for coal on the other hand was very plentiful and in fact under the Appalachian Mountains many geologists described many of the core samples from there as inverted mountains of coal. With this world view of energy from coal and not oil scientists and inventors looked for ways to make steam power more friendly to both business and the public. By the early 30's Ford came up with a fast firing boiler for it's Model T as chemical companies came up with a way to make liquid coal to be used in cars and trucks.

Airship or Zeppelin transoceanic travel was competing with standard ship crossings, but a horrible airline crash in New York City killing all on board along with people on the ground set travel by plane back many years. Although it was never proved it is believed that both the railroads and Zeppelin companies made sure the papers ran large banner headlines of the tragedy and planted the rumors of the dangers of airplane travel. After that airplanes were simply seen as strictly military machines and not something for civilized people .

The L&A is set in the mid 1920's with a raging wars in both Europe and South America. The railroads and factories are working around the clock to keep up. And this is how to view the screen shots of my route and the idea I used to to help create this large frame rate killing route :hehe:.

Dave

 

[jopartain]

[Deleted.]