My Mega PA/NJ route

Can you guess the location? Hint, this is where three anthracite railroads met, and where one of the biggest industrial companies' home plant and world headquarters was located, they made a very hard metal for use in construction. By 1976 all the tracks here had one owner, a newly formed consolidated railroad with blue as it's principal color. The route is actually a mixture of other's routes and my own DEM data to join them together, and blank DEM from the DLS. It will be a pretty big route. At least 151 miles east-west. For now, the route will be for myself due to custom cloned objects like signs and the fact that I used other's routes in it. At least two routes by others but that I'm improving on with new track, roads, crossing signals, etc. I'm still working on it, and I'm a one man band. I might do a "retro" version representing the 1980's or even earlier.

I'm a fan of 80's and 90's era Conrail besides just 2010's era NS and I think this would be very nice!

Well, there are a bunch of Lehigh Valley, Reading, and CNJ diesels on various sites as well as Conrail, so you can see where I am going with this. The location in the screenshot is Bethlehem, PA where the Reading and Lehigh Valley Railroad met. I improved the old Reading Line by uslw with new track and stuff and added on to it to go to Bound Brook, NJ and Harrisburg, PA, plus I will have the old Lehigh Valley Railroad up to Sayre, PA as well as the CNJ through Jim Thorpe, etc. I would also like to recreate steam excursions of the past like when the Blue Mountain & Reading ran off line trips in the mid-late 1980's.

rwk said:

Well, there are a bunch of Lehigh Valley, Reading, and CNJ diesels on various sites as well as Conrail, so you can see where I am going with this. The location in the screenshot is Bethlehem, PA where the Reading and Lehigh Valley Railroad met. I improved the old Reading Line by uslw with new track and stuff and added on to it to go to Bound Brook, NJ and Harrisburg, PA, plus I will have the old Lehigh Valley Railroad up to Sayre, PA as well as the CNJ through Jim Thorpe, etc. I would also like to recreate steam excursions of the past like when the Blue Mountain & Reading ran off line trips in the mid-late 1980's.

Click to expand...

Looks like I gotta go to the 70's then and just jam to Disco while cranking up the throttle in an Alco Century. :hehe:

Here is a shot of the Reading platform shelter in South Bethlehem (removed around late 1980's - commuter service to Philly ended June 30, 1981 on the Bethlehem-Quakertown section) with 3 Conrail GP30's.

It's looking good so far, I particularly like the idea of a 'retro' version. Personally I'd go back to about 1979-1984ish when you still had Conrail electrics under the wires, Lackawanna MUs and GG1s working for NJDOT.

I have no plans to go as far as the electrified lines in NJ but I found a download of PRR/PC/Conrail electrics from the 70's. Not GG1's, E44's or whatever.